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Showing posts with the label Dan

The Strength of American Materials -- An Environmental History of Engineering Science

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One of the many pleasures of writing "Tocqueville's Ghost" for HSNS (discussed on AmericanScience here) was revisiting Ann Johnson's “Material Experiments: Environment and Engineering Institutions in the Early American Republic,” from Osiris in 2009.

It's a fascinating essay and makes a convincing case for rethinking the sort of science and engineering going on at West Point and in the Corps of Engineers in the early nineteenth century. Johnson shows how the West Point/Corps project adapted the French Polytechnique model in research as well as teaching, creating in the process a very productive "research school." She shows how prominent men of science like Alexander Dallas Bache carried on later celebrated work (most prominently his steam-boiler experiments, above) that owed much to their time working with Joseph Totten and the Corps of Engineers at Fort Adams.

Just as interesting for our blog and our HoTeEs/HoTMESs discussions, is the way Johnson succeed…
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Tocqueville's Ghost

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Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences recently gave me the opportunity to review three thought-provoking books and in the process muse on the history of "American science." You can read the entire essay here.

I had a great deal of fun writing this essay, especially because it gave me an excuse to think about of the earliest figures in the field. For instance:

When Shryock and Schlesinger turned to science, they asked with Tocqueville: is there something distinctive about American science? Looking for American distinctiveness was part of their larger project, which multiplied exceptionalisms in the wake of the U.S.’s rise to superpower status. After the atomic bomb—Schlesinger called it “this terrible engine of destruction”—understanding American science mattered even more. Shryock recast and refined Tocqueville’s laments, explaining that industrial society lay behind the dearth of “pure” science in the United States. Shryock had reform in mind: “one way to overcome Americ…
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Down with epistemological rubrics!

I was struck by this passage in Erik Hmiel's review of Joel Isaac's new book, Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn:

And in seeking to combat their marginalization, they sought crucial points of commonality among the human sciences, the most crucial for Isaac being an epistemology grounded in research practices, pedagogy, and communities of inaugurated and qualified inquirers. In reconstructing this moment in the history of the American social sciences, we see how the "practical, 'everyday' aspects ofthe theory of knowledge...in the Harvard complex present a salutary contrast to the inflated role often granted to epistemological rubrics like 'positivism and 'interpretivism' in the formation of the human sciences," aspects that cast the “revolutions” of late-twentieth century thought, most notably Kuhn’s Structure, in a new light, and beg further questions about idea of the social sciences itself.
I had a healthy skepticis…
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Mapping Scientific Influence

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Ben Schmidt at Sapping Attention has a beautiful post up (with many pretty pictures) and exactly the sort of smart analysis one expects from his blog. Among the most interesting---albeit very tentative--- conclusions he comes to:

The 'while/whilst' result is suggestive, in that it indicates we can track cultural phenomena completely independent of science in the data. (India looks more like America, while Australia and South Africa look more like Britain: that's interesting to me.)
The university and city stuff can be interesting as well if we look in the right places. Obviously no one cares that "Harvard" is used more than "Stanford" in Cambridge; but the higher results for Stanford near CERN, and for Harvard--to stretch--in Australia may be telling us interesting things about the way that a project like the SLAC can get international recognition.
In Schmidt's hands, the ArXiv becomes a tool for seeing scientific connections inside and across national…
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Poe, Leidy, Morton, and Some Skeletons

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Now that's a picture:
Photo from A Glorious Enterprise: The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and the Making of American Science. Via.

Also, did you know that "diddling" can be considered an exact science?  (This and other interesting tid-bits on Poe and early American science appear in Maurice Lee's recent Uncertain Chances.)
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Touring The Idea Factory....or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Bell Labs

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A Special Guest Post from Ben Gross, Research Fellow, Center for Contemporary History and Policy, at the Chemical Heritage Foundation (Thanks Ben!)


First off, I would like to thank Dan and the other members of the AmericanScience community for offering a forum to discuss a subject near and dear to my heart: the history of corporate science. Specifically, I would like to take a moment to reflect upon the significance of this place:

Behold, Bell Labs! Located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, during the quarter century after World War II, this facility rose above all others to become synonymous with American innovation. Although a relative newcomer compared to research organizations at General Electric or Du Pont, the technologies developed within its walls—most notably, the transistor—prompted Fortune magazine to identify it in 1958 as “the world’s greatest industrial laboratory.” Further achievements over the coming decades, such as the launch of the first commercial telecommunications satell…
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Brooke Hindle on Early American Science

This retrospective look (from the 1980s, it seems, by Brooke Hindle) at the mid-twentieth-century origins of the history of science in early America deserves a quick read. The piece covers quite a bit of ground (including history of technology and material culture), but I found most interesting its discussion of the influence on the history of science of the tide toward "social and intellectual history," alongside the rise of institutions that I would affiliate with the American studies movement like the [now Omohundro] Institute of Early American History and Culture.

On the history of American studies generally, my first stop for an actor's account is still Leo Marx's 2004 essay, "Believing in America."
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Toward an Environmental History of Psychology: A Conversation with Michael Pettit

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The Forum for the History of Science in America's newsletter regularly prints conversations between accomplished scholars in the history of American science and younger historians. In the most recent number, (PDF available here) FHSA editor, Dan Bouk (Me!), claimed the privilege to speak with 2011 FHSA Article Prize winner, Michael Pettit.

We enjoyed ourselves and hope you'll enjoy listening in, so to speak. There is something for everyone: Raccoons (so cute!);  history of psychology and the human sciences (so cerebral!); Canadian institutions for HOS (so interdisciplinary!); and even a few musings on the intersection of HOS with environmental science (so relevant to the discussion Lukas introduced here!)


Bouk: Mike, I can see why the committee awarded you the FHSA article prize for 2011. Yours is a fascinating article (download here). One thing that struck me was that it lives in liminal spaces in a variety of ways: you talk about comparative psychologists on the edge of a beha…
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How are History of Sci/Med/Tech and History of Capitalism Teaching One Another?

Continuing our ruminations on the history of capitalism and its relationship to the history of science/med/tech or to STS (here) (here) (and here), I think we might find some useful categories of analysis in Jeffrey Sklansky's recent historiographical essay from Modern Intellectual History (Vol. 9, no. 1, 2012). Sklansky's piece, "The Elusive Sovereign: New Intellectual and Social Histories of Capitalism," (requires subscription) does what great historiographical works should do: it covers and categorizes a wide literature using analytical categories that shed new light on the assembled works; it reads recent scholarly trends perceptively; and it points the way toward fruitful new avenues of research and analysis. I'll summarize Sklansky's approach to each of these aspects, but for our purposes, I will note this first: Sklansky's analysis suggests to me that the history of capitalism as currently practiced already shares deep affinities with our own domin…
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(Capitalist) Numbers to Narratives

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Lee kicked of a lively discussion Friday as he wondered what the history of capitalism had to say to the history of technology, (medicine?), environment, and science (HoTeES, or HoTMeS?). Lee postulated that the interactions of capitalism/political economy and science might be expected within the realms of shared problems and jointly produced tools. I wrote a dissertation about "tools for discrimination" and the "science of difference," wherein life insurers are shown to be important sponsors of investigations into human difference---so I am on board. To help me judge Lee's hypothesis, I would like to offer a few posts over the next week that point to intersections between these two fields (HofCapitalism, HofScience/Tech/Med/Env). Let's get empirical, so to speak!



Evidence 1: Caitlin Rosenthal's exquisite essay in the most recent issue of Common-place, one of the hippest journals around. Rosenthal has one big argument, accented by a score of anecdotal ge…
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Evidence of the Normalization of American Science

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I have only watched a few episodes of The Big Bang Theory on CBS (and don't plan to watch more), but I suppose that a show like this is something that historians of science in the United States will eventually have to deal with. From what I can glean, the show's science content as such plays a relatively small role, but its sense of the scientist/geek/nerd as an important modern/American type sits at the center of the show's concept. Could such a thing have been conceivable before the post-WWII proliferation of engineering and science jobs? Sure, you have Arrowsmith (1925) and works that valorize the scientist in the early twentieth century, but we don't see art that considers engineers or scientists to be normal, if socially awkward, folks. I guess we should read Steven Shapin's The Scientific Life next to an episode and see what happens.

I would not have thought about the show at all, had I not stumbled upon this call for papers for an edited volume on …
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JAH Reviews (Dec. 2011)

I'm interested in thinking about the ways that history of science wins a place in broader conversations in American history. As part of my investigation, I've been skimming book review sections of JAH and similar journals. I thought you all might benefit as well from an abstract for each of the reviews published in Dec. 2011 that struck me as dealing with HOS in a significant way. Reviewed works include Philip Mirowski's Science-Mart, Nick Cullather's Hungry World, and Andrea Wulf's Founding Gardeners.

Read past the break for more.



Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science. By Philip Mirowski. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. Reviewed by Cyrus Mody.
Notes: "Part history of economics, part history of science, part lament for the decline of American academia, Philip Mirowski's Science-Mart is an enlightening, engaging, sometimes maddening tour through the 'Temples of Mammon' that Mirowski believes universities have become. S…
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Southern Science

In a post last month for the "Southern Roundtable" blog, Jay Malone (HSS executive director) makes a few noteworthy claims. For instance: historians of science and southern historians share peculiar senses of isolation in most history departments. Or:someone like William Dunbar (a Scot who came to North America in 1772 and became a planter) matters most to the history of science because he welcomed and supported visiting naturalists, like William Bartram or Alexander Wilson. (Also: tell me more about these visits. What they bring to mind most readily are the stops that Darwin made and recounted with Spanish officials on the Beagle voyage.)

But the most striking claim came in the title of the post. (And I know, I'm probably just showing my ignorance here.) What does "Southern Science" look like? Please, internet community, tell me more. (And, I know, you had the same question about "American Science." My question is: does a literature on "Southern …
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Looking Outward

In case you missed it, HSS president Lynn Nyhart used her column in the last newsletter to ask the history of science community of scholars to think expansively about the profession:
Here's a thought: we could become "them." Instead of noticing (and complaining about) science writers who take our best material and get it not-quite right, we could sometimes choose–and then learn–to write the way they do. Instead of sighing over science textbooks that compress history into brief sidebars, we could work with their writers to show why history of science deserves not only more space but integration into the overall presentation of science. We could further encourage history of science students to become K–12 teachers, museum professionals, and film-makers, and seek out active means to funnel people headed for these futures into history of science courses. Instead of bemoaning the lack of science-cultural literacy among our politicians and government bureaucrats, …
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Psychology of Color

A fascinating CFP for a conference on "Color, Commerce, and Consumption in Global Historical Perspective" went up a while back. The due date has passed, so that is old news. But I finally got around to looking over this 2007 Chemical Heritage Foundation piece by the conference's convener --- on the history of DuPont's work with car colors. I expected it to be all about chemical dye production, so I was surprised and fascinated by this:

In January 1925 two DuPont managers discussed the company’s need for practical advice on the psychology of colors as a means to anticipate major color fads. DuPont took a chromatic leap in October 1925 when it hired Towle and created the Duco Color Advisory Service to design the latest and most desirable color combinations for the auto industry. Born in Brooklyn, Towle had studied painting at the Pratt Institute and the Art Students League. During World War I he put his art training to good use as a member of the U.S. Army’s celebrated …
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CFP: George Perkins Marsh Conference

For your consideration---
A conference celebrating (physical geographer and other things) George Perkins Marsh: An American for all Seasons -- proposals due 15 March 2012


The College of Arts and Letters at the Stevens Institute of
Technology is pleased to announce a conference
celebrating the achievements and insights of George Perkins Marsh
(1801-1882), environmentalist, diplomat, philosopher, and scholar, to be
held on our campus 04 May 2012.  Our campus-wide commitment to the
development of innovative thinking in a culture of collaboration makes
Stevens an ideal venue for sharing ideas about Marsh – a luminary figure
whose life and works connect scholar-teachers across disciplines and
cultures.  Authors are invited to submit papers on any aspect of Marsh’s
many achievements or the impact of his work.  A selection of papers will
be published in a volume of conference proceedings.

Please submit inquiries and papers (maximum 4,000 words) or abstracts
(250-500 words) to Lisa Dolling <ldolling@ste…
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History of Medicine, For Human Dignity

An announcement for this conference on the history/memory of the Tuskegee experiments caught my eye in part because it aims higher than do most (and reflects on its use of history more explicitly than is usual). For instance:
Our purpose will not be to engender shame or guilt. Rather we will maturely enter into the realities of the past so as to re-imagine a deeper sense of human care in ourselves today, and thereby build a future never again marred by a holocaust of any kind. This conference will be a rich moment in time to prevent the worst by promoting the best of who we are and what we can do to protect the dignity and respect that is fundamental to being human.I cannot tell from the agenda (pdf), however, the true degree to which it will be historical in nature. At any rate, offered for your consideration.
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Diagnosing the diseases of the past, today

Historians of science and medicine debate whether it is possible to re-diagnose diseases manifested in the past with modern terms. But what about "diseases of the past" that come back today.

Note this 'graf from a Chicago Tribunearticle on vaccination and the resurfacing of now uncommon diseases:
Bonwit said medical schools must do a better job of teaching young doctors the history of medicine, which is largely the history of disease and death, he said. Archival footage of children with measles or whooping cough, for instance, should be teaching tools to help students identify diseases and understand their severity, he said.Via Hope Leman. See below.
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Now that's a dune, Dr. Cowles!

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The Library of Congress now hosts a fascinating set of photographs taken by University of Chicago ecologists (and their students), most prominently Henry C. Cowles (no relation to our dear Hank).

On a personal note, I love the images of Lake Michigan dunes. As an undergraduate at Michigan State, I did my best to escape every year to explore these enormous white-sand oddities and feel a bit of wonder.

I did not realize at the time that those same dunes had inspired Cowles' theory of ecological succession, beginning with his 1898 dissertation "The Ecological Relations of the Vegetation on the Sand Dunes of Lake Michigan."

In that seminal work, Cowles explained:
"Ecology, therefore, is a study in dynamics. For its most ready application, plants should be found whose tissues and organs are actually changing at the present time in response to varying conditions. Plant formations should be found which are rapidly passing into other types by reason of a changin…
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No dessert unless you eat your US history...

I love this insight from scientist and blogger Ian Hopkinson (SomeBeans) on some salutary side-effects of well-done history of science:
"In the same way that Poirier’s biography of Lavoisier introduced me to the French Revolution, this book on Franklin has introduced me to the American War of Independence. It’s like sneaking vegetables into a child by hiding them in something they like." Yummy.
Via.
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