History of Science, Technology and Medicine in Latin America

TBA

TBA

TBA

TBA

TBA

Plant Hunters, Hybrid Flowers and Artificial Atmospheres: Nineteenth Century Green Spaces in England and the Andes

Diego Molina (Royal Holloway | University of London)

 
Machines and Urbanisation in the Amazon:
 
Lorena Córdoba (CONICET/UCA and Ca' Foscari University Venice): "Ships, Trains and Telegraphs: Machines in the Amazon Rubber Industry".
 
Adrián Lerner (Cambridge University and Freie Universität Berlin):  "Meanderings: Making Urban Space in Amazonia".
 

 
Black and Indigenous Mining Technologies and Knowledges in the Americas
Presenters:
Jenny Bulstrode (UCL)
Allison Bigelow (University of Virginia)
 

 
Pests and Pest Control in Latin America and Beyond.
 
Presenters:
Tomas Bartoletti (ETHZ): "Insect Pests and Economic Entomology in Plantations".
Thomas Rath (UCL): "Pests and the Nature of Atomic Agriculture".
 

 
Household Appliances and Consumers in Cold War Southern Cone.
Javiera Letelier (UC Irvine)
Pablo Pryluka (Princeton University) 
 
This presentation will explore the expanded access to domestic goods that took place in South America in the decades following the end of World War II. Economic planning and political development gained traction globally over those years as tools to support modernization and welfarism. This happened in South America with a particular flavor: developmentalism launched an industrialization crusade to leave behind the region’s past as an exporter of foodstuff and raw materials. Thanks to local production and a rise in the standard of living, more people gained access to a broader range of domestic goods in the postwar years, which peaked over the 1960s. In their joint presentation, Javiera Letelier and Pablo Pryluka will explore the social and cultural changes this new access to durable goods brought about. By analyzing sales, advertisements, and public policy, they will explore how consumers experienced access to a variety of durable goods that would transform their everyday lives.

Eric Carter (Macalester College) on his new book "In Pursuit of Health Equity. A History of Latin American Social Medicine".

https://uncpress.org/book/9781469674452/in-pursuit-of-health-equity/

Join us on December 7th for a conversation with Christopher Heaney about his new book, Empires of the Dead 

Federico Rayez (CONICET - Universidad Nacional de Quilmes) | "Más allá del consultorio. Los sanitaristas argentinos como agentes de modernización (1960-1970)" (Buenos Aires: Biblos, 2023).

Este libro analiza la experiencia de los y las sanitaristas en la Escuela de Salud Pública de la Universidad de Buenos Aires (ESPUBA) desde su creación en 1958 hasta 1976. Esta institución, y los expertos que se formaron allí, sostuvieron una doble vinculación con agencias estatales de salud y con organismos internacionales especializados.

TBA

 
Animals in Latin American History
Presenters:
Helen Cowie (University of York): "Silk of the Andes: Knowing, Exploiting and Conserving the Vicuña in Colonial and Postcolonial Peru".
Reinald0 Funes (University of Havana and Princeton University): "Between Livestock History and Animal History in Latin America and the Caribbean".
 
 
 
 

Cartographic Latin America
 
Presenters:
Julie Gibbings, The University of Edinburgh 
Cold War Cartographies in Latin America 
This presentation examines the history of geographic knowledges and technologies during the Latin America Cold War (1946-1991). After World War II, when the US government sought to prevent the spread of communism in Latin America, its agencies recognised the need for detailed knowledge of local conditions. Accurate maps were crucial. Beginning in 1946, the US Army Map Service operated a free geographical surveying, cartographical drawing, and map reproduction school at Fort Clayton in the Panama Canal Zone. Known as the Inter-America Geodetic Survey (IAGS), the school trained thousands of military and civilian personnel from across Latin America.  
 
Trained through the IAGS, Latin American geographers used new mapping technologies to support economic development and US-supported counter-insurgencies against leftist groups. Latin American guerrillas, as well as people displaced by war, also generated new cartographic knowledge as they sought to navigate familiar and unfamiliar territories and to build political futures beyond the view of the state. Maps, guarded closely by the military and sought after by guerrillas, defined strategic battlefields. At the same time, guerrillas and displaced peoples navigated space through Indigenous and local knowledges of landscapes that were laden with social meanings, historical memories, and embodied other-than-human beings, such as mountain spirits. This research will seek to reveal how geographic knowledges and technologies –– scientific, insurgent, and Indigenous ––shaped a crucial and neglected theatre of the Cold War.  
 
 
Sebastian Diaz Angel, Cornell University
 Cold War and “Sidewise uses of technology”: Nuclear excavations and flying think tanks to control the Amazon and combat communism (1964-1973) 
 
This presentation analyzes a series of mid-sixties proposal for using nuclear excavation experimental techniques to remove a series of navigable obstacles of the Amazon Basin, and to dam some Sout American rivers. The paper follows a transnational network of flying think tankers and cold-warriors who sought to use nuclear excavation techniques to flood massive swaths of the Amazon basin, build the largest artificial lakes on the planet and transform the major rivers of the continent into a series of massive interlocked, channelized, and navigable artificial reservoirs, connecting the Amazon, Orinoco, and Paraguay river basins. Organized around the Hudson Institute (HI) of New York this project -known as the “South American Great Lakes System” (SAGLS)- anticipated to recreate the Great Lakes of North America in the southern continent to provide (in theory) inexpensive riverine transportation, inexhaustible sources of hydropower, and a ripe landscape facilitating large scale mining, agroindustry, and counterinsurgency operations in previously “unexploited” tropical regions. The paper explores also how and why the project was publicly promoted as a nineteenth century engineering challenges just waiting for twentieth century technologies to be completed.
 

Natalia Gándara (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso): "Gender, Validation & the Place of Knowledge: The transnational debate about the effects of the Chilean earthquakes of 1822 and 1835".

 
Food, Science, and State in Latin America
Session Coordinator: Stefan Pohl (Universidad de Rosario, Colombia)
Presenters:
Sören Brinckman (University of Wrocław), author of Milk for the Tropics! Food Regulation and Nutrition Policy using the Example of Urban Milk Supply in Brazil (1889-1964) [written in German].
Joshua F. Frens-String (The University of Texas at Austin), author of Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile.

History of Informatics in Latin America. Marcelo Vianna, Lucas de Almeida Pereira & Colette Perold

Join us for a conversation with historian of medicine Christina Ramos about her newly published book Bedlam in the New World: A Mexican Madhouse in the Age of Enlightenment.
 
Discussants: 
Adam Warren, University of Washington 
Elizabeth O'Brien, John Hopkins University 
Introduction available at https://uncpress.org/book/9781469666570/bedlam-in-the-new-world/