al-mofhariz

A couple weeks ago, I taught Martha Sandweiss's fascinating Passing Strange for my undergraduate methods seminar. The book exposes and explores the double life of Clarence King, the famed 19th century geologist of the American West. Historians have known for some time that after his western adventures King assumed a new identity as James Todd, a porter, and married a black women in New York named Ada Copeland. Sandweiss claims the honor of being the first to discover that King passed as black while married to Copeland (not a small accomplishment for a fair-haired, blue-eyed man). She also takes this relationship seriously and reconstructs not only King's life in light of it, but also the life of Ada Copeland/Todd.

The book amazed my students---some compared it favorably to a novel. I enjoy the story but appreciate Sandweiss' careful historical reasoning even more. To make up for a near total absence of archival material relating to Copeland, Sandweiss assumes in her third c…

As promised, I'm extending my post from last week in light of recent developments: a piece by Sheila Jasanoff and Peter Dear (in the most recent issue of Isis) responding to a piece by Lorraine Daston (in Critical Inquiry a few years ago) on the relationship between science studies and the history of science.

Briefly (as a background to this and a previous post), I am asserting: (1) that historians in general share a set of assumptions about structure and agency, (2) that the history of science is basically in line with this wider trend, and (3) that while there's nothing wrong with this co-/convergent evolution, there's another theoretical shift on the horizon.

I won't dwell too much on (1), in part because I'm still developing an appropriate vocabulary for elucidating it. Very roughly: with the rise of anthropologically-inflected cultural history since the 1970s, the balance between structure and agency seems to have shifted from keywords related to the former (soc…