ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Emerging from the Shadow: New Perspectives on Solar Eclipse Expeditions 1

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Total solar eclipse expeditions in the 19th and early 20th-century prompted major conceptual transformations in science, while also being used to justify funding for astronomy and promote particular images of nation states, the discipline, and its practitioners. There has been renewed interest in expeditions, with the application of new disciplinary approaches fundamentally transforming our understanding of how astronomical knowledge was made, valued, documented and shared.

Official reports constructed sanitised pictures of a regimented and steadily progressing enterprise, granting largely only elite actors the authority on observations. Recent scholarship has instead examined the vast surviving records, closely attending to asymmetries that shaped archives and previous narratives. Far from just isolated elite astronomers in the field, expeditions involved careful planning and eclipses were incredibly widely observed, documented and publicised. The expeditions therefore generated frequent interactions between different worldviews, with power-laden moments of exchange, conflict and experimentation. Recent research has revealed a range of previously hidden infrastructures and actors that enabled and participated in expeditions, including administrators, local assistants, technicians, amateurs and women.

Eclipses lasted only a few minutes. And yet, working with perspectives of variously positioned actors, our sessions will demonstrate the continued impact these expeditions had on a series of contested processes of change - in disciplinary communities, visualisation techniques, labour regimes, science diplomacy, and the status of astronomy. Participants will also reflect on how their methodological approaches have shifted and expanded the picture of actors, practices and institutions involved, and more generally, on the historiographical potential of the expeditions when not examined as a series of discrete, linear historical events.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• David Aubin, Sorbonne Université

Individual Presentations

• Building the Eclipse Enterprise: Administration, Diplomacy, and the Making of British Eclipse Expeditions - Jesse Garrison, University College London

• An 1860 eclipse expedition by a “simple amateur”: d’Abbadie at Briviesca - Frédéric Soulu, Academie des sciences of Paris

• Exhibiting the Eclipse: Victorian Visual Culture and the Norman Lockyer Observatory Image Archive - Beatrice Honey Steele, University of Exeter

• “even if the other man is a lady or a camera”: Women and the British Astronomical Association Expeditions - Megan Briers, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Session Organizers

• Megan Briers, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

• Jesse Garrison, University College London