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2 The practice of popularization The eighteenth century witnessed a growing public interest in natural philosophy. As one savant wrote, “physical phenomena gave [people] an indescribable pleasure.”1 The practice of popularization formed an integral part of eighteenth-century urban culture and illustrates one instance of how individuals could gain access to science. In fact, the steady rise of scientific dissemination in all its forms constituted a significant part of that aspect of the Enlightenment, along with literary projects like the Encyclopédie of Diderot
credits Eglantyne Jebb, who co-founded the Save the Children Fund in 1919, with the ‘innovation’ of pushing beyond the focus on children for national reform projects to ‘recast them as universal symbols and the valued building blocks of a peaceful, internationalist future’ (177). By WWII, images of malnourished children had ‘popularized the notion of “the civilian” as imagined through the figure of the innocent endangered child’ (191). This ‘interpretive lens
are translated into a single expression in Malagasy. On the other hand, for the media or NGO communicators, the competition between traditional and new media to ‘ seduce ’ young audiences requires a ‘ balancing act of popularization ’ between ‘ scientific approach and simplification, without falling into a binary discourse ’. 54 The differences between Phases 4 and 5 are not very audible and ‘ the journalist will tend to use the word famine
This book explores the appropriation of science in French society and the development of an urban scientific culture. Science underwent a process of commodification and popularization during the eighteenth century as more and more individuals sought to acquire some knowledge of scientific activities and as more and more people entered public debates on science. Popular science took many forms in the eighteenth century. While books, periodicals, universities, and academies all provided a breadth of scientific popularization at different levels and for different audiences, this book focuses on popular science within urban culture more generally. More than ever before, public lectures and demonstrations, clubs, and other activities arose in the eighteenth century as new opportunities for the general population to gain access to and appropriate science. These arenas for popular science were not restricted to people of a certain education. In fact, popular science, and public lecture courses in particular, was often set at a level that could be understood by pretty much anyone. This was a bone of contention between popularizers and their critics who felt that in some cases popular science lacked any sort of real scientific content. In reality, some popularizers had specific theoretical content in mind for their courses while others were admittedly more interested in theatrics. Identifying the audience, cost, and location of popular science helps reveal its place in urban culture. The book looks at the audience, identified through advertisements and course descriptions, as well as the economics of courses.
utilized their understanding of new scientific topics in conversations, poems, plays, and literature. Popularizers targeted individuals from a variety of social and cultural backgrounds as the proper audience for their courses and sold science as a necessary and useful subject for people to want to acquire. In addition, Parisians developed the ability to judge qualitatively the different geographies of eighteenth-century science. From the Left Bank of Paris, for example, with its colleges and other academic establishments, science looked a little different 44 POPULAR
manner in which balloons underwent popularization and commodification.3 In the 1780s, ballooning “fixed the attention of all the savants, and became the unique object of conversation in all assemblies.” The French discussed ballooning in the city and at court and in “all our circles, at all our suppers, in the toilettes of our young women, as in our academic lycées.”4 This scientific discovery spread rapidly from the provinces to Paris and on to the rest of Europe.5 I argue that public participation in balloon launches, most importantly through subscriptions but also
intellectual vigour. In practical terms, a properly produced popular history rested on detachment, utilized the latest research on the topic, pledged itself to minute accuracy and avoided picturesqueness. There was no going back to the old, sloppy ways of writing popular history, J. R. Green, the champion of popularizing, assured his readers.25 Professionals, thus, did not reject popular histories as such, but as part of their boundary work they scorned the vulgar popularisers who failed to meet their high standards. The interest that the professionals showed in popularizing
NYSF were more authentic because they would ‘all start on the stage’, just as, he noted, Shakespeare’s works had (qtd in Gerard). The Festival’s advertising for the Marathon reflects this desire to portray the cycle of performances as a deliberate Americanization and popularization of an English author of the classics that nevertheless retained its Shakespearean authenticity. The full
popularizing democratic reforms and challenging neo-communist tendencies in the newly elected government. Focusing on a series of different gaps between common assumptions supported by the larger civil society discourse and the particular development of civil society in Romania, the chapter also tried to argue that the concept of civil society needs to be much more flexible in order to better understand the different roles that so-called civil society groups play in particular contexts. Allowing for this flexibility can keep us away from theoretical and empirical traps
Bogdanov’s Red Star, published in 1908. Bogdanov, one of the founders of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party from which the Bolsheviks and the Soviet Communist Party descended, decided to popularize the proletarian struggle. So he wrote an adventure story in which the protagonist travels to the ideal communist society in space. Martians, led by an undercover agent named Menni, select the hero of the story, Leonid, a member of the Russian Socialist Democratic Party, to visit Mars so he can report back to the humans about what he learns. He travels via an