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Please submit items for inclusion here and in the newsletter to the newsletter editor Julia Bruce.
The main sources for information on all the Society’s events are the newsletter and the meetings page.
Current news:
The recent changes to the hardware and software used to produce the Newsletter, and the changing circumstances of the editor, have made it necessary to make some slight changes to the submissions policy for the Newsletter. Please don’t hesitate to contact the editor if you have any queries at all about submissions.
The editor welcomes submissions in any format—handwritten, typewritten or electronic. However, electronic submissions, by email, email attachment or on CD, in Word, Quark or as RTF files, are greatly preferred. Documents created in other wordprocessing programs can normally be accepted, but if these present technical difficulties, it may be necessary to request re-submission in a different format. Text in uneditable PDF format cannot be accepted unless it is under 200 words long, in which case it will be manually transcribed.
Submissions should be no more than 600 words long, unless by prior agreement with the editor.
Hard-copy original submissions, either type-written or handwritten, are welcome, but will only be accepted if they are under 300 words long. Anything exceeding this must be submitted electronically, unless by prior agreement with the editor. But please note that the word limit does not apply to forwarded newspaper or other articles. These may be of any length and will be extracted from, or précised, accordingly.
I regret there is currently no facility to submit material by fax.
Any free, cleared copyright or non-copyright images to illustrate submissions are always most gratefully received. These should be supplied as jpegs, tiffs or Photoshop documents via email or on CD. Negatives, transparencies and hard copy images requiring scanning, cannot be accepted.
Julia Bruce
Newsletter Editor
julia-bruce@ntlworld.com
(01865) 762118
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SHNH William T. Stearn Student Essay Prize 2008
The Society for the History of Natural History invites submissions to the William T. Stearn Student Essay Prize Competition. The prize will be awarded to the best original, unpublished essay in the history of natural history. It is named in honour of the late William T. Stearn, a scholar whose work contributed much to the field and to this Society.
The competition is open to undergraduate and postgraduate students in full- or part-time education. Entries will be considered by a panel of three judges appointed by the Council of the Society. The winner will receive £300 and the winning essay will normally be published in the Society's journal, Archives of natural history.
The deadline for entries is 30 June 2008. The rules of the competition and the entry form can be downloaded from the SHNH website (William T. Stearn Prize).
The 2007 Stearn Prize Essay, 'Siren canora: The mermaid and the mythical in late-nineteenth-century science' by Heather Brink Roby, will appear in Archives of natural history Volume 35, Part 1
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The Society’s Thackray Medal was instituted in 2000 to commemorate the life and work of John Thackray, the Society’s late President. The medal is awarded annually to an outstanding contribution to the history of natural history realized in the preceding 12 months. Recipients may be individuals, teams or institutions.
Nominations for the medal are invited from all members of the Society, and will be judged by a panel chaired by the Society’s Vice-President. Further details and a nomination form are available on the Society’s website.
Previous winners of the medal include Peter Marren (2006) for the second edition of his work The New Naturalists, and David E. Allen and Gabrielle Hatfield (2005) for their book Medicinal plants in folk tradition: an ethnobotany of Britain and Ireland.
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Digitizing Linnaeus
Digitizing Clusius
Digitizing Darwin
Darwin Correspondence Project
New journal launched
Rare Audubon sightings
The Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation is digitizing a complete set of the Linnaean dissertations from its Strandell Collection of Linnaeana and making them accessible on-line. These are the 186 doctoral dissertations that were defended by students of Carl Linnaeus, with Linnaeus serving as praeses. Topics covered range from botany and zoology to medicine, health and nutrition, mineralogy, museums, botanical gardens, and other subjects, capturing Linneaus’s thoughts on numerous topics.
The dissertations are photographed and the images converted into Adobe Acrobat PDF format for easy access. This has several advantages, enabling the compression of the digital files so that they will download quickly, and making the digital versions openly accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Adobe Acrobat Reader software is available free of charge from the Adobe website. The copies on-line are made at a low-to-medium resolution that is both readable and printable, but they are not being presented as high-resolution, artifactual reproductions. High resolution 300 dpi JPEGs of each page and plate, are however being archived for uses requiring higher quality images
The PDFs are being added to a database called Original Linnaean Dissertations, one of two searchable databases of information about the dissertations on the Hunt Insititute website. The other database is an index to over 30,000 scientific names as cited in the dissertations, compiled by director Robert W. Kiger. These files were originally developed for a book that we published in 1999 (Index to scientific names of organisms cited in the Linnaean dissertations …).
Both databases are accessible at:
http://huntbot.andrew.cmu.edu/HIBD/Departments/Databases.shtml
The search page for the Original Linnaean Dissertations database enables searching for specific dissertations, and includes buttons to display the full list of dissertations sorted by respondent or date of defence. Until the project is completed there will also be an option to produce a list of only those dissertations that have been digitized.
There is a webpage containing brief English summaries of the contents of each dissertation, to lead web searchers to this material that otherwise might remain unknown to them. The summaries are at: http://huntbot.andrew.cmu.edu/HIBD/Departments/Library/LinnaeanDiss.shtml
This project is being done as a contribution to Linnaeus Link.
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The Clusius Project, which started in 2003 at the Scaliger Institute of Leiden University, endeavours to create a platform for new research concerning this eminent naturalist.
The principal aims of the Clusius Project are:
1. Digitization of, and worldwide access via internet to the unique collection of letters exchanged between Clusius and around 300 naturalists from all over Europe which is held in Leiden University Library.
2. Research: in a research project covering the period 2005–2009/10 and funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) two Ph.D. students and one post-doc are engaged in writing two dissertations and one synthetic study concerning Clusius and Renaissance botany from the perspective of the new cultural history of science.
3. Creating a modern “replica” of Clusius’ European network: together, scholars with relevant expertise from all over Europe (and beyond) aim to create a wide-flung network similar to Clusius’ own network, and join forces in the analysis of his work, network and significance in the history of science.
Carolus Clusius (1526-1609) was one of the most important naturalists of the European Renaissance. Originally educated as a lawyer and physician, he devoted his life and work to the extension and improvement of knowledge concerning plants (and to a lesser extent animals). Clusius travelled throughout Europe in order to collect, investigate and cultivate plants. He finally settled in Leiden in the Netherlands, where he was one of the creators of the hortus botanicus. Clusius can be regarded as one of the first professional botanists in Europe. He corresponded with more than 300 correspondents from eleven European countries and enjoyed the protection of a variety of patrons, ranging from the Habsburg Emperor Maximilian II to the Hungarian magnate Balthasar Batthyany. Above all, he produced an impressive number of scholarly works and translations dealing with botany, zoology, geography and medicine.
Clusius’ valuable correspondence is largely preserved in Leiden University Library and forms a source of major importance for the history of European science. It has been explored only to a limited extent as yet. As a typical Renaissance scholar, who functioned in an international network of humanist scholars, physicians, patrons, artists, travellers, gardeners and apothecaries, and who was educated in a variety of fields of knowledge, Clusius deserves scholarly attention and an international and interdisciplinary approach.
More about Clusius and the Clusius Project can be found at the University of Leiden website
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The complete works of Charles Darwin, are being published online. The project, run by Cambridge University, has digitized some 50,000 pages of text and 40,000 images of original publications—including some newly transcribed material—all of it searchable. Audio files are downloadable on to MP3 players. The aim of the project is to make Darwin’s work as accessible as possible.
The project's director, Dr John van Wyhe has spent the past four years searching the globe for copies of Darwin's own materials, and works written about the naturalist and his breakthrough ideas on natural selection.
One of the newly available documents is Darwin’s field notebook from the Beagle voyage. Other texts appearing online for the first time include the first editions of the Journal Of Researches (1839), The Descent Of Man (1871), The Zoology Of The Voyage Of HMS Beagle (1838-43) and the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th editions of the Origin Of Species, the pivotal tome that elucidated his thoughts on evolution.
There is no charge to use the website. Most texts can be viewed either as colour originals or as fully formatted electronic transcriptions. There are also German, Danish and Russian editions. Users can also peruse more than 150 supplementary texts, ranging from reference works to contemporary reviews of Darwin's books, obituaries and recollections. At the moment the site contains about 50% of the materials that will be provided by 2009, the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth.
The database can be viewed at:
http://darwin-online.org.uk/
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New Director
Professor James Secord has been appointed as the new director of the Darwin Correspondence Project.
His appointment, which follows the retirement of Professor Duncan Porter, comes at a pivotal time for the project, which has just published the 15th volume of what will eventually be a 30-volume edition of all known letters written both by and to Charles Darwin.
In total, the number of letters comes to almost 15,000. The collection covers an extraordinary range of subjects, from imperial exploration and travel, to the intimate details of Victorian family life. There are ambitious plans to make these rich materials widely accessible. More than 2,000 letters are now freely available online at http://darwin.lib.cam.ac.uk/, and a specially-commissioned dramatisation of the letters has been warmly received.
Professor Secord was born in Madison, Wisconsin. He studied the history of science, geology and literature at Pomona College and Princeton University. His writings include studies of Darwin's early geology and the acclaimed Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation'
Like Darwin's correspondence itself, the Project is international in scope. The main research team is based in Cambridge University Library, which holds the world's largest collection of Darwin manuscripts. Further researchers are based in the United States, and close ties are maintained with research institutions worldwide.
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SHNH members interested in museums (interpreted to include related institutions such as aquaria, zoos, botanical gardens, and historical societies, as well as cultural and social histories of the impact of museums, histories of museum-related professions, exhibits, educational programmes, collections, and significant museum figures) should note the founding of a new journal, Museum History Journal, edited by Hugh H. Genoways and Mary Anne Andrei.
The first issue will be published in January 2008. For more details about the journal, and the call for papers, visit :
http://www.lcoastpress.com/journal.php?id=6
or contact:
Hugh H. Genoways, University of Nebraska State Museum, W436 Nebraska Hall, Lincoln, NE 68588-0514, USA (hgenoways1@unl.edu), or Mary Anne Andrei, Department of History, University of Virginia, 128 Bennington Road, Charlottesville, VA 22901, USA (andre057@umn.edu).
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In April the New York Historical Society will select about 40 of its collection of 435 Audubon paintings to display for the following twelve months. The paintings are then put back into controlled storage for another 10 years. In this way, the Society hopes to be able to display its entire collection, the world’s largest, over an 11-year period. The Audubon exhibition also displays biographical material.
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