Tag: 20th century
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A Meme from the Past
Once in a while, the archives offer moments of exhilaration, when the sources depict something surprising, unusual, or simply strange. Sometimes these feelings can stem from finding some familiarity where you didn’t expect it to exist. That was the case when I encountered the set of drawings above in a student scrapbook from 1903 at…
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On little boys and furry animals – or what happened to Little Albert?
By Ivan Flis Every scientific discipline has its famous experiments. The case is no different for psychology. In the company of famous psychological experiments, one study is often mentioned as the fulcrum of the behaviorist revolution of American psychology – the story of a little boy named Albert and the attempt to teach him fear.
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Purity or performance
By Bert Theunissen Of all sports horses competing at the most recent Olympic Games, 30 % were Dutch-bred. And of the ten gold medals available, five were awarded to horses from the Netherlands. This is a remarkable achievement, considering that the Dutch do not have a long tradition in horse breeding like the Germans, the…
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Embedded in History. An interview with Professor Norton M. Wise.
By Jorrit Smit On the Sunday before Christmas, I bike to the UCLA campus in Westwood for the last time. Out of breath and full of sweat after climbing the hill in a boringly radiant sun, I find professor Norton Wise waiting for me outside Bunche Hall. With a special key he activates the elevator,…
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The case of the cat in court
By Noortje Jacobs and Steven van der Laan Do animals carry legal obligations? To the twenty-first century reader of Shells & Pebbles this question might appear to be odd. Surely, only in fables pigs are summoned to appear before a judge to be held accountable for any misdemeanour. Not quite. In past centuries, animal trials…
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A Rambo Trilogy in Early Modern Europe
An Interview with Professor Margaret Jacob, by Jorrit Smit On one of those sunny, warm, Californian fall afternoons, I meet professor Margaret Jacob in the Herbert Morris Seminar Room on the first floor of Royce Hall in the middle of the UCLA campus. The well-known early-modern scholar has just entertained a crowd of scholars, students…
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A short introduction to the history of Teylers museums online collection
By Fransje Pansters Teylers Museum is the best preserved public institute for art and science of the 18th century world. The founders wanted to bring together all available knowledge about arts and sciences, as a microcosm of the world. It opened its doors to the public in 1784. People could come to the museum to…
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Amsterdam’s dinosaur population
By Ilja Nieuwland Amsterdam may be known for a lot of things, but dinosaurs aren’t usually among them. However, take a walk along the central Plantage Middenlaan in Amsterdam’s Plantage (‘plantation’) district and you will be confronted by two unlikely-looking creatures in the city zoo’s gardens: one is instantly recognizable as Stegosaurus, the other is…
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Manfred Reichel’s Archaeopteryxes and the origin of feathered dinosaurs
By Ilja Nieuwland While the rest of the world was dedicating way too much time and resources to exterminating one another, Switzerland remained a relatively tranquil spot in 1941 Europe. In that year, the micropaleontologist Manfred Reichel published an article outlining his views on the ‘first bird’, Archaeopteryx lithographica. Reichel’s text but particularly his illustrations…
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New dinosaurs, old animals
Review of: John Conway, C.M. Kosemen & Darren Naish (2012). All Yesterdays. Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals. London: Irregular Books. Price: (Amazon Kindle E-book) or (Printed version via Lulu.com). By Ilja Nieuwland ‘Paleo-art’, or the art of restoring extinct life, has experienced a number of paradigmatic changes during its two-hundred-or-so-years…
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The evolution of Gerhard Heilmann’s Iguanodons
By Ilja Nieuwland The Danish artist-cum-scientist Gerhard Heilmann, who became famous for his book The Origin of Birds, published a little-known, short piece about Iguanodon a few years later, in an issue of Othenio Abel’s journal Palaeobiologica, dedicated to the Belgian paleontologist Louis Dollo. In many ways, this Iguanodon is much more ‘old-fashioned’ than his…
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The (forgotten) Dutch attempt to stimulate IT education
By Katrin Geske In January 1984, three ministries, the Ministry of Economic Affairs, the Ministry for Science and Education, and the Ministry for Agriculture and Fishery[1] established a policy for stimulating information technology (IT) made in the Netherlands: the Information Technology Incentive Plan (the Dutch name was INformatica StimuleringsPlan, hereafter INSP). In this program, the…
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Sinclair Lewis’ Arrowsmith: Why everyone should read this 1925 medical novel
By Noortje Jacobs For my research, I came across the Pulitzer Prize winning novel Arrowsmith, written by Harry Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) in 1925 and based upon the experiences of the (by now) famous bacteriologist Paul de Kruif (1890-1971). One of the most widely read medical novels of the twentieth century, Arrowsmith has often been lauded…
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The Tale of the Four Foot Phallus
By Hans Schouwenburg Until its renovation in 2010, the former Arts and Humanities Library of Utrecht University (Letterenbibliotheek) housed a rather unusual treasure. It was not a rare book, incunabulum, or any other peculiar curiosity from the special collections. Nor was it proudly displayed in a cabinet or carefully stored on a bookshelf. In fact,…
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There is something about fern
By Constance Sommerey I like fern. I like the way fern unfolds itself, its elegance and its seemingly everlasting greenness. I really never gave this character trait of mine much thought. After all, it’s just fern. Yet, two years ago, something changed.