al-mofhariz

“We have taken the liberty to add to this manual, a kind of classic legislative tablet, or memorandum. It will serve for private use, by methodising the most interesting points of the legislature. You may help your memory and do good, if you can thereby shew the necessity of filling the blanks in the assembly with a due portion of the classic information and assistance requisite for the business of the day: sometimes you will find you have too few commercial men, or too few agriculturalists, and often too few LIBERAL AMERICANS , who may embrace correct views for the interest of the whole of the union…” [ More ] With that introduction, Samuel Blodget Jr. introduced his readers (in 1806) to the first Congressional scorecard: Source: Samuel Blodget Jr., Economica: A Statistical Manual for the United States of America  (Washington, D.C., 1806) from hathitrust.org Although, really, it’s more an account book than a scorecard. Blodget hoped to rationalize his nation’s government by ...

What do Newcomb, Twain, Mayr, and Crosby have in common? No, they aren't a 60s folk rock band. The answer is that they all tell us something interesting about the cultural power of the eclipse. 28 March 2006 Solar Eclipse, courtesy of NASA What is most interesting about them is the way they reflect various ideas about the capacity for scientific thinking among Americans and others, past and present.  This occurred to me while reading Matt Stanley's very interesting article , "Predicting the Past," from the second number of Isis  this year (2012). Stanley traces changing attitudes toward the role of history in astronomy and astronomy in history. His centerpiece is a disagreement between Greenwich's Astronomer Royal, George Airy, and the head of the American Nautical Almanac , Simon Newcomb. Airy turned to ancient Greek sources for data on past eclipses that could help him calculate the "secular acceleration"of the moon , a small but crucial constant neces...

From the Franklin Institute's General Report on the Explosions of Steam-Boilers     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. ...

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 ...

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."

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! A different sort of account book, but an accounting nonetheless---from Samuel Blodget's Economica: A Statistical Manual for the United States of America (1806) Evidence 1: Caitlin Rosenthal...