al-mofhariz

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 form...

As many of you no doubt know, the Obama Administration announced a decision to cease defending the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) against legal challenges this past Wednesday .  Just to be clear, this does not mean the administration will no longer enforce the law.  It just means they will no longer take steps to actively defend it in court.  Why not just stop enforcing it altogether?  Well, just imagine what would happen if every administration could simply pick and choose which laws to enforce!  Doing so would all but eliminate the legislative authority of the United States Congress.  To my mind, these developments are interesting to historians of science for at least two reasons.  The first has to do with the specific legal reasoning employed in the administration’s decision.  The second is about the implications this reasoning has for the role that science plays in democratic society.  Let’s start at the beginning, with the law ...

For many of us, archives are a central feature of our day-to-day work practices. In research practicums we learn about how to identify archival sources and begin piecing fragments into coherent accounts. However, I often find myself thinking about the epistemological (and ethical) status of the archive. This is a gap in our pedagogy that warrants attention. At the most basic of levels -- how did this material come to be available to me as historian and what are my obligations to these material traces? Cultural critics, anthropologists, and social historians have done important work in this vein -- the translation of Derrida's Archive Fever into English spurred a flurry of scholarship in the late 1990s, including one of my favorites: Carol Steedman's Dust: The Archive and Cultural History. Steedman is an interpreter of Derrida, who draws on the archive as source of power in order to probe the politics of doing 'bottom up' history with records that were produced by ...

Lilian Brown, dressed in a Sari (~1920) When I'm not working, one thing I like to do is cook.  I've often wondered if I should not switch the order of my priorities: start working in a kitchen and read history in my free time.  I've also toyed with the idea of working as a cook in the afternoons and evenings, saving my mornings for writing.  Alas, some friends with restaurant experience have disabused me of these naive notions.  There's no way I would get a job sans professional experience other than maybe (maybe!) prepping veggies in the morning and washing dishes all night. So I've been casting about for other ways to combine my work and free time.  Or rather, I should say, for ways to pass my hobby off as work. As some of you may know, I'm supposed to be writing a dissertation about the history of paleontology around the turn of the 20th century.  One of the people who figures pretty prominently in my story is  Barnum Brown (who some of you may rem...

A popular post last week featured an interview with Betty Smocovitis , who delivered the Distinguished Lecture at the the Forum for History of Science in America's meeting at HSS in Montreal. Joanna has already summed up that lecture , now being published in Genetics , so what I'd like to do instead is zoom in on aspect of the interview that got taken up in the comments. The interview's major thematic (as suggested in the title) is the juxtaposition between life as a historian and life as a scientist. The link between scientists and historians of science - whether biographical, as in the case of Smocovitis and others, or intellectual, in the form of readership and shared conversation - is an important one for our discipline, both historically and in the present. By the end of the interview, the go-between role of the historian of science (between scientists and historians) is complicated even further. Historians of American science must also liaise between the smaller commu...

Richard Conniff just published a fascinating piece for his New York Times series on Specimens.  It’s about the relationship between natural history and espionage and makes a historical link between the two, showing how many spies (both real and fictional) frequently donned the mantle of a naturalist as cover for their political activities.  For example, late in life the British secret agent Sir Robert Baden Powell (of Boy Scouts fame) freely admitted he used to pose as “one of the exceedingly stupid Englishmen who wandered about foreign countries sketching cathedrals, or catching butterflies.”     Sylvanus Morley, US Navy Spy   According to Conniff, this was primarily a one-way relationship: spies often disguised themselves as naturalists but scientists rarely gathered intelligence.  “[I]nstances of naturalists using their work as a cover for espionage are scarce,” we are told.  In actual fact, nothing could be further from the truth!  As it...

Hank has been sending me text messages about not posting enough. He’s also encouraged me to pick a fight with him. Let me take up the challenge by making some critical remarks on something he wrote in a comment to a recent post. But before I do so I’d like to reiterate that Hank started it (!) so if this post has a slightly polemical feel you know who’s to blame. :-) For those of you who haven’t been keeping up with the comments section of this blog, Hank’s claim is as follows: In the last couple of decades historians have “gotten pretty good at [describing] how individual actors [use] ideas and cultural resources as they grapple with the world.” My guess is he sees this as a good thing. However, he also says that in our effort to understand individual strategies we have come to neglect the “structures determining both those usages and what's available to use in the first place.” For this reason, he advocates a return to structuralism and suggests using “tools in the digital ...

Last week, Joanna drew our attention to the fascinating (and well illustrated!) story of the cytogeneticist Masuo Kodani as told in a recent publication in Genetics by Betty Smocovitis ---a paper derived from a talk at this year's Forum for the History of Science in America (FHSA) meeting. Today I'd like to offer my special thanks to Megan Raby of the University of Wisconsin, who agreed last November to interview Smocovitis about her career and about this talk. I'll put the entire interview in the extended entry, but I offer first, a few highlights. Joanna's post features the terrific images that Smocovitis displayed. As Smocovitis tells Raby in the following passage, those images were much more than illustrations: The interesting thing is, why did my paper take on the cast, the flavor, that it did?  I could have just talked about Kodani and Stebbins.  What happened was, that I was trying to find images of Kodani and I got that Life image [shown during the FHSA talk...

Last week, Princeton's Modern America Workshop hosted a round-table on the history of the social sciences in America (co-sponsored by the Center of the Humanities and the Program in American Studies). A link to the line-up is here . Our four panelists - Chas Camic, Sarah Igo, Andy Jewett, and Mary Morgan - drew an audience of over thirty faculty members and students from a range of departments and interdepartmental programs. Reflexivity was in the air, if not always explicitly on the table. We tried out a semi-unconventional format for the event. Three panelists circulated ten-page "micro-essays," bound as one text on the state of the field in the history of the social sciences. As a format - with 5m remarks from authors and a 10m comment - it worked pretty well. Though initially halting (perhaps because so many things were on the table), the conversation did get going, ranging from nomenclature to methods to case-studies. The stuff of the session (disciplines, acto...

In a post on 1 February, AmericanScience in its current and evolving iteration was born. The move from a single- to multi-author format was part of an effort to spark a wider conversation through internal dialogue on an expanded range of topics. So far, it seems to be working, and we hope readership and chatter will continue to grow. The blog is now run by four early-career historians of science, as follows: ********************* Dan Bouk ( Dan ) is an assistant professor of history at Colgate University. He got into this business so that he could teach US cultural and intellectual history to excitable youths, and that's what he does. His manuscript-in-progress on the statistical endeavors of the American life insurance industry goes by the title, How Our Days Became Numbered: , with a post-colon bit that seems ever in flux. He serves double duty on this blog as a contributor and as the editor for the Forum for the History of Science in America. That means he gets to serve as the ...

In November, University of Florida Professor, Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis gave the Distinguished Lecture for the Forum for History of Science in America at the History of Science Society annual meeting in Montreal. In her talk, she documented the career of cytogeneticist Masuo Kodani, who was interned at Manzanar during World War II. For those of us who attended, the drama of Smocovitis' narrative was underscored by her use of iconic images from the time-period. Stark black and white photographs made by Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange belied the spectrum of racial tensions in America during and after the war. As a Japanese-American, Kodani struggled in life and in science. Unlike his collaborator, Curt Stern, Kodani's status as a Japanese-American (he was born in Pasadena) located him outside the networks that had developed to support European emigres like Stern. Thus, Kodani was re-located to the Manzanar camp. While interned, he and other Japanese-American agricultural ...

The beast is out of the box!   The Secret Science Club goes on a post-Valentine’s rampage with the Mesozoic Era’s most beloved creature, Tyrannosaurus rex. Paleontologist Stephen Brusatte of the American Museum of Natural History and Columbia University lectures on recently discovered tyrannosaur species , new thinking about dinosaur evolution , and the hunt for fossils in Europe, China, and the American West. Dig it! This is one creature feature you don’t want to miss! Before & After --Groove to prehistoric tunes --Stick around for the  Cretaceous Q&A --Try our Darwinian cocktail of the night, the T. Rex on the Beach . (No schnapps, but lots of bite . . .) The Secret Science Club meets Thursday, February 17 @ the Bell House , 149 7 th St. (between 2 nd and 3 rd avenues) in Gowanus, Brooklyn, p: 718.643.6510   Subway: F to 4th Ave; R to 9 th St; F or G to Smith/9 th . Doors open at 7:30 pm. Please bring ID: 21+.  Free!

Marine archaeologists should announce today that they have found the remains of the whaleship, the Two Brothers---a vessel captained by the same George Pollard Jr. who captained the doomed Essex. So reports the New York Times . The Essex sank at the mercy of a very angry Sperm Whale. Its story inspired Herman Melville to write Moby Dick. Lest it seem odd that Pollard should receive a second commission after his disaster with the Essex, Melville offered his own explanation, via Ishmael, in a comment on the commercial wiles of Nantucketers : Nor is it so very unlikely, that far from distrusting his [Ahab's] fitness for another whaling voyage, on account of such dark symptoms, the calculating people of that prudent isle were inclined to harbor the conceit, that for those very reasons he was all the better qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales. In one sentence, Melville casts whaling---and perhaps business more generally---a...

Secrecy has become a fairly common topic of discussion among historians of science in the past few years. Two very different examples are a documentary film by Peter Galison and Robb Moss as well as a collection of essays on Galileo by Mario Biagioli. One reason this issue appeals to historians is that there is something paradoxical about the role of secrecy both in science and democratic society. Although usually accepted as indispensable, secrecy strikes at a putative core value of both: openness and transparency. For that reason, we might expect historians of science to take an interest in the recent spate of developments around the online anti-secrecy phenomenon Wikileaks . I have been surprised that a limited and entirely informal poll of my colleagues reveals that most do not harbor much sympathy for Wkileaks. This is especially true after the recent release of US diplomatic cables which are often decried as of little global significance, essentially amounting to high-sta...

As someone with a prior and ongoing interest in the history of extinction, I've been following a new column in the New York Times by science writer Richard Conniff with some interest over the past few weeks. The column's called "Specimens" , and it purports to trace "the search for life" amongst naturalists by looking beyond Darwin's accomplishments to find a number of colorful characters whose discoveries of new species have transformed our lives in ways we scarcely recognize. Interesting. Now, how has Conniff pursued this vein - how has he elucidated the ways species discovery has impacted "our lives"? I'm having trouble figuring this out myself - while each essay is interesting in its own way, none has revealed the transformation of lives via species discovery, at least on my reading. So far, he's posted a memoir of his late mother-in-law's natural-historical interests , hagiography for fallen naturalists , an attack on imperia...

Errol Morris---in an odd lecture--- claims that Tom Kuhn threw an ashtray at him after an argument over incommensurability turned personal. Weird. Check it out here ( video ) ( audio ). According to Morris, he approached Kuhn with a certain indignation over Kuhn's apparent abnegation of the search for Truth in science and the history of science. We can only guess how (if?) the conversation turned violent. But like all conflicts, this one pleads for analysis. Morris takes Kuhn's idea of incommensurability to make the accumulation of knowledge impossible. I've always favored a reading of Structure that allows for the accumulation of knowledge, even as paradigms come and go. I guess I presume a sort of translation can and does take place across paradigms. I'm fascinated by Morris' passionate response. Is this an example of a reformist Liberal's fear of creeping relativism? I think I (we?) too often forget that the culture wars were not simply left-right. Liberals ...

The Forum for the History of Science in America's blog is changing (drastically!) over the next few weeks. We're getting a face-lift, re-imagining our goals and our audience, and, most importantly, expanding out to a team format so that we can cover more bases and more interests within our very broad definition of the "history of science in America." Stay tuned for updates, introductions, and real, honest-to-God change in the next fortnight or so...