Characteristics of the History of Science in America, with Some Programmatic Notes on Unity

Clark A.Elliott, Belmont, Massachusetts
(An essay in the "What's American About the History of Science in America?" series)

The study of science in America has a history of its own and is relevant background to a discussion of the general topic. At the beginning of the post-World War II era and the related growth of history of science as a field of study, the focus was on European developments and, arguably, the emphasis was on so-called “internalist” history. American science was a side show to what had taken place across the Atlantic. The early generation of Americanists, for the most part, were (1) not disciplinary historians and (2) were especially interested in the nineteenth century. Given these conditions, the focus of Americanist interest was on the historic development of an infrastructure in support of scientific work, the emergence and character of a multi-layered scientific community, the development of a social and political ideology that granted science a place in the American cultural pantheon (including an examination of the power relations between science and other cultural entities, especially organized religion). The self-consciousness that gave birth to the Forum for the History of Science in America (deliberately, not American Science) was the product of this state of affairs at the time. I opt to define the term “American” to mean the United States of America, which shares a common history and governmental structure, with the social and cultural character that has grown up around that common background. I have no real argument with colleagues who extend the definition to include all of North America and sometimes beyond. But that shift to a geographic rather than a governmental and cultural entity (i.e., the USA) would seem to dilute the possibilities for studying the scientific enterprise in a historically-meaningful context.

In very general terms, there appears to have been three loosely defined periods of science in America (and perhaps in modern science overall). In the beginning (seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries), science was most closely identified with the general culture and society, and during the nineteenth century a concerted effort took place to establish science as a separate and self-governing enterprise. The success of this effort led to the second period (roughly 1900-1950), when science was substantially independent and centered in the insulating academic environment. The third (post-1950) period grew out of the great successes of wartime research and an increasingly complex relation between science, technology, industry, and politics. Unlike the period before 1900, when science had to be concerned with the ways in which its pursuits were affected (and perhaps limited) by the general culture, after 1950, the shift turned to the ways in which science itself was the active agent, exerting a significant influence on general American culture, society, economics, and politics. The fact that research on science in America, as a sub-discipline, grew up largely focused on nineteenth-century developments, poses a significant challenge to those who wish to extend the field to cover what, in many ways is a quite different entity in the post-1900 (and especially post-1950) era.

There are, of course, various approaches to history of science and none has been exclusively characteristic of studies of any one of the broad historic periods outlined above. A significant amount of work has been done on the social and organizational history of recent science, and studies on the pre-1900 period have sometimes focused on the history of disciplines. Disciplinary studies are more feasible for the recent period, however, simply because “American” science is part of an international coordinated effort. In such cases, what is American about the topic may be integrated into a broader approach where national interests are not considered. Ideally, of course, socio-political and intellectual interests are now more apt to be integrated and the local aspects made part of the overall story. Nonetheless, for recent science there is a dilution in the way in which many (disciplinary) studies can be called American even when Americans are involved.

Some interesting historiographical questions arise in trying to characterize or define American science. Is it anything that happens in science in America? Is it possible to describe or characterize American science in any distinctive way (as when referring to nineteenth century science as mainly measurement, data collection, or instrument-oriented)? Has the democratic ethos, religious foundation, or philosophical outlook of Americans formulated or emphasized a particular interpretive inclination among American scientists (perhaps comparing the pre-professional and professional eras in American science)? Is what is “American” about American science mainly about organization, politics, cultural effects, and the like?

These are challenging questions but they are for others to pursue. My engagement in the field has been much more pragmatic – identifying the actors, delineating salient “events” (chronology) to serve as a factual substructure for research, identifying archival resources, bibliography. The listing of new books and dissertations on American science in News and Views beginning in 1980 (after 1984, the newsletter of the Forum for the History of Science in America) has taken a fairly broad approach to the subject. It might be helpful to consider some of the characteristics of those writings on American science, as background to reflection on the nature of the field.

About 7,000 books and dissertations were issued during the period from 1980 through 2006. On average, the number of citations grew by roughly 15% every five years. About a quarter were biographical in approach (that is, they dealt with the life and/or work of one or several individuals), and about 10% were institutional in orientation (defining institutions very broadly, including universities, societies, government entities, business concerns, and others).

Around 85% of the books and dissertations related to particular scientific disciplines, although a variety of historiographic approaches were used (including biographical and institutional studies). The other 15% of the total output is characterized as humanistic, organizational-institutional, and social-political aspects, relations and events of science (about evenly divided among those three categories). It may not be surprising to point out that the largest disciplinary subjects (about 20% in each case) were medicine (health sciences and practices) and technology (technology, engineering, and invention). Environmental history (together with agriculture) amounted to 10% of the output, and works on the social and cognitive sciences about the same. Only about a quarter of the works relate to the history of basic scientific disciplines (astronomical and atmospheric, earth, life, and physical sciences, and mathematics). Around one-third of the monographic output in the period through 2005 spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and only about 15% relates specifically to the period before 1900. These numbers confirm what is impressionistically known, that the history of science in America is now heavily weighted toward the twentieth century. Work on the eighteenth century and earlier is largely vanishing, accounting for only about 2% of the items in the bibliography as of 2005.

Whatever else can be said about Americanist studies in science, it is a varied and vibrant enterprise. Whether it is a coherent field is liable to examination and contemplation. Undoubtedly, there are many individuals writing on what can be called American science whose professional loyalties are elsewhere – in environmental studies, history of physics, religion, literature, and other specialized areas. The history of medicine and technology are integral to certain views of the American scene but both are self-consciously and separately organized activities and many of their practitioners no doubt consider themselves as only marginally related to the history of science.

In a situation where many practitioners set their primary gaze on other historical fields or are faced with divided loyalties, an actualization of American science as sub-discipline may have limitations, in so far as the intellectual enterprise is concerned. But there is much to be done in building and maintaining the infrastructure, not unlike the tasks taken up by the American scientific community in the nineteenth century. In terms of organizational effort, this can be a primary locus of activity by the Forum for the History of Science in America. There is an ongoing need to identify and distribute notice of new publications, archival repositories and collections, and websites – i.e., to take charge of the whole question of research resources in the broadest possible sense. The Forum in the past produced a directory of interested historians and it may be time to consider a renewal of that project (especially now that technology has made its creation and maintenance so much more feasible) – i.e., to define the field also in terms of its practitioners, irrespective of whether they are Forum members. Periodically, the field would benefit from a “needs and opportunities” review, to look not only at what has been done (sometimes overdone) but topics or problems that are deemed interesting but neglected. Admittedly, scholarly work is best when it is generated in a laissez faire environment, but occasionally reviewing the landscape can be helpful, perhaps especially for graduate students, who could apply their efforts in areas that promise maximum impact.

One of the primary failures in the development of history of science in America (as a field of study) seems to be the relative lack of progress in integrating science into American studies and the overall writing and teaching of American history. This should be a more active area for the Forum. Appointment of a Forum subcommittee (or a joint committee with the American Studies Association and/or the Organization of American Historians) to study the topic with recommendations for action would be a worth while project. In raising awareness of American science small things can be beneficial – e.g., it would be helpful if reviewers were encouraged to mention that a work is situated in the American context, even when the books’authors do not aim to write specifically on science in America. In fact, it would be useful if all history of science reviews would consistently refer to the political or geographic locus of a work, when such limitation is an aspect of the book. In this same vein, an effort should be made to encourage more studies comparing American science to the corresponding situation in other national settings. Finally, why, after all this time, has no one written a general work on the history of science in the United States, from the colonial period to the present? Beyond inertia, the answer to that question alone would elevate the whole topic of American science to a level of concrete discussion

See the cumulated bibliography, now including about 7,100 citations and with subject headings, at: http://home.earthlink.net/~claelliott/nvbibliogall.htm

The History of American Science: A Field Finds Itself

Hamilton Cravens, Iowa State University
(An essay in the "What's American About the History of Science in America?" series)

I became an Americanist for practical reasons. I thought that the entire world was interesting, but it seemed to me that if I wanted to do any research and writing in history, it was far easier to specialize in American history than in, say, modern European or classical history (two fields that tugged at me as an undergraduate). Yet I have retained my interest in European history and read widely in that vast terrain, especially in the history of France and of Germany.

America, then, was to be my focus. More was involved, however. I also gravitated toward intellectual history, and the history of science and of religion (by contrast, I found political history as then practiced not to my liking). Among the influences on me at the University of Washington in these areas were the American colonial historian Max Savelle, whose Seeds of Liberty (1948) I found an exciting portrait of an intellectual age, with fascinating detail on science and religion in eighteenth century America. I was also drawn to the history of science by Harry Woolf, then a charismatic presence among the junior faculty in the later 1950s and early 1960s, and a good conversationalist with students at morning coffee in the student union. There was also a personal element in the story. All through my childhood and adolescence I had been a solid believer in Christianity—an Episcopalian, in fact—and, lo and behold, at some point in my sophomore year in college, my religious faith evaporated, as if by magic or sleight of hand. So I wondered: was my experience typical of other Americans? Was this a part of what it meant to be modern?

On the basis of these and similar experiences I found myself at the University of Iowa in 1962 for my PhD, and cast my lot with Professor Stow Persons in the fields of American intellectual history and the history of American science. That was a very fortunate decision, for Stow was perhaps the most brilliant and precise scholar I had yet worked with—and I had been lucky enough to have worked with some excellent professors. The problem of the interaction between scientific and social thought, and their historical circumstances (the latter then meaning essentially institutional history) seemed to me to be a good area to investigate in American history, from Jamestown to the present. What I got from Stow was the sense that ideas always existed in a historical context—indeed, in an age (see his American Minds: A History of Ideas [1958]). What had attracted me to Stow in the first place was his work on the role of evolutionary science in American culture. I selected the heredity-environment controversy in the American natural and social sciences as my dissertation project. I realized that this must have been pivotal in the history of evolutionary thought. After all, the evolutionist had to reconcile continuity and change, or heredity and environment.

There was another reason as well. I had become very caught up in the excitement of the decade about civil rights, and I knew that the nature-nurture problem in biological and social science was a key to the red-hot issue of race in American life. I should mention another influence at Iowa—George H. Daniels, who was just finishing up his doctorate my first year at Iowa and launching what promised to be a brilliant career. I was very impressed by George’s dissertation, on Baconian science in America, for it was to my mind a model of how to do the intellectual and institutional history of science in a national culture. George’s work, which could be considered an example of historical sociology, or, more certainly, sociological history, became a guide for me. He identified a community of scientists and proceeded to relate these dramatis personae to a body of beliefs and actions. George’s dissertation was later published in a revised version as American Science in the Age of Jackson (1968). Such approaches were still relatively controversial among the doyens of the history of science establishment, who wrote about famous European scientists and their scientific ideas. America was not an important center of scientific activity, according to this line of argument, and the social history of American science, which several historians, including Richard Shyrock, A. Hunter Dupree, Brooke Hindle, and William G. Stanton, had done much to develop, was nevertheless to the establishment virtually trivial.

I was lucky in the first job I had, as an instructor at Ohio State University. All of us who were instructors taught relatively heavy loads of freshman courses, but we had only two preparations, so once the first two quarters of teaching were done, we could return to working on our dissertations. I say I was fortunate because of the Ohio State library, which was phenomenal and because of the associations I made there, especially with John C. Burnham, who taught history of American science there, and was a very helpful and supportive guide to the field, and several of my peers among the instructors whose interests were close to mine, especially David W. Levy, who was working on a superlative biography of Herbert Croly, and Henry D. Shapiro, who published a wonderful examination of the idea of Appalachia in American culture, but in truth there were plenty of other colleagues there who provided intellectual stimulation and good fellowship. To this point, I was still essentially an intellectual historian of America—I was not really a historian of science, in America, or even in Outer Mongolia, for that matter. It was in Columbus that I began to read deeply in the history of science, and my first reference points were Thomas Kuhn, whose classic Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) seemed to pose important questions about why and how scientists make up their minds and then change them, as did the work of Robert K. Merton, especially his classic study of science in 17th century England, which I admired (and admire) profoundly, for its attempt to link scientific and cultural values. Another important discovery that pushed me in the direct of the social history of scientific ideas was the brilliant dissertation of George W. Stocking, Jr., on American social scientists and race. Here was a dissertation that employed content analysis to link groups of people to specific ideas of science. The work of the two Georges—Daniels and Stocking—were formative for me and my work. Their published works were, in my judgment, absolutely seminal. And they are still eminently useful today.

In the 1970s, the history of American science, to the extent that it was tolerated at all by the history of science establishment, was focused on the period before the Civil War and almost not at all on the social sciences. The history of science was still in the main a field in the history of European science, and we Americanists were rare birds indeed. Furthermore, there was a debate, which I thought exceedingly silly, on whether “external“ or “internal” factors were more important in the history of science. I threw my hands up at such arguments, thinking that they suggested more about the imagination –or lack thereof—of those who posed such questions than the material about which they were supposedly reconstructing as history. For a while too I remember distinguished scholars probing me as to whether the American environment or culture made a difference in how science was done. Some of this came from old ideas about American ‘exceptionalism’, or about the American character, especially from the myth and symbol school of American Studies, which thankfully Bruce Kuklick and other adepts laid waste to in that decade.

Within another fifteen or twenty years, the situation had changed dramatically. Many of the old disputes of an earlier time had gone up in a puff of smoke. Between 1968 and 1990 a veritable flood of books on science in America were published, and the points of view, while clearly more on the side of the social construction of science than its “pure” intellectual or ideological history, were far more diverse and complex—and, sometimes, a tad muddled. We could no longer say as Americanists that we stood for this or that set of propositions. There were too many of us, and we were off on our own individual pathways to scholarly accomplishment. What now engaged many Americanists was what interested many historians working in other specialties in American history, viz., what were the roots of the present? This presentist mentality has dominated especially American history for many decades, and its appearance among historians of American science became an indication of some kind of intellectual integration of Americanists within the larger discipline and profession—for better or for worse, may be one of those questions such as what is beautiful to one is ugly to another.

Yet more is involved than this in the field’s development. The old arguments about American science, which George Daniels did so much to undercut in his excellent American Science in the Age of Jackson (1968) no longer interest us. And what were these assumptions? Namely, that natural history was the larger research interest, as distinct from the physical sciences, among American scientists; that science was practically-oriented, as distinct from the avowedly theoretical approach to nature; that there was a marked lack of specialization during the first half of the nineteenth century; and that science was still largely a pursuit of amateurs. George made a reasonable argument that most American scientists worked from a structured set of philosophical assumptions that constituted orthodoxy locked in time—in that particular era, and that they constituted a coherent scientific community. Now we know much more about science from the colonial period to the post Cold War era, and many such older questions simply do not engage us. One small example: who today is still pondering what an amateur scientist was? As the youngsters in our culture might say, that is so ‘yesterday’. It is utterly meaningless. And now too historians of science are looking beyond the old Europe-America dichotomy towards a global perspective on the history of science. That makes these ancient preoccupations even more – well, ‘yesterday’, or even ‘day before yesterday’ [to coin a bit of slang].

At this point, in 2008, to look back upon the early days of the field is to recognize that the field has changed, and that many of the older questions and themes simply do not engage us. For one thing, there is a considerable faction in the history of science profession, Americanists included, who see science as a series of cultural practices, which makes many of the old issues moot. As for me and the question of the ‘Americanness’ of American science, I have been—I think—fairly consistent in saying that science in America has some characteristics that are recognizably American and some that are not, and the most important thing about ‘American science’ is that it has been practiced in America, with all the complexities and ambiguities that statement implies. In particular in my work and conversations with two brilliant colleagues, Bob Schofield and Alan I Marcus in the 1980s and 1990s at Iowa State University, I traded in whatever remaining sociological ideas I had for anthropological ones, something that my work in the history of anthropology had encouraged in any event. Science was a part of the national culture. It was also a part of an international culture. Most importantly, it belonged in a particular age. It is this structuralist approach, as understood in Europe, not in the United States, that has given our work here at Iowa State and elsewhere a slightly different perspective than that of many in our field.

As for whatever advice a grizzled oldster like myself could possibly offer to a beginner [since that issue was asked for in the call for these essays] I would say that one could have a field day working in the many mansions of the history of American science. There is so much we simply do not know. We still lack a good, solid framework or narrative of the history of science in America. And our ignorance of many things—the history of chemistry, for example—should be encouragement for as many ambitious scholars as there are likely to be in the next generation – and still there will be new fields to cultivate. I for one would suggest that a good outline of the narrative of science in America would derive from the distinct ages of the American past—or pasts, to be more precise, for one would find, I would insist, that, as a professor of mine once put it, the meaning of meaning changes meaning from one age to another, and, within that context, scientific ideas and practices change along with everything else in the culture.

Hamilton Cravens
Iowa State University

Science Knows No Boundaries

Alan I. Marcus, Mississippi State University
(An essay in the "What's American About the History of Science in America" series.)

Like virtually all historians of science before me, I entered the field from science; I had been a chemist. But unlike most science historians, I was never fully steeped in the scientific method as the only way of knowing or viewing natural phenomenon. I was too much of a sixties kid for that. Everything seemed more complex than what I had learned. Perspective seemed up for grabs. So when I was told that science knows no national borders, that scientific knowledge was an accumulation of data and facts that led to somewhere, I naturally felt dis-ease. I thought it quite cool how various practitioners of science in the past had figured things out, how they did whatever they did, but I never took it as a model for action, a model to be employed in some project to make the world a better place or to manufacture additional or new science. In that sense, I approached the history of science in the spirit of discovery but I never worried or even contemplated that that sense of discovery could or should be applied to the present or the future.

Years later I learned that some would call such an approach historical particularism. But it colored how I viewed the then current history of science tumult. A generation of historians in the early 1960s had tried to prove that there was science in America. They had settled on Joseph Henry at Princeton, the Smithsonian Institution, Asa Gray and Louis Agassiz to show that Americans participated in the debates that were engulfing European scientists. In that sense, scientists could be found in America but their work was simply part of the worldwide scientific enterprise and these American scientists on a whole added relatively little.

Another group challenged that equation a bit later in that decade. Led by George H. Daniels, they asked not whether Americans practiced science but rather what constituted science in America. At the ouset, they dismissed the idea that there was simply one worldwide scientific community. What they posited instead were communities corresponding to national borders. What was science in the age of Andrew Jackson? What was the AAAS at its founding? What did Americans trained in Justus Liebig’s laboratory take back to the United States and establish there?

That was quite a radical precept. It dismissed any number of propositions that seemed to undergird history of science. By positing more than one scientific community, it implied that science was not universal but rather relative. And it emphasized the characteristics of the community of practitioners. Daniels, for example, tried to provide a template by which any group of practitioners took steps to meld themselves into a single entity in the manner of European scientists.

It remained a short step from that approach to a full blown analysis of the cultural context of science, scientific inquiry, or any other facet of science. That approach was ultimately taken in numerous ways and has characterized much of the history of science activity over the past three decades. In this framework, what the individual or collective experiences, knows, feels, suffers, learns colors if not defines what it/they see and what it/they believe. In a sense, it places a stimulus-response model of human behavior on scientists, the complexity of which solely depends on the individual.

This social force explanation has always struck me as unsatisfactory. And I never have been comfortable identifying science as a unique type of activity. Scientists practice science but they remain people and operate within certain cultural parameters or constructs. More immediately, they accept notions that characterize that culture. Indeed, as Michel Foucault, Quentin Skinner, and Clifford Geertz has taught us, those cultural notions make argument possible. Without accepting those notions, individuals would have no common fund of perspective from which agreement or disagreement could be located.

It has always been those cultural notions that have fascinated me. But if they are indeed cultural notions—notions found at particular places at particular times—then they should not just be the possession of scientists but manifested through the various activities and enterprises of that time and place.

Put into action, this leads to an interesting proposition too frequently ignored. Indeed, most historians of science—indeed, most historians generally—follow a particular person, event, discovery, theory over time to see how experience modifies that person, event, discovery or theory. This longitudinal approach is insular in the sense that it focuses exclusively on the impact of various forces on a particular person or thing to determine how that impact changed that very person or thing.

But the cultural notions approach begins simply by treating the labors of scientists as the product of discrete cultural notions. In that sense, scientists are no different than artists, lawyers, politicians in that particular place at that particular time. It stands to reason that scientists are not pursuing an extraordinary project but rather a common one. They employ notions held in common with their peers that help demarcate what they see. And if that is indeed the case, then the investigation of science and scientists needs to be latitudinally pursued and focused on interrogating those notions.

Since the method of scientists suggests that their efforts are anything but arbitrary or culturally-based, scientists are especially frank in expressing how they arrived at their work. And by being so certain of their objectivity, they are much more willing than then contemporary artists or literary specialists to describe sans guile their assumptions and thought processes; they become an extraordinary window into the cultural notions that circumscribe them. And in that final sense, history of science in America and history of American science stand as nothing less than the history of American culture through the details and practices of science and scientists. History of science then becomes integrated within American history.

Alan I. Marcus
Mississippi State University

What’s American about the History of Science in America? Restrospective and Prospective

The Forum is pleased to announce a new essay series on what it means to study science in an American context (broadly defined). Does awareness of the Americas as a place where science is practiced influence our understanding of that science? We are soliciting brief essays and comments (anywhere from 500-3,500 words) from scholars at all stages of their careers working any relevant discipline (not just history). Senior scholars might choose to reflect on how their understanding of science in America has changed over the years, if it has, while graduate students and recent Ph.D.s might discuss the relevance (or lack thereof) of the idea of American science to their research.


Thirty years ago, the field of history of science was oriented almost entirely toward Europe. At about that time, a number of scholars consciously identified themselves as historians of science in America. During the years between then and now, research that was once marginal to the discipline has become central, and many historians who were once on the periphery of the profession now stand among its leaders. The Forum hope to document what thirty years of change has meant to the theoretical construction of this field and related disciplines in order to gain a better understanding of where it is now and where it might be heading.

If you would like to write an essay for this series, please contact Daniel Goldstein, newsletter editor for the Forum for the History of Science in America(dgoldsteinATucdavis.edu).

We are delighted to present the inaugural essays in this series

“Science Knows no Boundaries;” Alan I. Marcus;
“Characteristics of the History of Science in America, with Some Programmatic Notes on Unity;” Clark A. Elliott;
“The History of American Science: A Field Finds Itself,” Hamilton Cravens,

Each author reflects on his own relationship to the history of science, the overall character of the field, and suggests directions for its future development. Please join a discussion of these essays on the Forum’s blog.

Does American Science have a "paranoid style"?

David Engber explores this question in a three-part series for Slate magazine that may be of interest to FHSA members.  Engber traces the manufacture of uncertainty about science through a number of examples, ranging from intelligent design, industry-sponsored research, and environmental activism.  He connects this trend to Richard Hofstadter's discussion of the "paranoid style in American politics."  Sage Ross has an interesting assessment of moderate versus immoderate doubt about science from a history of science perspective.  

Darwin's Reach Conference Call for Papers

Hofstra University announces an interdisciplinary conference titled, "Darwin's Reach: A Celebration of Darwin's Legacy across Academic Disciplines," to be held March 12-14, 2009.  Historians of science and those working in all areas of academic inquiry related to Darwin and evolution are invited to submit abstracts.  200-word abstracts are requested for a June 16, 2008 deadline.  The full call for papers, with further information and instructions, is available at Hofstra's event website.  Hofstra University is in Hempstead, New York, 20 miles east of Manhattan.

American Science Live!

The history of American science as a field has certainly grown by leaps and bounds since the 1970s, but how much has that history filtered into the public consciousness?  I've been pondering this question because Isaac Newton just came to my small town as part of his latest FMA Live tour.  Who knew that "Newt" was so cool?  His website is great fun, including a brief history of Newton's career that ends with "Thanks, Newt.  Props to you for being the Man Behind the Motion!"  This program is sponsored by Honeywell and is aimed at getting middle-schoolers excited about science.  My question, then, for members of FHSA, is which American scientist should be next to go on tour?  Ben Franklin?  Rachel Carson? Alexander Dallas Bache? T.H. Morgan? Maria Mitchell?

New Journal-Call for Papers

The Museum History Journal is currently seeking submissions.  This new, peer-reviewed, semi-annual journal has just published its inaugural issue for Spring 2008.  Articles that appear in the first issue that may be of interest to historians of science in America include:

• Charlotte Porter, "Natural History Discourse and Collections: The Roles of Collectors in the Southeastern Colonies of North America"
  
• Mary Anne Andrei, "The Duty to Conserve: The Importance of Natural History Museums as Exemplars of Conservation Ethics"
• William S. Walker, "John C. Ewers and the Problem of Cultural History: Displaying American Indians at the Smithsonian in the Fifties"

Dissertation Development grants

The Social Science Research Council is currently accepting applications for their Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship.  Each year the SSRC offers these fellowships in certain research fields.  Each research field is led by tenured professors who serve as research directors, leading a team of graduate students.  The fellowship entails two workshops and the availability of up to $5000 in research funds. Research fields for 2008 include: Animal Studies (Janet Browne, Harriet Ritvo) and Critical Studies of Science and Technology Policy (Sheila Jasanoff, Clark Miller).  The deadline is February 8th.

Opportunity for recent PhDs

Lawrence University is accepting applications for their 2008-2009 Fellows in the Liberal Arts and Sciences postdoctoral program.  Historians who will have their PhDs in hand by August 2008 or who  have received their degree within the past five years are encouraged to apply.  Fellows will teach at Lawrence for two years, with salary and research support.  Lawrence University is a highly selective liberal arts college in beautiful Appleton, Wisconsin.

Spontaneous Generations

A new on-line journal for historians and philosophers of science has published its first issue.  Spontaneous Generations is peer-reviewed and interdisciplinary in focus.  Each issue will include research articles, short editorials, and focused discussion on selected topics.  The journal is currently accepting on-line submissions.  

Podcasting is still unfamiliar territory for many academics, but the number of good quality history podcasts is growing rapidly. Elizabeth Green Musselman has entered the fray with the first podcast devoted exclusively to the history of science, technology, and medicine. Her podcast, The Missing Link, is a delightful program consisting of several half hour episodes on a particular theme. The latest episode includes live audio of Ted Porter's lecture at the most recent History of Science Society conference in Washington DC. Earlier episodes explored science fiction, gender, and animal companions. Much of the podcast content comes from Musselman herself, but she has also encouraged her students to prepare short essays, and welcomes outside submissions as well. The program has a high-quality production value which makes for a pleasant listening experience. Individual episodes might be easily incorporated into syllabi as lecture supplements, or as part of a larger assignment. Hopefully, Musselman is only the first of many historians of science who will explore podcasting as a means of engaging the public, which is indeed the missing link.

Benjamin Franklin: A How-To Guide

Exhibit Announcement

Benjamin Franklin: A How-To Guide

The Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University

[From the Website] What do you know and how do you know it? Today we are surrounded by self-help literature and how-to guides. While Franklin did not create this how-to universe, this most celebrated of self-made Americans did much to shape it.In recognition of the 300th anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Franklin, three scholars - Joyce E. Chaplin, Sara J. Schechner, and Thomas A. Horrocks - have joined forces to curate a two-part exhibition that is simultaneously on display in two Harvard venues and explores the self-help theme from two perspectives.

At Houghton Library, the exhibition examines the Circulation of Knowledge, focusing on how information was made public. At the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, the focus is on Science and Sociability, exploring how science was part of a social context that prized human interaction and collaboration.

The exhibition features rare books, broadsides, manuscripts, scientific instruments, natural history specimens, art, and music. Topics include How to...be Charming,...see Clearly, ...do an Experiment,... learn Things, ...get the Word Out, ...do Good,...be a Political Animal,...see the World,...win Friends and influence People,...be Benjamin Franklin.Some of the books and pamphlets were written, printed, owned, or used by Franklin. These include Franklin's Plain Truth, Poor Richard almanac, and works on electricity, swimming, and numerous topics. Other items influenced his life and work. Among them is the manuscript in which John Hancock appoints and instructs Franklin and Thomas Jefferson to make a treaty with France in 1776. Another is one of only 25 surviving copies of the first edition of the Declaration of Independence. Personal letters between Franklin and Jefferson, David Hume, and various men and women round out the image of the man.

Notable scientific instruments include electrical apparatus that Franklin purchased for Harvard College in the 1760s, Franklin's maps of the Gulf Stream, and early bifocal spectacles of his design. Also on display are scientific instruments owned by friends of Franklin, including Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier, the chemists who independently discovered oxygen; John Jeffries, a physician and balloonist who delivered the first air mail letter to Franklin; and Charles Willson Peale, an artist who established a famous, national museum in Philadelphia. A wild turkey from Peale's museum - still stately after 200 years - is on display to help explain why Franklin wanted this bird to be our national symbol.Support for this exhibition is generously provided by: The Charles Warren Center for Studies in American HistoryHoughton Library, Harvard College LibraryDepartment of the History of Science, Harvard University

Exhibition Locations, Hours, & Contacts
Collection of Historical Scientific InstrumentsScience Center 251, 1 Oxford Street,Cambridge, MA 02138Summer Hours:Tues-Thu, 11:00am - 4:00pm, Fri, 11:00pm - 3:30pmBeginning in September:Mon - Fri, 11:00am - 4:00pmClosed on weekends and University holidays.For information contact Sara Schechner at617-495-2779 or schechn@fas.harvard.edu

Houghton LibraryEdison and Newman Room, Harvard Yard,Cambridge, MA 02138Houghton Library Hours:Mon, Wed - Fri, 9:00am - 5:00pmTues, 9:00am - 8:00pmSat, 9:00am - 1:00pmClosed on Sunday and University holidays.For information, contact Thomas Horrocks at 617-495-2442 or horrocks@fas.harvard.edu

Full-Text Collections and Class Assignments: A Librarian’s Perspective

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Among the greatest advantages offered by full-text databases are their indexing and search capabilities. I see many historians of science using these features to good effect in their research. But when it comes to teaching, most of the student assignments I see (and as a librarian, I see a lot of them) just use these new resources in old ways—typically just as a source for known items. I’d like to suggest that many of the full-text collections now available can be used to design interesting assignments that were not feasible before—especially for undergraduates. The trick is to start by looking at the databases available to you and determining what they are best at—that is, how do they index their content; what kinds of search and retrieval mechanisms do they use, how do they organize and display their results. Then you can develop assignments that are shaped as much by the features of the digital resources as by subject material.In general, commercial, licensed products have more potential for this kind of thing because sophisticated searching is one of the features libraries expect for their money when they license a database. But there are several free online collections with potential as well. Here are some examples of what I mean, first using JSTOR a widely-held, licensed product, and then using the freely available Making of America Project.JSTOR is a licensed collection of full runs of back issues (not the most recent 3-5 years, usually) of core journals in a number of academic disciplines. Many titles go back to the Nineteenth Century, and in the case of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London back to the 1600s. It doesn’t use any controlled vocabulary (pre-determined lists of indexing terms, e.g. Library of Congress subject headings), but it does allow you to limit your search by year, academic discipline and in various other ways. Here’s an example of how you might take advantage of these features to craft an assignment on the history of eugenics. A simple keyword search on eugenics gives over 11,000 results. Sorted by date, students would have a quick overview of the emergence and development of the idea in the United States. The results show that it first appears (in the database) in a few early book reviews published in science and philosophy journals, but that it takes off with the 1904 publication of Francis Galton’s, “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aims,” in the American Journal of Sociology. Scanning the results list would allow students to see that it was initially used by social scientists much more than by natural scientists. Then, students could construct (or you could provide) a new search to address a variety of more specific questions. Here are two of several possibilities I can imagine. A search limited to articles with eugenics in the title, sorted oldest to most recent, returns a list of 88 articles from 1904-2003 that would allow students to trace how the concept and attitudes towards it have changed over the course of a century. Alternatively, students could organize searches by discipline in order to compare how botanists and anthropologists, for example used the term. My next example highlights different features of JSTOR’s search structure. If you were teaching about colonial science, students could search for “Virginia” (or any other place) in the General Science subset of JSTOR, limiting the results to articles published between 1600-1775. Students doing this search would very quickly have generated a set of sources that could be the basis for an analysis of how that colony was represented in the pages of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions. If students did the same search for several different colonies they should be able to draw some conclusions about science in the colonies generally, and specifically, how it differed from colony to colony.Making of America Project—If you’ve never looked at it, the MOA is a huge, free, full-text collection of nineteenth-century American monographs and journals produced by the University of Michigan and Cornell University. As is true with many free collections, the indexing and retrieval options are not as sophisticated as they are in JSTOR. However, you can sort search results according to the frequency with which your search terms appear in the text. This is a good way to bring the most relevant results to the top. An interesting sample search in the journal collection for the words “scripture” and “geolog*” (that is words that begin this way, including geology, geologist and geological) returns 129 results which, when sorted by frequency brings to the top a rich collection of articles on the relationship between geology and revealed religion from a diverse set of magazines including The Princeton Review, The Southern Quarterly Review, Catholic World, and the Ladies Repository. As set of primary sources like this, drawn from diverse magazines would previously have been available only as an edited collection. But in this case, students could choose from any number of relevant topics and, by carefully selecting search terms, pull together distinctive document sets to write about.

Thursday, March 02, 2006

Distinguished Lecturer address delivered at the Forum's annual meeting in November, 2005

The Forum 20 Years Later: Establishing a Creation Story

Marc Rothenberg

Smithsonian Institution

I am very honored to be selected as the Distinguished Historian by the Forum and to follow in the footsteps of Nathan Reingold and Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, among others. Because this is the 20th anniversary of the formal establishment of the Forum, it seems appropriate to take this opportunity to reflect upon the events of two decades ago. It was a busy time in my life. My marriage, my assumption of the editorship of the Joseph Henry Papers, and the establishment of the Forum all took place within five months of each other. But today I will reflect on only one of these three milestones.In looking back at the founding of the forum, I hope to supplement Clark Elliott’s excellent account of the history of the Forum published in Catching Up with the Vision, the special 1999 issue of Isis commemorating the 75th anniversary of the establishment of the History of Science Society. Using my personal files and somewhat faulty memory, I hope to place the Forum in a different context than Elliott did. Elliott looked at the Forum as a ”promoter of a neglected or developing field.” I see the forum as a symptom or indicator of larger movements in the History of Science Society, at a time when Americanists moved, generally speaking, from the periphery to the center of the Society as the Society itself became more open in both an intellectual and even social sense.The true roots of the Forum are social, in so far as a gathering of like-minded historians at a meeting is a social rather than an intellectual event, may extend back to 1971 and the Northwestern University conference on nineteenth-century American science. Or perhaps, since I was too young professionally to attend the meeting at Evanston, we should consider the pivotal event to be the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston in 1976, at which Nathan Reingold organized a series of sessions on American science in commemoration of the Bicentennial of the United States. Maybe the foundation event was a conversation or a series of conversations among a group clustered around Reingold in a hotel lobby. The truth is, I don’t remember when I first met the other members of what became the founding group of News and Views. Most likely, it took a series of events to enable a group of young historians of, primarily, science in nineteenth-century America to get to know and trust each other, and recognize that they shared a common vision of the history of American science. In any case, it was at the annual meeting at Madison, in 1978, that Michelle Aldrich, Clark Elliott, Stanley Guralnick, Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, Ronald Numbers, Margaret Rossiter and I did get together. We shared two important characteristics in addition to our interest in American science: first, we were all relatively junior professionally, a decade or less past our Ph.D.; second we were deeply concerned about the future of our discipline and were willing to work to make it better. Indeed, looking back, what strikes me is how willing over the years we have been to take on responsibilities in the discipline. As many of you know, during what was the prehistory period of the Forum, this group of seven attempted and failed to find funding for a major conference, did establish a newsletter—News and Views, and provided the editorial team and the core contributors for the first volume of the new series of Osiris. And for the details of these activities, I refer you to Elliott’s article.In considering the formal prehistory of the Forum, the years 1978 to 1985, there are two important points to keep in mind. First, the eventual founders of the Forum grew up professionally in a History of Science Society that had viewed the history of American science as unimportant, if not irrelevant. According to Robert Post’s recollection of conversations, Nathan Reingold, A. Hunter Dupree and Brooke Hindle “all had a sense of being shunned by the society.” Reingold claimed that in the early days of his connection with the history of science, the history of American science was a “marginal specialty, often regarded with disdain by mainline practitioners.” The participation of Americanists at the highest level of Society decision- making was limited. Between 1965 and 1984 Americanists held only 20% of all Executive Committee positions. Recognition was also limited. The first president of the History of Science Society who could be labeled an Americanist was Richard Shryock in 1941. The next was John Greene (also a historian of Darwin and hence perhaps more acceptable than other Americanists) in 1975, a gap of thirty-four years. He was followed by Sally Kohlstedt in 1992. Shryock received the Sarton medal in 1959. Not until 1990, over thirty years later, was a second Americanist, Dupree, so honored. Although we did not face as bad a situation in the 1970s as that facing our mentors, I believe the Forum’s founders’ generation was still struggling to get intellectual respect from other historians of science. Indeed, parenthetically, as late as 1984, a historian of physics felt no hesitation in asking me, to my face, why I was wasting my time studying a second rate scientist when there was so much to learn about the leading scientists, no doubt referring to the French contemporaries of Henry he was interested in. And beyond the question of intellectually marginality, there were social reasons why we were marginal. Many historians of American science went to the wrong schools and had the wrong jobs.What do I mean by that claim? The most persistent image of the meetings I have from the 1970s was the announcement of a departmental smoker on a bulletin board. Smokers were and still are informal gatherings of faculty, graduate students, and former students of a particular graduate program. My contention is that the social activities (and many other aspects, such as committee membership, nomination for office, etc.) of the Society seem to have been centered in and controlled by the faculty of a small number of major departments. Those of us, like myself, who came out of American History/American Civilization, and whose advisors were infrequent attendees at the History of Science Society meetings, were distinctly outsiders.What was striking to me then, and is still very striking, is that graduate students and faculty alike in the 1970s seemed to have accepted the premise that a relatively small number of departments represented the entire profession. How small a number? In 1971, Richard French and Michael Gross, two graduate students in the history of science, sought to “satisfy [their] curiosity about the backgrounds, attitudes, and aspirations of fellow graduate students studying the history of science at institutions in North America.” They thought they could do so by surveying graduate students at only 17 institutions. In 1971, this might have been adequate for learning about the characteristics of graduate students studying traditional fields like the Scientific Revolution or Early Modern Science, but the survey badly missed one growing segment of the discipline—students of the history of American science. At the time of the survey, four of the seven historians destined to establish News and Views were still in graduate school. Only one attended an institution that was surveyed by Gross and French. The other three were invisible as far as the Gross and French survey was concerned. I think this invisibility was symptomatic of the larger issue of the social structure of the History of Science Society and the status of Americanists in the Society.I think a second survey, just five years later, reinforces my point. In 1976 a survey of recent Ph.D.s was conducted on behalf of the History of Science Society Committee on Employment Problems and Opportunities. Data was not gathered by asking young members of the Society about their employment situation, which would have given us information about the broad range of young scholars who were members. (I acknowledge that such a survey would have been difficult. I have been trying to construct such data for the Committee on Research and the Profession.) Instead, the survey was directed at the faculty of the major graduate programs in the history of science. The operating premise was that we learn about the profession from the experiences of the graduates of a limited number of programs, not from the experiences of the broader professional community. What was worse, the professor who drew up the survey believed that gathering evidence from only thirteen institutions would be sufficient to gain an understanding of the employment situation of recent graduates in the history of science. Again, one problem with the data was that Americanists did not generally attend these institutions. Only three of the founders of News and Views, for example, had graduated from one of the thirteen. I was a rather dissatisfied member of that committee, but I was unsure of my ground, so I shared the list with Nate Reingold, querying whether he thought the data would be of any use. He agreed with me about the limitations of the survey. In particular, he agreed that if one was going to try to gather data through the graduate departments, the survey left out Americanists. He jotted down the names of an additional fifteen institutions, the minimum he felt was necessary to get a true picture of what was happening on the employment front. When I later gathered bibliographic information on the history of American science and technology, one fact was clear from the distributions of dissertation in the history of American science, a fact that reinforced the issue that Reingold and I discussed in 1976: in the mid-1970s, Americanists were generally being educated at institutions other than those perceived by the leadership of the History of Science Society to be at the core of the history of science profession.Americanists also did not entirely fit the perceived proper profile of employment. The 1976 survey assumed that graduate programs trained “their students with a shared expectation of future academic employment” and focused only on that form of employment. Institutions were asked to divide the data into only two categories: academic and non-academic. The implication of the questions asked the graduate programs was clear. Non-academic employment translated into failure. This time, other members of the committee complained very loudly. Fortunately, the data supplied by the graduate departments was detailed enough for a more sophisticated interpretation. (To be fair, some graduate schools defined academic very broadly.) The committee was able, in the final report, to divide the data between scholarly and non-scholarly employment, with scholarly employment further sub-divided between academic and non-academic. As the committee’s report emphasized, there were demonstrated opportunities for scholarly employment in the federal government, in the corporate world, as a contract historian, or in museums. Not coincidently, such opportunities were greater for those who had knowledge of American history. And such employment, the committee felt, reflecting in part their own personal histories, should not be viewed as some sort of failure, no matter what the graduate departments felt to be the proper goal of their students.My second point is that it is important to remember that the History of Science Society was not a static organization in the 1970s. The prehistory of the Forum coincided with the first stage of the evolution of the History of Science Society “from subscription agency to professional society,” to use Michael Sokal’s phrase. This first stage, which ran from approximately 1970 to the assumption of the presidency by Gerald Holton in 1983, was marked by an increasing awareness of the Society of such issues as employment problems and the status of women. The Society was growing both in terms of membership and financial resources. Hiring practices were changing and there was more open completion for jobs. There was a revolution in the making, and there expectations that the new version of the Society was much more welcoming to Americanists than the old one. However, although many members were eager to embrace a broader definition of the history of science, and hence a more inclusive society, there were still members who looked back longingly at the good old days in which a small group controlled the society.Coincidentally, the first year of Holton’s presidency was also the year the coordinating group of News and Views, now minus Guralnick, who had entered the corporate world, but soon with the addition of Alan Leviton, began the process of establishing a society. I say coincidentally, because as far as I can tell from the correspondence, the coordinating committee for News and Views was not in a rush to take the next step. Elliott, however, precipitated the process in May 1983 when he advised the rest of the group that he would not willing to be editor of the newsletter indefinitely, and suggested that we “have some kind of Society or formally organized group to publish and sustain the newsletter.” In essence, he forced the hand of the group. At the Norwalk meeting, the group agreed that the newsletter had to be sustained—it had proved itself too valuable not to sustain it—and we decided to launch a new society at the Chicago meeting of the History of Science Society in 1984.What is very striking to me in retrospect is that the relationship between the proposed society, eventually to be named the Forum, and the History of Science Society was left very vague. Indeed, the call for a gathering of Americanists at the Chicago meeting issued in News and Views doesn’t say that the intent was to organize a new society. Rather, it was to discuss ways in which there could be ”continuous and broad-based cooperation and coordination of effort among historians of American science.” I have seen no evidence that we had a vision for the Forum. It just evolved.Between the meetings at Norwalk and Chicago, the History of Science Society elected a vice-president, to be president in 1987-88. Some of the News and Views coordinating committee were dissatisfied with the two candidates presented by the nominating committee, and the launched an effort to nomination Nate Reingold by petition, offering as justification the hope of electing an Americanist after a gap of more than a decade (John Greene had been the last Americanist president), and also to have a president who “might add new dimensions to the Society.” Reingold was sympathetic to the Holton revolution, and I for one wasn’t convinced that the other candidates were. The petition succeeded, but William Coleman won the election with a clear plurality, with Reingold and Loren Graham splitting the remaining vote relatively evenly. I have always wondered whether that effort to elect Reingold colored relations with the Society during the next two years. Challenging the decisions of the Nominating Committee was not a common event.Well, back to the Forum. The gathering at the annual meeting in Chicago attracted attention from the leadership of the History of Science Society. President Holton addressed the meeting, arguing against the splintering of the HSS. He even eluded to us in his presidential address, in which he mentioned a “subspecialty group” whose members “think of themselves as specialists first and historians of science second.” His solution was the establishment of divisions within the History of Science Society, modeled after those in scientific societies. After the meeting, Arnold Thackray, the editor of Isis, also raised the possibility of divisions. Thackray’s worries about the splitting of the Society might be linked to the increasing dissatisfaction with Isis among Americanists. The thought of a journal associated with the Forum had been the subject of discussion among the coordinating group for years. In addition there was a journal proposal being developed in the Midwest and another, within the year, on the East Coast and a second in the Midwest. The unhappiness was not because Thackray ignored the history of American science. Between 1980 and 1984, nine of the fifty-five articles published in Isis were clearly on American topics. It seems, however, that the explosion of scholarship on American science was producing more publishable material than Thackray apparently thought prudent to publish. Thackray, after all, had to provide a balance among competing sub-disciplines. The result was a feeling that it was more difficult to be published in Isis if you were an Americanist than in other fields. There were also other pressures for establishing a journal for the history of American science, including the hope of developing possible links between history and policy.In spite of the fears of the History of Science Society leadership, we went doggedly ahead, and at Bloomington formally established the Forum. And the issue of the relationship between the Society and the Forum finally had to be confronted. There were a number of possible models out there. On one end was the model of the Affiliated Societies of the American Historical Association. These societies were separate organizations, which met concurrently with the AHA and had a separate program, but also had joint sessions with the AHA. On the other end were the special interest groups of the Society for the History of Technology. These were informal, self-sustaining and self-identifying clusters of like-minded historians, very loosely regulated by SHOT. Indeed, as Mel Kranzberg warned when asked to comment on the issue of affiliation, “Any attempts to set down rigid rules might lead to all sorts of disputes within the organization, and, as you know, HSS has been prone to more political in-fighting than has SHOT—and that is why our meetings are a lot more fun too.”The response by the Society to the Forum was to establish an ad hoc committee on interests group, which met with Toby Appel and me, representing the Forum, in Philadelphia in February 1986. It was a very positive meeting and resulted in a set of draft bylaws that was, I thought, very responsive to the issues of flexibility and autonomy raised by Toby and me at the meeting. Unfortunately, the Society leadership modified these draft bylaws. The Executive Committee and Council did not listen to Kranzberg. First, the Executive Committee changed the bylaw regarding funds, giving itself veto power over interest group fund raising and expenditures of any funds other than dues. Then Council, at the Pittsburgh meeting, amended the bylaw regarding the provision of services by the History of Science Society to interest groups, changing the word “will” to “may”, and thus opening up the possibility of preferential treatment. In sum, autonomy was restricted and the commitment to the interest groups lessened. The Coordinating Committee of the Forum was already upset with the first change. The second, I think was even more unexpected. At an emotional and spirited business meeting, the likes of which haven’t been seen at the History of Science Society in the two decades since, the bylaws were defeated. Ironically, the rejection of the bylaws was probably the best solution possible. If the Society had adopted these bylaws, it was most likely that the Forum would have formally rejected status as a Special Interest Group. In turn, I suspect that the Society would have ceased to provide meeting space to the Forum. A divorce, on the model of the one with SHOT, was the likely result. Thanks to the defeat of the bylaws, the relationship between the Forum and the History of Science Society was still left uncertain. The advantages of affiliation, at least as the History of Science Society approached it, were unclear, but none of us was quite ready to take the step of organizing a truly independent society.The simple truth was that most of us truly loved the History of Science Society. It had been our primary disciplinary society. I think Nate Reingold expressed in well in a letter he wrote to a senior member of Council about the crisis. After communicating how important the Society had been in his career, he expressed his loyalty to it, declaring, “I am not interested in leading a succession.” But at the same time, he warned his correspondent “the population pressure of specialization can produce strong currents.” Reingold further warned this council member that the changes of language were perceived as an effort by the History of Science Society to establish a “hegemonic framework” for relationships with the Forum and other potential interest groups. Although Reingold did not feel that this was literally true, he counseled that perceptions were important. Reingold included SHOT members as among those who shared this perception of the leadership of the History of Science Society.I received quite a different perspective of what when wrong at the Pittsburgh business meeting in that Council member’s response. (He sent me a carbon copy.) It was quite disturbing. He dismissed the opposition to the bylaws, claiming it was the work of just a few loose cannons, not representing the views of the leadership of the Forum, who tried to bully the business meeting through threats of succession. What was lacking from his reconstruction of the events was any sense that Americanists might have a legitimate grievance. He was oblivious to the possibility that given the marginal status of the sub-specialty in the past, historians of American Science might not want what Reingold called a “hegemonic framework” for their relationship with the Society.By now, I was chair of the coordinating committee, and I spent the next ten months worrying about affiliation, but at the same time convinced that affiliation was probably a dead issue. Why was I so sure? Because there was no word from the History of Science Society. Occasionally, I heard a rumor that the issue was so controversial that it was being left on the far back burner. Being the conservative, busy historian I was, inertia ruled. I was quite willing to continue the status quo. I followed the well-worn path established by my predecessor, Sally Kohlstedt. I asked for, and received a slot at the annual meeting at Raleigh for a Forum business meeting. The informal relationship, neither entirely satisfactory, but not entirely unsatisfactory, would remain. Suddenly, six weeks before the Raleigh meeting, Mike Sokal informed me that the issue was once again alive. Special Interest groups were on the Council agenda, although, interestingly, Sokal informed me that this was done with an eye to “Special Interest Groups that [the Committee on Research and the Profession] hope will emerge in future years.” Officially, the committee report would have nothing to do with the Forum. (Apparently, the letter Kohlstedt sent to the Executive Committee expressing the Forum’s specific concerns about the bylaws was never forwarded to CoRP.) A week before the meeting, I learned that a new set of proposed bylaws had been drafted, and these bylaws were very responsive to the issues raised the previous year. In fact, they much more closely reflected the spirit of the original draft. These were approved by the Society and the Forum formally applied for status as a Special Interest Group.Why the sudden change? I don’t know for sure, but I suspect it was not coincidental that the Council which approved the new bylaws, a Council led by Mary Jo Nye, also approved her plan for a committee, to quote the newsletter, “to review and evaluate the Society’s current programs and priorities with an eye to deciding the directions in which we want to move in the future.” The Society was now looking forward, not backward, towards new relationships among historians of science and a new vision for the society. The Forum, too, looked forward towards a new, more formal relationship with the Society.It is safe to say that the field of the history of science in the United States is now an acknowledged part of the history of science and Americanists part of the Society. The fears of those who felt that the Forum might mean the splintering of the History of Science Society have been proven wrong. The Forum and the Society have become intertwined. In fact, from 1990 until 2003, a majority of the Executive Committee members were Americanists and Americanists made up the entire Executive Committee in 2000. What these particular statistics reflect, is not the Americanists are suddenly dominant in the History of Science Society. Rather, many of the highly motivated historians who founded the Forum then took an active part in the now much more welcoming History of Science Society, including Kohlstedt, Rossiter, Numbers, and myself. The history of American science is now just one of a number of significant and active fields in the history of science.For the remainder of my talk, I want to look forward rather than backwards and suggest possible activities for the Forum in the future. Some of you may interpret this as an effort to see how much work I can create for the rest of you.The challenge facing the Forum in the future is to find a mission appropriate for a healthy sub-specialty. I think the challenge can be met if the Forum lives up to its name: to be a forum, that is, a place where historians and their ideas can come together for fruitful exchange.What should the Forum be doing? The first goal of the Forum has always been to facilitate communication, either through the newsletter or in person. Of course, for the Forum, in the beginning, there was News and Views. Our newsletter had two goals: “to exchange news and to circulate views.” It was the latter objective that I want to focus on. Elliott called for “short descriptive or critical articles on methods, sources, interpretations, propositions for general discussion, essay reviews, etc.” He wanted the newsletter to be “a place where ideas can be tried out on colleagues for feedback or for their information, without commitment to a more formal publication medium.” He made it so, and in doing so set a high standard, which his successors, and I was his first successor, have not, I believe, completely met. While I was editor News and Views began to tilt was away from views and towards news. There were a variety of reasons for this, not the least of which was that it was hard work finding opinion pieces. Well, I am here to issue a call, which I haven’t cleared with Daniel Goldstein, to restore the balance. I urge the Forum membership to use its newsletter to be a true forum for discussion. We don’t have many others.At the same time, we should explore how the website and the newsletter could work together. There is a new frontier for societies. Society after society to which I belong struggles with questions regarding the interaction of its website and its newsletter, as well as the issue of electronic publication/distribution of its newsletter. Posting opinion pieces on the website, as opposed to the newsletter, would be much less expensive. Page limitations could be ignored. But how permanent is website publication? How do you archive such material? I would like to see the Forum consider these issues.Personal communication is perhaps even more important than communication by the written word. I was very happy when I read the “Letter from the Chair” in the Spring 2005 issue of News and Views. Yes, networking should be among our highest priorities. Given the size of the annual meeting of the History of Science Society—500 being a moderately sized meeting nowadays--leaving it up to chance won’t work. I think the reception is a wonderful idea. The real trick is coming up with a procedure we can repeat year after year at relatively low cost. But I urge the Steering Committee to try.One possible way to encourage networking is to meet outside the confines of the annual History of Science meeting in smaller, more focused meetings. SHOT calls these boutique meetings. While I was chair of the Special Interest Group in the History of Astronomy, I worked with Michael Crowe of Notre Dame to establish a workshop in the history of astronomy. The workshop meets every other year, on the Notre Dame campus, in the summer. Attendance is open to whoever wants to come. There are both invited discussion papers and the opportunity to offer a work in progress. Forty or more historians, ranging from graduate students to the senior scholars, attend. There is only one session at a time, and lots of time and opportunity for private and group dialogue. It is informal, cheap, fun, and very rewarding. We are very fortunate that Notre Dame offers a small stipend to allow the workshop to invite a senior historian from Europe to join us. I think we should explore establishing the equivalent type of meeting. The primary reason I opposed the bylaws proposed at Pittsburgh was my fear they would forestall the ability of the Forum to raise funds for small, independent meetings. To the best of my knowledge, we have taken little advantage of the opportunity provided by the revisions in the bylaws we made such a fuss over. We should.But I also want to discourage the Forum to do something. Don’t establish a journal. One of the great strength of the history of American science intellectually has been that it has avoided the situation in which practitioners only communicate to each other. Since 1985, Americanists have published in a wide range of American history journals, journals dedicated to the history of specific scientific disciplines, and broader history of science journals. This was brought home again to me last week while I was researching some annotations for The Papers of Joseph Henry. I had to look at Annals of Science, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, and Isis, with a quick peek at a journal of Southern history. This cross-specialty fertilization is important, and we should continue it.Then there is the need for information for our discipline and our profession. The Executive Committee needs information to select appropriate members for committees. The Isis editor needs referees and book reviewers. Scholars need to know who else might be working in specific fields. At one time (are Alan and Michelle here?) we had an outstanding directory, more detailed and more useful than the History of Science Guide. I would like to see us regularly produce such directories, perhaps online rather than printed.Twenty years ago, historians of American science had something to prove. That need to prove something gave them the energy and commitment to construct an institutional infrastructure for communication among and information gathering about themselves. Well, historians of American science no longer have to prove anything to the History fo Science Society. But the need to communicate among ourselves, to gather information for our mutual use, is just as great. That infrastructure, founded twenty years ago, known as the Forum, needs our continued commitment and energy. I call upon you to provide it.From the time of that gathering in Madison in 1978 until into 1996, the Forum was crucial to my professional life as a historian. The greatest frustration I had when I became Treasurer of the History of Science Society was my inability to stay involved in the Forum. Finally, last year, I managed to rearrange committee-meeting times so I could once again attend the Forum meetings. And I was immediately put to work. But that is OK. I have received an immeasurable amount of professional and personal joy from the Forum, although none as great as the pleasure I have received from today’s honor. Thank you.