scholarly journals Lo spirito di Arcetri

Author(s):  
Roberto Casalbuoni ◽  
Daniele Dominici ◽  
Massimo Mazzoni

On 7 November 1921, the new Institute of Physics of the Royal Institute of Higher, Practical and Advanced Studies of Florence was inaugurated in Arcetri. Three years later, with the establishment of the University of Florence, the Degree Course in Physics would start: as such an adventure in research and scientific training began, which would take us to the present day. To mark the centenary of the inauguration of the Institute of Physics in Arcetri, the book takes the opportunity to retrace a part of those years. The period chosen ranged from the arrival of Garbasso in 1913 to the end of the 1960s. The book contains a first part, documenting the history of the Institute of Physics during the above mentioned years. This is followed by a second part, outlining the biographies of some of the protagonists of that history. In the final part, there is an index of the holders of the courses of Physics and Astronomy in Florence from 1876 to 1969. This landscape is the result of research work conducted in the University’s Historical Archives of the University.

Author(s):  
Terry L. Birdwhistell ◽  
Deirdre A. Scaggs

Since women first entered the University of Kentucky (UK) in 1880 they have sought, demanded, and struggled for equality within the university. The period between 1880 and 1945 at UK witnessed women’s suffrage, two world wars, and an economic depression. It was during this time that women at UK worked to take their rightful place in the university’s life prior to the modern women’s movement of the 1960s and beyond. The history of women at UK is not about women triumphant, and it remains an untidy story. After pushing for admission into a male-centric campus environment, women created women’s spaces, women’s organizations, and a women’s culture often patterned on those of men. At times, it seemed that a goal was to create a woman’s college within the larger university. However, coeducation meant that women, by necessity, competed with men academically while still navigating the evolving social norms of relationships between the sexes. Both of those paths created opportunities, challenges, and problems for women students and faculty. By taking a more women-centric view of the campus, this study shows more clearly the impact that women had over time on the culture and environment. It also allows a comparison, and perhaps a contrast, of the experiences of UK women with other public universities across the United States.


2018 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 475-505
Author(s):  
David S. Busch

In the early 1960s, Peace Corps staff turned to American colleges and universities to prepare young Americans for volunteer service abroad. In doing so, the agency applied the university's modernist conceptions of citizenship education to volunteer training. The training staff and volunteers quickly discovered, however, that prevailing methods of education in the university were ineffective for community-development work abroad. As a result, the agency evolved its own pedagogical practices and helped shape early ideas of service learning in American higher education. The Peace Corps staff and supporters nonetheless maintained the assumptions of development and modernist citizenship, setting limits on the broader visions of education emerging out of international volunteerism in the 1960s. The history of the Peace Corps training in the 1960s and the agency's efforts to rethink training approaches offer a window onto the underlying tensions of citizenship education in the modern university.


Author(s):  
Philip Enros

An effort to establish programs of study in the history of science took place at the University of Toronto in the 1960s. Initial discussions began in 1963. Four years later, the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology was created. By the end of 1969 the Institute was enrolling students in new MA and PhD programs. This activity involved the interaction of the newly emerging discipline of the history of science, the practices of the University, and the perspectives of Toronto’s faculty. The story of its origins adds to our understanding of how the discipline of the history of science was institutionalized in the 1960s, as well as how new programs were formed at that time at the University of Toronto.


Author(s):  
J. G. Vitale

Abstract. The city walls of Florence constitute a complex system: six circles and at least nine distinct phases of use and transformation, from the foundation of Florentia to Florence Capital, to contemporary adjustments. The DIDA, Department of Architecture of the University of Florence with the Municipality of Florence, has been carrying out since 2012 the FIMU project with the study of the various walls circuits and diachronic surveys of the surviving wall sections. The aim is to combine and harmonize the historical data with technical-scientific innovation, expressing its own vision of the relationship between the history of the city of Florence and the correct valorization of one of its important Landmark. Every citizen must be able to recognize in the traces of the past his belonging to a community, the results expected from this research are the realization of an informative-didactic and informative apparatus that will emphasize this important historical testimony of Florence and its transformations occurred over the centuries. Data acquisition, processing and visualization methods define this research as ‘experimental’ for the knowledge and evolution of a historic city that would contribute to elevating services for the technical scientific community and the citizen, to which data would become available currently ‘raw’ with the preparation of an apparatus based on a database through the ‘Open Data’ platform of the Municipality of Florence.


Substantia ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 5-17
Author(s):  
Stefano Dominici ◽  
Gary D. Rosenberg

A group of scientists interested in history of science and fascinated by the figure of Nicolaus Steno (1638-1686) gathered in Florence for the 350th anniversary of the publication of his De solido intra solidum naturaliter contento prodromus dissertationis. A public conference held at Palazzo Fenzi on 16 October 2019 and a geological fieldtrip on the following day were occasions to discuss different points of view on the last published work of the Danish natural philosopher, dedicated to "solids naturally enclosed in other solids" (De solido intra solidum naturaliter contento, or De solido in short). The title of the gathering, "Galilean foundation for a solid earth", emphasized the philosophical context that Steno found in Florence, where in 1666-1668 he established tight human and philosophical bonds with renowned Italian disciples of Galileo Galilei and members of the Accademia del Cimento. For participants to the 2019 gathering, the Museum of Natural History of the University of Florence, hosting some of Steno's geological specimens, and the region of Tuscany itself, formed the perfect location to discuss the phenomena that Steno had observed from 1666-1668, the motivations for his research, the methodology of his discovery and, generally stated, the European scientific context which informed his inquiry. Some of the talks given in that meeting are included within this volume, kindly hosted by Substantia, International Journal of the History of Chemistry published by the Florence University Press. In addition some of the invited speakers who were unable to attend, also contributed a paper to this publication. The collection is about earth science in the early modern period, when the study of minerals, rocks, and the fossilized remains of living things did not yet form a distinct path to knowledge about earth history, but was an integral part of the wider "philosophy of nature".


1999 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madeleine MacMurraugh-Kavanagh ◽  
Stephen Lacey

It has long been the received wisdom that television drama has become increasingly ‘filmic’ in orientation, moving away from the ‘theatrical’ as its point of aesthetic reference. This development, which is associated with the rejection of the studio in favour of location shooting – made possible by the increased use of new technology in the 1960s – and with the adoption of cinematic as opposed to theatrical genres, is generally regarded as a sign that the medium has come into its own. By examining a key ‘moment of change’ in the history of television drama, the BBC ‘Wednesday Play’ series of 1964 to 1970, this article asks what was lost in the movement out of the studio and into the streets, and questions the notion that the transition from ‘theatre’ to ‘film’, in the wake of Ken Loach and Tony Garnett's experiments in all-film production, was without tension or contradiction. The discussion explores issues of dramatic space as well as of socio-cultural context, expectation, and audience, and incorporates detailed analyses of Nell Dunn's Up the Junction (1965) and David Mercer's Let's Murder Vivaldi (1968). Madeleine MacMurraugh-Kavanagh is the Post-Doctoral Research Fellow on the HEFCE-funded project, ‘The BBC Wednesday Plays and Post-War British Drama’, now in its third year at the University of Reading. Her publications include Peter Shaffer: Theatre and Drama (Macmillan, 1998), and papers in Screen, The British Journal of Canadian Studies, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and Media, Culture, and Society. Stephen Lacey is a lecturer in Film and Drama at the University of Reading, where he is co-director of the ‘BBC Wednesday Plays’ project. His publications include British Realist Theatre: the New Wave and its Contexts (Routledge, 1995) and articles in New Theatre Quarterly and Studies in Theatre Production.


Author(s):  
Patrick Wikus ◽  
Wolfgang Frantz ◽  
Rainer Kümmerle ◽  
Patrik Vonlanthen

Abstract Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is a wide-spread analytical technique which is used in a large range of different fields, such as quality control, food analysis, material science and structural biology. In the widest sense, NMR is an analytical technique to determine the structure of molecules. At the time of writing this manuscript, commercial NMR spectrometers with a proton resonance frequency ≥ 900 MHz are only available from Bruker. In 2019, Bruker installed the first 1.1 GHz (25.8 T) NMR spectrometer at the St. Jude Children Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, followed by the installation of the first 1.2 GHz (28.2 T) NMR spectrometer at the University of Florence in Italy in 2020. These were the first commercial NMR spectrometers operating at magnetic fields in excess of what can be achieved with conventional low temperature superconductors, and which depend on high temperature superconductors to generate the required magnetic field. In this paper, the requirements on commercial NMR magnets are discussed and the history of high-field NMR magnets is reviewed. Bruker’s R&D program for 1.1 and 1.2 GHz NMR magnets and spectrometers will be described, and some of the key properties of these first commercial NMR magnets with high-temperature superconductors are reported.


Author(s):  
Thomas Neville Bonner

In the waning years of the nineteenth century, despite (or perhaps because of) the inroads of laboratory science, uncertainty still hung heavy over the future shape of the medical curriculum. Although currents of change now flowed freely through the medical schools and conditions of study were shifting in every country, agreement was far from universal on such primary questions as the place of science and the laboratory in medical study, how clinical medicine should best be taught, the best way to prepare for medical study, the order of studies, minimal requirements for practice, and the importance of postgraduate study. “Perturbations and violent readjustments,” an American professor told his audience in 1897, marked the life of every medical school in this “remarkable epoch in the history of medicine.” Similar to the era of change a century before, students were again confronted with bewildering choices. Old questions long thought settled rose in new form. Did the practical study of medicine belong in a university at all? Was bedside instruction still needed by every student in training, or was the superbly conducted clinical demonstration not as good or even better? Should students perform experiments themselves in laboratories so as to understand the real meaning of science and its promise for medicine, or was it a waste of valuable time for the vast majority? And what about the university—now the home of advanced science, original research work, and the scientific laboratory—was it to be the only site to learn the medicine of the future? What about the still numerous hospital and independent schools, the mainstay of teaching in Anglo- America in 1890—did they still have a place in the teaching of medicine? Amidst the often clamorous debates on these and other questions, the teaching enterprise was still shaped by strong national cultural differences. In the final years of the century, the Western world was experiencing a new sense of national identity and pride that ran through developments in science and medicine as well as politics. The strident nationalism and industrial-scientific strength of a united Germany, evident to physicians studying there, thoroughly frightened many in the rest of Europe.


Author(s):  
Paul Patton ◽  
Jing Yin

Gilles Deleuze was one of the most important French philosophers of the second half of the 20th century. Born in 1925, he studied philosophy in Paris at the Lycée Carnot and the Sorbonne during the Second World War, passing the agrégation in 1949. He was trained in the history of philosophy by Ferdinand Alquié, Georges Canguilhem, and Jean Hippolyte, among others, and his early works were mostly monographs on individual philosophers, including Hume (Empiricism and Subjectivity, 1991 [1953]), Nietzsche (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 1983 [1962]), Kant (Kant’s Critical Philosophy, 1983 [1963]), and Bergson (Bergsonism, 1988 [1966]). He also published a book on Proust during this early period, which signaled a lifelong preoccupation with literature (Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, 2000 [1964]). He published essays on Sacher-Masoch (“Coldness and Cruelty,” in Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty by Gilles Deleuze and Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, 1991 [1967]), Beckett, T. E. Lawrence, Melville, and Whitman (collected in Essays Critical and Clinical, 1997 [1993]). The end of this early period saw the publication of Deleuze’s doctoral studies, Difference and Repetition (1994 [1968]) and Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1990 [1968]), followed by The Logic of Sense (1990 [1969]). Deleuze’s metaphysics of difference intersected at some points with Derrida’s philosophy, but also departed from it in that Deleuze saw his practice of philosophy as straightforwardly metaphysical and constructive rather than deconstructive. In the 1960s, Deleuze taught at the University of Clermont-Ferrand. In 1969, at Foucault’s invitation, he took up a post at the experimental University of Paris 8 at Vincennes (later St. Denis), where he taught until his retirement in 1987. His encounter with Félix Guattari in the aftermath of May 1968 led to their two coauthored volumes under the general title Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1983 [1972]), followed by A Thousand Plateaus (1987 [1980]). This work produced a number of concepts that have been taken up in diverse fields across the humanities and social sciences. They also coauthored Kafka: For a Minor Literature (1986 [1975]), and a decade later they produced a reflective account of their practice of philosophy: What Is Philosophy? (1994 [1991]). A final phase of Deleuze’s work began after the publication of A Thousand Plateaus, and continued until his death in 1995. During this period he published an essay on the painting of Francis Bacon (Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 2003 [1981]) and two short monographs: Foucault (1988 [1986]) and The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993 [1988]). He also published a very influential two-volume study of the nature and history of cinema: Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1986 [1983]) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989 [1985]). As noted above, a collection of his literary philosophical essays, Essays Critical and Clinical, appeared in 1993 before being translated into English in 1997. After a long period of respiratory illness, Deleuze committed suicide in November 1995.


1990 ◽  
Vol 64 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 149-208
Author(s):  
Redactie KITLV

-Mohammed F. Khayum, Michael B. Connolly ,The economics of the Caribbean Basin. New York: Praeger, 1985. xxiii + 355 pp., John McDermott (eds)-Susan F. Hirsch, Herome Wendell Lurry-Wright, Custom and conflict on a Bahamian out-island. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1987. xxii + 188 pp.-Evelyne Trouillot-Ménard, Agence de Cooperation Culturelle et Technique, 1,000 proverbes créoles de la Caraïbe francophone. Paris: Editions Caribéennes, 1987. 114 pp.-Sue N. Greene, Amon Saba Saakana, The colonial legacy in Caribbean literature. Trenton NJ: Africa World Press, Inc. 1987. 128 pp.-Andrew Sanders, Cees Koelewijn, Oral literature of the Trio Indians of Surinam. In collaboration with Peter Riviére. Dordrecht and Providence: Foris Publications, 1987. (Caribbean Series 6, KITLV/Royal Institute of Linguistics anbd Anthropology). xiv + 312 pp.-Janette Forte, Nancie L. Gonzalez, Sojouners of the Caribbean: ethnogenesis and ethnohistory of the Garifuna. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988. xi + 253 pp.-Nancie L. Gonzalez, Neil L. Whitehead, Lords of the Tiger Spirit: a history of the Caribs in colonial Venezuela and Guyana 1498-1820. Dordrecht and Providence: Foris Publications, 1988. (Caribbean Series 10, KITLV/Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology.) x + 250 pp.-N.L. Whitehead, Andrew Sanders, The powerless people. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1987. iv + 220 pp.-Russell Parry Scott, Kenneth F. Kiple, The African exchange: toward a biological history of black people. Durham: Duke University Press, 1987. vi + 280 pp.-Colin Clarke, David Dabydeen ,India in the Caribbean. London: Hansib Publishing Ltd., 1987. 326 pp., Brinsley Samaroo (eds)-Juris Silenieks, Edouard Glissant, Caribbean discourse: selected essays. Translated and with an introduction by J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville, Virginia: The University Press of Virginia, 1989. xlvii + 272 pp.-Brenda Gayle Plummer, J. Michael Dash, Haiti and the United States: national stereotypes and the literary imagination. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988. xv + 152 pp.-Evelyne Huber, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Haiti: state against nation: the origins and legacy of Duvalierism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990. 282 pp.-Leon-Francois Hoffman, Alfred N. Hunt, Hiati's influence on Antebellum America: slumbering volcano of the Caribbean. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. xvi + 196 pp.-Brenda Gayle Plummer, David Healy, Drive to hegemony: the United States in the Caribbean, 1898-1917. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. xi + 370 pp.-Anthony J. Payne, Jorge Heine ,The Caribbean and world politics: cross currents and cleavages. New York and London: Holmes and Meier Publishers, Inc., 1988. ix + 385 pp., Leslie Manigat (eds)-Anthony P. Maingot, Jacqueline Anne Braveboy-Wagner, The Caribbean in world affairs: the foreign policies of the English-speaking states. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1989. vii + 244 pp.-Edward M. Dew, H.F. Munneke, De Surinaamse constitutionele orde. Nijmegen, The Netherlands: Ars Aequi Libri, 1990. v + 120 pp.-Charles Rutheiser, O. Nigel Bolland, Colonialism and resistance in Belize: essays in historical sociology. Benque Viejo del Carmen, Belize: Cubola Productions / Institute of Social and Economic Research / Society for the Promotion of Education and Research, 1989. ix + 218 pp.-Ken I. Boodhoo, Selwyn Ryan, Trinidad and Tobago: the independence experience, 1962-1987. St. Augustine, Trinidad: ISER, 1988. xxiii + 599 pp.-Alan M. Klein, Jay Mandle ,Grass roots commitment: basketball and society in Trinidad and Tobago. Parkersburg, Iowa: Caribbean Books, 1988. ix + 75 pp., Joan Mandle (eds)-Maureen Warner-Lewis, Reinhard Sander, The Trinidad Awakening: West Indian literature of the nineteen-thirties. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1988. 168 pp.


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