This essay interrogates the motives of eighteenth-century European naturalists to alternately show and hide their laboring-class fossil suppliers. Focusing on rare moments of heightened visibility, I ask why gentlemen naturalists occasionally, deliberately, and even performatively made visible the marginalized science workers on whom they crucially depended but more typically ignored or effaced. Comparing archival fragments from elite works of natural history across a considerable stretch of time and space, including Italy, France, Switzerland, Britain, Ireland, Germany, Spain, and French, Spanish, and (...) British America, this essay sketches the contours of a disparate group of people I term ‘earth workers’: laborers of very low social rank, such as quarrymen, shepherds, ditch-diggers, and fieldworkers, whose daily labor in and on the earth enabled the discovery of subterranean specimens. At the same time, archival traces of laboring lives ultimately reveal more about the naturalists who created them than they do about the marginalized laborers whose lives they faintly record. Cultural norms of elite masculinity and scholarly self-presentation in the Republic of Letters help us to understand why some eighteenth-century naturalists felt they had to publicly disavow a form of labor that would come to be recognized as a crucial and skilled part of scientific fieldwork in the modern era. Compared to other kinds of invisible labor that historians of science have brought into view, the social meaning of earth work rendered it uniquely visible in some ways and uniquely invisible in others. (shrink)

This article considers the relationship between research and pedagogy in Isis from the perspective of undergraduate teaching. Isis does not think of itself primarily as an organ for supporting education in the history of science, yet contributions to Isis are found across undergraduate syllabi, classrooms, and curricula. This essay makes a start at documenting and exploring some of the ways in which Isis is already being used in undergraduate educational contexts and suggests several ways in which Isis might further support (...) the goal of welcoming new learners in our field. Drawing on the authors’ experience co-teaching an introductory history of science lecture course and on the results of an informal survey of instructors of similar courses at other US institutions, we aim to engage conversations about the past, present, and future of the journal as it relates to the educational mission of our field. (shrink)