Latin American ecosystems have produced some of the most rich and varied crops in modern memory, the production of which has, since the mid-sixteenth century, both tied Latin America to the global economy and resulted in extraordinary ecological change. Growing sugar, coffee, bananas, and other crops has combined with large scale natural resource extraction (oil, copper, timber) and the process of urbanization to transform Latin America in dramatic fashion, with significant consequences for humans, flora, and fauna. Agricultural science has been a key component to advancing the rate of...

Since its independence in 1822, elite Brazilians have considered their nation to be destined for greatness (grandeza) and to rank among the world's modern powers. Yet according to Lincoln Gordon, a scholar of Brazilian trade and energy policy, this nationalistic aspiration has been continually upset by the shortcomings of Brazil's uneven economy, which has relied largely on the exchange of its raw materials for goods manufactured abroad. Such a trade relationship allows little room for long-term growth. As part of the effort to launch itself into a first world economy while...

Cuban scientists in the early 1900s published books on how to use hair to distinguish the degree of racial mixing because determining skin color could indicate degrees of criminality. Writings in Mexico averred that men with thick lips were likely to be rapists while men with thin lips had a propensity for murder. Brazilian law enforcement made permanent records for any woman wandering the streets because she was assumed to be either a thief or a prostitute. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scientists throughout much of the Western world believed that physical and...

In 1835, after nearly four years of botanical, ethnological, paleontological, zoological, and geological observation throughout South America, a little-known twenty-six year old British naturalist named Charles Darwin began to explore and collect samples from the Galapagos Islands, an archipelago off the coast of Ecuador (see source 'Map of tortoise distribution'). He found it interesting that the species of these isles were similar to those of the continent, yet the biota of each island were unique in their details. Odd species such as the flightless cormorant and giant tortoises, as in...

Race, like gender or class, is a socially contingent construct that means different things to different societies at different times. Yet in the early part of the twentieth century, countries throughout the world turned to science in order to rationalize and legitimize their particular understanding of ethnic and racial difference. Eugenics, the science of using heredity to improve racial characteristics, became prevalent in many of the most scientifically advanced countries, including the U.S., Britain, and France in the early twentieth century. The term was coined by Sir Francis Galton...

With every foot of available space in his dugout canoe filled with caged exotic birds, botanical specimens, and monkeys (often left to roam about at will), Alexander von Humboldt made his way up Venezuela's Orinoco River in 1800 (see the source 'Map of Casiquiare Canal'). Despite the chaos of rapids, mosquitoes, jaguars, and alligators, Humboldt rarely failed to make and record measurements of barometric pressure, the magnetic field, and the air and water temperature with his many state-of-the-art apparata. All the while, he was mapping the river system, collecting rocks and fossils, and...

For those of us raised in the scientific traditions of Europe, mathematics may seem to be the epitome of rationality, the intellectual opposite to religion and spirituality. Yet for many Mesoamerican groups, computation, arithmetic and accurate astronomical measurement were practiced as part of the religion because time itself was the omnipresent manifestation of the divine. To solve the mathematical problems that made time comprehensible within the Mayan cosmology was not only a pursuit of knowledge, but a pursuit of wisdom and cosmic truth.

The mathematics of the Mayan world...