Science and Culture for Members Only : The Amsterdam Zoo Artis in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

When I first proposed the history of Artis as a dissertation subject in the mid-1980s, my ideas generated enthusiasm among some historians and skepticism among others.The value of zoo history as a serious academic topic in the history of science was not yet crystal clear.I commenced research that first appeared in my dissertation and has now crystalized into this book.I trust that this work, and various studies of other zoos that have recently appeared, will convince scholars in many sub-fields of history and the social sciences that zoological gardens provide rich resources that help illuminate science and reveal its cultural meanings.I could not have conducted this research without the valuable and friendly assistance of staff members in the libraries of the University of Amsterdam, the Gemeentelijke Archiefdienst Amsterdam, and the Nationaal Natuurhistorisch Museum Naturalis in Leiden.I am grateful for their help.It is my pleasure to thank here all of my friends and colleagues -too many to name -who have supported me in more ways than they know.While I was a graduate student, the faculty, staff, and my fellow graduate students of the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania maintained an unusually encouraging and intellectually stimulating environment during my years in Philadelphia.When I moved to Amsterdam, the (then) Department of Science and Technology Dynamics at the University of Amsterdam gave me an institutional base for which I am grateful.I was privileged to have participated in their discussion groups and Voortgangsconferenties where drafts of my work were discussed by both department members and outside participants.I thank them for their valuable comments.I am also indebted to the members of the (then) Unit for Mass Spectrometry of Macromolecular Systems at the FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics in Amsterdam for their technical support, hospitality, and the friendly atmosphere.I am thankful for the science and culture for members only

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.