al-mofhariz

Let's make it a good one.

It may be apocryphal, but Liberty Hyde Bailey (one of my heros) once explained that he did not teach "men to be farmers" in his horticulture courses at Michigan Agricultural College in the 1880s; he taught "farmers to be men."

That quote came to mind when I read over this profile of Benjamin Cohen's approach to teaching Engineering Studies at Lafayette: "Cohen sees a bright future for the engineering studies program. He and his colleagues are looking to enhance what he calls the 'hard skills' like political philosophy, historical context, cultural familiarity, communication, and environmental knowledge to help students become leaders of creative innovation and design. These skills can encourage a better awareness of what Byatt meant by a world 'full of life and light.'"

Cohen recently published Notes from the Ground, on early American ag science and is now at work on a book recounting the history of food adulteration and purity.

I don't spend much time thinking about science and images, but I know I should spend more. Two pieces of evidence.

1) This collection of atlases: "Places and Spaces: Mapping Science" --- I suppose these are the sort of things that Daston and Galison analyzed in Objectivity, but with a bit more reflexivity (since many seem to be science studies-oriented; also, that rhymed). Unfortunately, the Web version doesn't allow for close up looks of intriguing maps like this and this.

2) A recent CFP from the University of Rochester for "Image, Truth, and Distortion," a grad conference:
"The term “image” is broadly construed: images from any time period and of every variety from political cartoons to frescoes to digital photography, as well as literary, biographical, metaphorical or mental images, are acceptable subjects of investigation.  Ideal submissions should explore the ways in which images have been used throughout history to reflect, refract,…

I've recently happened upon a couple different attempts to recreate the history of two sci-enviro-tech villains of the late twentieth century. Each, I think has its merits for passive amusement or even as a teaching tool---although I've yet to try either out with students.

First, consider the history of Asbestos, Quebec, as told through the eyes of the world's largest Asbestos mine, in graphical form. With pleasant drawings and nice-enough background theme, this graphic novel emphasizes the rise and fall of an industrial town, with plenty of pathos, and approaching the right sort of ambivalence about the fire-proofing material (I'm reminded of Don Worster's mantra from Rivers of Empire: "How in the remaking of nature, do we remake ourselves?"---How in the eradication of fire, do we poison ourselves?) There's also an affiliated documentary about the town of Asbestos from the Network in Canadian History and Environment.

DDT gets a similarly inventive trea…

John Steele Gordon argues---over on Bloomberg's recently revamped "echoes" blog---that historians of the US stock market in the mid-twentieth century has been misled by that market's most prominent index. The handiwork of a publisher (Dow) and a statistician (Jones), the Dow-Jones Industrials evolved from a series of focused indexes into a single number meant to represent the entire NY exchange, and by proxy the American economy.

But for all the power and influence this number has had, Gordon shows how dependent it is on basic assumptions. Swap out AT&T for IBM in the Depression years and the market recovery comes years before we have generally thought.

For our purposes, the Dow, its development, and public understandings of stock indexes strike me as topics awaiting a historian of science's analysis. I would read that book.

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If you haven't seen the new "echoes" blog---edited by Stephen Mihm, the UGA historian of capitalism in the US, it's wor…

Loyal AmericanScience reader Anna Zeide wonders about Thanksgiving in a post-can world over at the Food Studies section of Grist. Check it out.

For those of you who teach some environmental history or history of technology alongside history of science, I can vouch for "The Miracle of the Can" as a great tool to generate discussion right around Thanksgiving. Seasons be damned!

For more Thanksgiving scholarly fun, see Neil Prendergast's recent Environmental History article on "Raising the Thanksgiving Turkey."

And a final tid-bit, from the department of applied science: Butterball University!

I noticed a fascinating Call For Papers this morning on h-net for a conference on "Science, Space, and the Environment," sponsored by the Rachel Carson Center in Munich and scheduled for thus July 17-18 at London's Science Museum.

Here's the pitch: "Although the sciences have provided critical resources in environmental debates, their own role in environmental change has been little studied. This conference will explore how the sciences have affected the physical environment."

The organizers seem to have negative impacts on the environment foremost in their minds, but there are clearly other directions one could take such an inquiry. Don Worster's Nature's Economy imagined science to have split personalities when it came to nature: the "Arcadian" strain of science produced knowledge that helped humans understand, love, and live with nature; the "imperial" strain led to domination and abuse. Forgive me a pun, but I imagine that the …

This Friday, Nov. 4 at 12pm, those attending the FHSA distinguished scientist lecture will have the privilege of hearing from and talking with Case Western's Dr. Cynthia Beall. Gina Rumore, an FHSA stalwart, got in touch with Beall and offers the following introduction to her work. Enjoy:

Dr. Cynthia Beall of Case Western University will deliver this year’s FHSA Distinguished Scientist Lecture at the History of Science Society’s annual meeting in Cleveland, Ohio. Beall, a physical anthropologist, studies how humans adapt, physiologically, to living at high altitudes. She conducts her research on populations in the South American Andes, the Tibetan Plateau in the Himalayas, and the Simien Plateau of Ethiopia. She is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Over the past forty years, Beall’s research has challenged some of the most fundamental ideas about human adaptation—including her breakthrough discovery that Tibetan and A…

AmericanScience will be all over the place at the jointly-held annual meetings of HSS/SHOT/4S in Cleveland next week. We're looking forward to meeting and talking with our readers! Let us know your ideas for topics, guest posts, interview suggestions, and general feedback. Here's where to find us:

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 4

HSS: 9:00 – 11:45 AM

Blossom (4th Floor)

"Costs and Benefits: Life Scientists and the Assessment of Wartime Technologies, from 1945 to the Vietnam War"

Chair and Commentator: Karen Rader, Virginia Commonwealth University

1. Environmental Consciousness in the Cold War: Radioecologists, Nuclear Technology, and the Atomic Age, *Rachel Rothschild, Yale University
2. Quickening Nature’s Pulse: Mutation Plant Breeding at the International Atomic Energy Agency, Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Oregon State University
3. The Atomic Farmer in his Gamma Garden: Agricultural Research at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, 1948-1955, Helen Curry, Yale University
4. The Area Should Be…

[[Updated on 6 July 2012, to fix a few errors or poor phrasings in my original summary of Lewis et. al.'s paper, following on a productive and private discussion I had with one of the authors. My fixes are in brackets or indicated by strike-throughs.

I encourage historians of science to read this paper. As I wrote in my personal notes on it: “This is a fascinating paper—it makes Gould’s 'summer of 1977' look rather half-hearted and inexact.” And it turns out it was even more interesting than I thought: the authors find that the Morton did in fact mismeasure some of his skulls using his shot method (which Gould, and I, and many others) generally assumed to be accurate, but even those mismeasurements do not appear rooted in bias. I misread this conclusion and misrepresented it in my post.

But my post was never supposed to be a full review of Lewis et. al. --- I intended to talk about the state of the field in science studies and I continue to argue that while Lewis et. al. sho…