Mar 15, 2025

Nature on Paper

Documenting Science in Prussia, 1770-1850

Anne Greenwood Mackinney

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Summary

Over the past two decades, natural things—especially those collected, exchanged, studied, and displayed in museums, such as animals, plants, minerals, and rocks—have emerged as fascinating protagonists for historical research. Nature on Paper: Documenting Science in Prussia, 1770-1850 (U Pittsburgh Press, 2024) follows a different, humbler set of objects that make it possible to trace the global routes and shifting meanings of those natural things: the catalogs, inventories, and other paper tools of information management that form the backbone of collection institutions.

Anne Greenwood MacKinney focuses on Prussia from the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century, a place and time that witnessed the dramatic restructuring of research, government, and public collections toward a closer integration of science, state, and a proto-civil society. The documents at the heart of her study are mediators actively shaping the historical trajectories, values, and meanings of the objects they record, and with pasts and paths of their own. MacKinney also reveals how various stakeholders—in the research community, museum sector, government, and general public—can interact with these documents and thereby shape the world of natural science. By centering the history of natural historical collection paperwork and the agents involved in its production, circulation, and safekeeping, Nature on Paper tells a largely neglected story of a form of scientific labor that transformed the infrastructure of modern research at the turn of the nineteenth century.

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Gloria Maritza Gómez Revuelta

Gloria Maritza Gómez Revuelta is a an Adjunct Lecturer at the Universidad de Guadalajara (UdeG). She obtained her PhD (History) at El Colegio de México with a dissertation on how outer space and space technoscience were ascribed different meanings in Mexico during the Inter-American Cold War. Maritza holds degrees from Universidad de Guadalajara and El Colegio de México. Her book on the history of the concept of revolution in Mexico was published in 2019. She belongs to international and national research groups focused on Scientific Diplomacy, History of Concepts and Public History. She co-hosts the science and technology podcast Cosas de Sapiens.

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