The figure of Antonio Stoppani (1824–91), an Italian priest, geologist and patriot, has re-emerged in the last decade thanks to discussions gravitating around the ‘Anthropocene’ – a term used to designate a proposed geological time unit defined and characterized by the mark left by anthropogenic activities on geological records. Among these discussions, Stoppani is often considered a precursor for popularizing the term ‘Anthropozoic’, which he used to describe and characterize the latest ‘era’ of Earth's geological time. His writings, largely unknown to an international audience before the ‘Anthropocene saga’, have been particularly in the spotlight after Valeria Federighi translated excerpts of his main geological work, Corso di Geologia, originally published in three volumes between 1871 and 1873. In the first edition of Corso di Geologia, namely Note ad un Corso Annual di Geologia, or simply Note, published between 1865 and 1870, Stoppani characterized the Anthropozoic in stratigraphic terms. In particular, Chapter 15 of the second volume of Note (1867) represents the first stratigraphic characterization that the author provides of the Anthropozoic. Our contribution here brings, for the first time, a translation of Chapter 15 to a broader international audience, accompanied by a critical commentary elucidating the broader social, political, religious and scientific context wherein the notion of Anthropozoic emerged in Stoppani's writings. The text of the original document and its translation can be found in the supplementary material tab at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087422000590.

In the 1870s, microscopy societies began to proliferate in the United States. Most of these societies attracted microscopists from surrounding cities, but the American Postal Microscopical Club, modelled on the British Postal Microscopical Society, used the postal system to connect microscopists scattered across the country. Club members exchanged microscope slides and notes following a chain-letter system. The main objective of the club was to teach its members how to make permanent slides. Preparation and mounting methods required technical skill, which was, as even club members had to admit, difficult to learn without personal instruction. Yet members developed ways to share craft knowledge through the post. Drawing on the private notes of a member and published reports on the slides circulated, this paper challenges the widespread assumption that the generation of craft knowledge depended on the co-location of artisans. It argues that microscopists’ knowledge of preparation methods was intertwined with their skill in building and navigating information infrastructures, and that by tracing these infrastructures we gain a better understanding of how craft knowledge travelled in the late nineteenth century.

Whilst the ‘local culture’ of experimental natural philosophy in seventeenth-century England drew on ‘resources’ supplied by the gentlemanly identity of men like Robert Boyle, this culture found much of its distinctiveness in a series of exclusions having to do with faith, gender and class. My concern in this essay is less with these exclusions, and the distinctions they enabled, than with their surreptitious returns. Following from this, as a heuristic strategy, I will try to understand how Boyle and Co. used and reacted to, repressed and cathected, that which they sought to exclude. By charting the movements of exile and return across the contested frontiers of class, gender and faith, truth and lies, authenticity and performance, we can, I believe, fruitfully complicate our understandings of both the social history of truth, and the social history of our ‘post-truth’ predicament.

Mendelian Inheritance in Man (MIM), a computerized catalogue of human genetic disorders authored and maintained by cardiologist and medical genetics pioneer Victor A. McKusick, played a major part in demarcating between a novel biomedical science and the eugenic projects of racial betterment which existed prior to its emergence. Nonetheless, it built upon prior efforts to systematize genetic knowledge tied to individuals and institutions invested in eugenics. By unpacking the process of digitizing a homespun cataloguing project and charting its development into an online database, this article aims to illuminate how the institution-building efforts of one individual created an ‘information order’ for accessing genetic information that tacitly shaped the norms and priorities of the field toward the pursuit of specific genes associated with discernible genetic disorders. This was not by design, but rather arose through negotiation with the catalogue's users; it accommodated further changes as biomedical research displaced the Mendelian paradigm. While great effort was expended toward making sequence data available to investigators during the Human Genome Project, MIM was largely taken for granted as a ‘legacy system’, McKusick's own labour of love. Drawing on recent histories of biomedical data, the article suggests that the bibliographical work of curation and translation is a central feature of value production in the life sciences meriting attention in its own right.

The Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester has recently acquired the Electricity Council archives, a body of material of national scope and a major resource for researchers into the electricity industry. The Electricity Council had previously transferred its collection of electrical artefacts to the Museum to be used in the development of the National Electricity Gallery, opened in March 1986, which it co-funded with Greater Manchester Council. In order to illustrate the content and value of these archives, this paper focuses on the promotion of the domestic use of electricity during the inter-war period, a choice of subject which relates to a strong area of the Museum's object collections. The first section outlines the acquisition and scope of the archives and describes the records therein of the Electrical Association for Women (EAW) and the British Electrical Development Association (EDA); the second section uses the relevant records of the EAW and the EDA to investigate the chosen theme, with particular reference to women's involvement and perceptions of women.

Time is a fundamental concept that we typically take for granted in our everyday lives. Rarely do we look at our wristwatch and think how seconds, minutes and hours came to take on such importance. Even less do we reflect on all the work that goes into making seconds, minutes and hours appear as something as natural as the world around us.

What is time? How is it we have come to order our lives in such regulated and precise ways? How has our conception of time changed throughout history? The idea to reflect upon such weighty questions emerged at a conference organized by the British Society for the History of Science on the subject of ‘space’ held at the University of Kent in 1994. It seemed to many participants that the topic of time would make an equally interesting subject for a meeting. In particular, one question came to the fore: did space dominate time or time dominate space? In the event it took the dawning of a new century to provide the impetus, excuse and opportunity to organize a meeting to discuss such matters. It also quickly became clear that other historical societies and institutions had similar aims. The result was a joint three-day meeting, co-organized by the BSHS, the Royal Historical Society and the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, held at the impressive Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool, in September 1999.

This unprecedented coalition demonstrated the importance and productivity of bringing together historians of different backgrounds and interests. The bridging of traditional boundaries was also symbolized by Ludmilla Jordanova's unique position as both president of the BSHS and vice-president of the Royal Historical Society. The whole event, not surprisingly, attracted significant media attention and was deemed by all concerned a great success. This special issue of the BJHS is a small sample of the diversity and richness that characterized the meeting.