Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez, the first Cuban, Latin American, and person of African descent to travel to space, has experienced a significant evolution in his persona since his historic flight aboard Soyuz 38 in 1980. This article explores three pivotal phases in this transformation: first, his portrayal in the media as a pioneering Cuban cosmonaut, which positioned him among the socialist elite of the Space Age; second, the controversy regarding the identity of the first Black person in space, which brought renewed attention to Tamayo’s achievements; and third, the ongoing reconfiguration of his image through social-media platforms, allowing for broader engagement with diverse audiences. By applying the principles of persona analysis to a multilinguistic set of historical documents and images related to Tamayo, this study illustrates the malleability of his self-fashioning for different audiences and how it has adapted to reflect changing sociopolitical contexts and the evolving landscape of public representation in the digital age.

This article examines the practice of post-mortem examination in the Royal Navy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815). The professional medical logbooks kept by ship’s surgeons as part of their mandated practice reveal that they turned to pathological anatomy to diagnose their patients – a technique typically associated with French anatomy during this period. I show that these post-mortem dissections blended medicine and surgery together by correlating clinical signs and symptoms of disease with pathological manifestations of disease in the bodies after death. This article also considers the medical culture that existed on these ships that enabled this research, specifically how captains, officers and crew responded to, and interpreted, such medical enquiry on board. By resituating the naval ship as a site of medical experimentation and enquiry, I explore how naval surgeons participated in medical research within the Royal Navy and used the ship space to engage in pathological anatomy before their British civilian counterparts flocked to French hospitals after the wars.

In this paper, we dissect how different regimes of labour were crucial to the success of the British and Brazilian expeditions which observed the 1919 total solar eclipse in Príncipe and Sobral. We connect regimes of labour with degrees of invisibility and discuss plausible justifications for various absences/presences in the written records. We discuss reasons for the inclusion of Cottingham, the artisan–technician expert on clockwork mechanisms, into the teams; the entanglements of forced labour with scientific and technical work in Príncipe; and the various regimes of labour in place at Sobral. We argue that the impact of various regimes of labour in Príncipe and Sobral cannot be confined to the provision of infrastructural support, but include critical location choices, the possibility of scientific success during the observations themselves, and the processing of plates following observations.