The proximate cause of the 1984–85 miners' strike, the longest mass strike in British history, was a round of colliery closures announced by the National Coal Board (NCB, now British Coal) in March 1984 as part of the restructuring of the British coal mining industry. The impact of pit closures upon communities is so immediate and devastating that the effect obscured the fundamental causes. The restructuring process had accelerated since 1979 because of the economic and energy policies adopted by Conservative governments, but had its origins in the Labour government's response to the 1973 oil shock and the tripartite settlement of the 1974 strike by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). The 1974 Plan for Coal established an investment programme to expand coal production by three means: developing new mines; extending the life of existing collieries; and implementing new technologies. These supply-side measures were already underway when the first Thatcher government, elected in 1979, established new limits on publicsector spending and sought to liberalize markets.

Italian mycologist Pier Andrea Saccardo is best remembered for his monumental Sylloge Fungorum, the first ‘modern’ effort to compile all identified fungi within a single classification scheme. The existing history of mycology is limited and has primarily focused on developments within England, but this article argues that Saccardo and his collaborators on the Sylloge supported a vital transnational expansion of mycological knowledge exchange and played a crucial role in stabilizing the tangled knot of local naming and identification among the world's amateur and professional mycologists. Written in the ‘universal’ scientific language of Latin, the Sylloge served as an early database of fungal knowledge and symbolized a broader unification of mycological inquiry in a moment of expanded scientific correspondence. The article situates this proto-database in broader histories of big data in biology and shows how the Sylloge formed a globalizing foundation for the twentieth century's major collecting and taxonomic advances in mycology.

William Hunter's anatomical inquiry employed all of his senses, but how did his personal experiences with the cadaver become generalized scientific knowledge teachable to students and understandable by fellow practitioners? Moving beyond a historiographical focus on Hunter's images and extending Lorraine Daston's (2008) concept of an ‘ontology of scientific observation’ to include non-visual senses, I argue that Hunter's work aimed to create a stabilized object of the cadaver that he and his students could perceive in common. Crucial to this stabilization was the sense of touch and its interaction with other senses, creating intersensory knowledge of the cadaver. Through a close reading of his neglected posthumous publication An Anatomical Description of the Human Gravid Uterus (1794), I demonstrate that Hunter wrote extensively about touch and other sensory experiences, using comparative metaphors and other linguistic strategies to engender clear ideas of the cadaver in the mind of the reader. That these ideas could be consistent between practitioners was guaranteed by God, but required practitioners to appropriately reflect on their sensory experiences with cadavers. Hunter's experimental practice encompassed both simple and complex methods, all aimed at increasing the range of sensorial experiences he had with the gravid uterus. His preservations of these experiences in text, image and preparation could then be used to support further anatomical investigations.

A recently blossoming historiographical literature recognizes that physical anthropologists allied with scholars of diverse aspects of society and history to racially classify European peoples over a period of about a hundred years. They created three successive race classification coalitions – ethnology, from around 1840; anthropology, from the 1850s; and interwar raciology – each of which successively disintegrated. The present genealogical study argues that representing these coalitions as ‘transdisciplinary’ can enrich our understanding of challenges to disciplinary specialization. This is especially the case for the less well-studied nineteenth century, when disciplines and challenges to disciplinary specialization were both gradually emerging. Like Marxism or structuralism, race classification was a holistic interpretive framework, which, at its most ambitious, aimed to structure the human sciences as a whole. It resisted the organization of academia and knowledge into disciplines with separate organizational institutions and research practices. However, the ‘transdisciplinarity’ of this nationalistic project also bridged emerging borderlines between science and politics. I ascribe race classification's simultaneous longevity and instability to its complex and intricately entwined processes of political and interdisciplinary coalition building. Race classification's politically useful conclusions helped secure public support for institutionalizing the coalition's component disciplines. Institutionalization in turn stimulated disciplines to professionalize. They emphasized disciplinary boundaries and insisted on apolitical science, thus ultimately undermining the ‘transdisciplinary’ project.

In the faculty of arts at the University of Padua in the years around 1600 professors debated the reliability of astrology, the existence of occult celestial influences, and the idea that celestial heat is present in living bodies. From the 1570s to the 1620s many professors in the faculty of arts pushed back against astrology and Jean Fernel's theories surrounding astral body. Girolamo Mercuriale, Alessandro Massaria and Eustachio Rudio thought that some forms of astral causation and Fernel's ideas were incompatible with their observations of disease, Aristotle's philosophy and Hippocratic theories. Later, Santorio Santorio and Cesare Cremonini, who were allied to the political circle of Paolo Sarpi, polemicized against astrology. Their writings show that at Padua medical theory was linked to Aristotelian cosmology, which emphasized the incommensurability between celestial and terrestrial elements. Their rejection of astrology, however, did not lead to the complete marginalization of astrology at Padua. By the middle of the 1620s, as the political climate changed in Venice, the University of Padua hired professors who promoted astrology and Fernel's theories about the celestial nature of innate heat. The diversity of opinions about astrology reflected Venice's divided politics and multiple approaches to interpreting Aristotle and other authorities.