Hist 697H /Owens, TH 1.00-4.00, Spring 2004 6/13/2004

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY: THE U.S. EXAMPLE.

This is a new seminar that, it is hoped, will eventually take its place among the department’s other historiography seminars. As there are several of us in the department interested in teaching such a course, details will vary from year to year, with sometimes, for instance, a European and sometimes an American slant. Whatever the emphasis, the seminar is intended to be an introduction both for those who plan to go on to further graduate work in the history of science, and for those who merely desire to enrich their programs with an eye, perhaps, towards preparing a secondary field.

This edition of the seminar will draw largely, though not exclusively, on U.S. material. We’ll begin the semester by reading several of the “foundation texts” that have influenced the current generation of historians. We’ll then move to works that exemplify the rich variety of current historiographical approaches to the study of science, among them the sociology of scientific knowledge and laboratory studies, rhetoric and the “literary turn,” feminist scholarship, popularization, organizational/political culture, and the usefulness of global comparison for an appreciation of U.S. science in its national context.

WRITTEN ASSIGNMENTS AND PRESENTATIONS. Starting Thursday, February 12^th, we’ll schedule pairs of presentations, rotating through the semester. I’ll expect five-pages, double-spaced, the Monday before the Thursday for which you’re scheduled to present, so I can make copies as part of our reading for the week’s seminar.

1. STANDARD NARRATIVES.

(2-5,2-12)

Daniel Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (1979).

Larry Owens, “Science in the United States,” in Science in the Twentieth Century (1997), ed. John Krige and Dominique Pestre.

Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (1987), pp1-25.

Mink, Louis. "Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument." In The Writing of History. Literary Form and Historical Understanding., edited by Robert Canary and Henry Kozicki. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978.

Curtis, Ron. "Narrative Form and Normative Force: Baconian Story-Telling in Popular Science." Social Studies of Science 24(3) (1994): 419462.

Misia Landau, “Human Evolution as Narrative,” American Scientist 72 (1984): 262-268.

2. ORGANIZATIONAL IMPERATIVES.

(2-19)

Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977).

Louis Galambos, “Technology, Political Economy, and Professionalization: Central Themes of the Organizational Synthesis,” Business History Review 57 (1983): 471-493.

3. THE ETHNOGRAPHIC ANGLE.

(2-26,3-4)

Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (1979).

Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973).

Steve Shapin, “Following Scientists Around(review of Latour’s Science in Action),” Social Studies of Science 18 (1988): 533-50.

(3-11)

4. LABORATORY STUDIES AND CONSTRUCTIVISM.

Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (1998).

(3-25)

5. THE “LITERARY TURN.”

Leah Ceccarelli, Shaping Science with Rhetoric (2001).

Trevor Melia, Essay review on the rhetoric of science, Isis 83 (1992): 100-106.

Charles Taylor, “Science as Cultural Practice: A Rhetorical Perspective,” Technical Communication Quarterly 3 (1994): 67-81.

Danette Paul and Davida Charney, “Introducing Chaos (Theory) into Science and Engineering: Effects of Rhetorical Strategies on Scientific Readers,” Written Communication 12 (October 1995): 396-438.

Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “Close Readings of the Third Kind: Reply to My Critics,” in Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Inventions and Interpretations in the Age of Science (1996), ed. Alan G. Gross and William Keith, pp330-56.

(4-1,4-8)

6. GENDER AND FEMINIST STANDPOINTS.

Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism.

Sandra Harding, chapter on physics, in Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? (1991).

Judy Wacjman, “Reflections on Gender and Technology Studies,” Social Studies of Science 30(3) (2000): 447-64.

(4-15)

7. POPULARIZATION.

Stephen Hilgartner, Science on Stage: Expert Advice as Public Drama (2000).

Hilgartner, S. (1990). "The Dominant View of Popularization: Conceptual Problems, Political Uses." SSS 20(3): 519-539.

Tom Gieryn, “Ingredients for a Theory of Science in Society: O-Rings, Ice Water, C-Clamp, Richard Feynman, and the Press,” in Theories of Science in Society (1990), ed. Susan Cozzens and Thomas Gieryn.

Curtis, Ron. "Narrative Form and Normative Force: Baconian Story-Telling in Popular Science."

Ezrahi, Yaron. "Technology and the Illusion of the Escape from Politics." In Technology, Pessimism, and Postmodernism, edited by Yaron Ezrahi, Everett Mendelsohn and Howard Segal, 1994.

(4-22 ->class will be held from 3.30-5.00)

8. MUSEUMS.

Neil Harris, Chapter Three, “The Operational Aesthetic,” from Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum (1973).

Charles Willson Peale, Discourse Introductory to a Course of Lectures on the Science of Nature (1800).

Sophie Forgan, “The Architecture of Display: Museums, Universities and Objects in 19^th-Century Britain,” History of Science 32 (1994): 139-162.

Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936,” in Culture/Power/History (1994), ed. Nicolas Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry Ortner, pp49-96.

Thomas Gieryn, “Balancing Acts: Science, Enola Gay and History Wars at the Smithsonian,” in Sharon MacDonald, ed., The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture (1998).

(4-29)

9. BIG SCIENCE/ COLD WAR “FORMS OF LIFE/ THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL-UNIVERSITY COMPLEX.

Capshew, James H., and Karen A. Rader. "Big Science: Price to the Present." Osiris 7 (1992): 3-25.

Paul Edwards, Chapter 1, “’We Defend Every Place’: Building the Cold War World,” in The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (1996).

Pickering, Andrew. "Big Science as a Form of Life." In The Restructuring of Physical Sciences in Europe and the United States 1945-1960, edited by Michaelangelo De Maria, Mario Grilli and Fabio Sebastiani. Singapore, New Jersey, London, Hong Kong: World Scientific, 1988.

David Beers, “Secret Sam,” Chapter 4 in Blue Sky Dream: A Memoir of America’s Fall from Grace (1996).

Paul Forman, "Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as a Basis for Physical Research in the U.S. 1940-1960," Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 18(1) (1987): 149-229.

Tom Misa, "Military Needs, Commercial Realities, and the Development of the Transistor, 1948-1958," in Smith, ed., Military Enterprise and Technological Change.

Leslie, S. W. (1990). "Profit and Loss: The Military and MIT in the Postwar Era." HSPBS 21(1): 59-85.

Hooks, G. (1990). "The Rise of the Pentagon and U.S. State-Building: The Defense Program as Industrial Policy." American Journal of Sociology 96: 358-404.

Merritt Roe Smith, "Army Ordnance and the 'American System' of Manufacture, 1815-1861," in Merritt Roe Smith, ed., Military Enterprise and Technological Change (1987).

(5-6/13)

10. ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURES.

Diane Vaughn, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA (1996).

Martha Feldman and James March, “Information in Organizations as Signal and Symbol,” Administrative Science Quarterly 26(1981): 171-186.

John Sutton, “Organizational Autonomy and Professional Norms in Science: A Case Study of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory,” Social Studies of Science 14 (1984): 197-224.

Hugh Gusterson, Chapter 6, “Testing, Testing, Testing,” in Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (1996).

McCurdy, Howard. Chapter 1(or the Introduction?) on organizational culture, in Inside NASA: High Technology and Organizational Change in the American Space Program, 1994.