A Companion to the History of Science

By Bernard Lightman

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the History of Science is a single volume companion that discusses the history of science as it is done today, providing a survey of the debates and issues that dominate current scholarly discussion, with contributions from leading international scholars.

• Provides a single-volume overview of current scholarship in the history of science edited by one of the leading figures in the field
• Features forty essays by leading international scholars providing an overview of the key debates and developments in the history of science
• Reflects the shift towards deeper historical contextualization within the field
• Helps communicate and integrate perspectives from the history of science with other areas of historical inquiry
• Includes discussion of non-Western themes which are integrated throughout the chapters 
• Divided into four sections based on key analytic categories that reflect new approaches in the field

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Feb 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781118620755

Book preview

About the Editor

Bernard Lightman is Professor of Humanities at York University and former editor of the journal Isis (2004–2014). Lightman's most recent publications include Victorian Popularizers of Science, Victorian Scientific Naturalism (co-edited with Gowan Dawson), Evolution and Victorian Culture (co-edited with Bennett Zon), and The Age of Scientific Naturalism (co-edited with Michael Reidy). He is currently working on a biography of John Tyndall and is one of the editors of the John Tyndall Correspondence Project, an international collaborative effort to obtain, digitalize, transcribe, and publish all surviving letters to and from Tyndall.

About the Contributors

Jim Bennett is Keeper Emeritus at the Science Museum, London. He was formerly Director of the Museum of the History of Science, University of Oxford. He has published on the history of instruments, of astronomy and of practical mathematics from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

Charlotte Bigg is a researcher at the CNRS, Centre Alexandre Koyré, Paris. She has published widely on scientific images and visual cultures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has co-edited The Heavens on Earth: Observatories and Astronomy in the Nineteenth Century (Duke University Press, 2010) and Atombilder. Ikonografie des Atoms in Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit des 20. Jahrhunderts (Wallstein Verlag, 2009). She is currently preparing Astronomy and Photography, to appear in Reaktion Books' Exposure series.

Jimena Canales holds the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in the History of Science at University of Illinois–UC and was previously Assistant and Associate Professor at Harvard University. She is the author of The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson and the Debate that Changed Our Understanding of Time (Princeton University Press, 2015) and A Tenth of a Second: A History (University of Chicago Press, 2010) and has published widely on science, technology, art, and philosophy.

Valérie Chansigaud is a researcher associated with SPHERE laboratory (University Paris–Diderot–CNRS). She studies the relation between human beings and wild nature. She has published several books of the history of ornithology, naturalist illustration, and protection of nature. Her last book, L'Homme et la Nature (Delachaux et Niestlé, 2013), has been given the Prix Léon de Rosen of the Académie française.

Peter Dear teaches the history of science and science studies at Cornell University. He is the author of Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions 1500–1700 (2nd ed., Princeton University Press, 2009).

Marwa Elshakry is Associate Professor in the History Department at Columbia University. She is the author of Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and co-editor, with Sujit Sivasundaram, of Science, Race and Imperialism, volume 6 of Victorian Literature and Science (Pickering & Chatto, 2012).

Diarmid A. Finnegan is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography in the School of Geography, Archaeology, and Palaeoecology at Queen's University, Belfast, United Kingdom. His research interests center on the cultural geography of science and religion in the nineteenth century. His work includes the book Natural History Societies and Civic Culture in Victorian Scotland (Routledge, 2009) as well as several articles on scientific culture in Victorian Britain and Ireland.

Aileen Fyfe is Reader in Modern British History at the University of St. Andrews. Her research interests lie in the communication and popularization of the sciences. She is author of Science and Salvation (University of Chicago Press, 2004) and Steam-Powered Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2012), and co-editor of Science in the Marketplace (University of Chicago Press, 2007). She is currently leading a major research project "Publishing the Philosophical Transactions: The economic, social and cultural history of a learned journal 1665–2015."

Anita Guerrini is Horning Professor in the Humanities and Professor of History at Oregon State University. Trained in the history of science, she has written on the history of experimenting, animals, medicine, food, and the environment. Her books include Experimenting with Humans and Animals: from Galen to Animal Rights (John Hopkins University Press, 2003) and The Courtiers' Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV's Paris (University of Chicago Press, 2015). She blogs at http://anitaguerrini.com/anatomia-animalia/.

Klaus Hentschel is professor for history of science and technology in Stuttgart. He has worked on relativity theory, quantum physics, spectroscopy, the interplay of instrumentation, experimentation and theory formation, on social networks and on invisible hands, on taxonomies in science, and on argumentation. For his studies on the physical sciences he has received five national and international prizes. cf. www.uni-stuttgart.de/hi/gnt/hentschel and .../gnt/dsi for his international Database of Scientific Illustrators 1450-1950 with more than 10,000 entries.

Catherine Jackson is Assistant Professor of History of Science at University of Wisconsin, Madison. She previously held research fellowships at the University of Notre Dame and Chemical Heritage Foundation. Originally trained as a synthetic organic chemist, Jackson is completing a book on the origins of organic synthesis. She has published on Liebig, Hofmann, and the chemical laboratory, and co-edited (with Hasok Chang) An Element of Controversy: The Life of Chlorine in Science, Medicine, Technology and War (British Society for the History of Science, 2007).

Boris Jardine was the 2014-15 Munby Fellow in Bibliography, Cambridge University Library. He has published widely on scientific instrumentation, in particular the relation between instruments and texts. He has also worked at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science (Cambridge) and the Science Museum (London).

Kristin Johnson is Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. She is the author of Ordering Life: Karl Jordan and the Naturalist Tradition (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).

Matthew L. Jones is the James R. Barker Professor of Contemporary Civilization at Columbia University. A Guggenheim Fellow, he is completing a book on the National Security Agency, and is undertaking a historical and ethnographic account of big data, its relation to statistics and machine learning, and its growth as a fundamental new form of technical expertise in business, political, and scientific research. His Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking About Thinking from Pascal to Babbage is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.

Heike Jöns is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Loughborough University. She has widely published on the geographies of science and higher education with a focus on transnational academic mobility and knowledge production. Her books include the research monograph Grenzüberschreitende Mobilität in den Wissenschaften (Universität Heidelberg 2003) and the edited volume Geographies of Science (Springer, 2010). Her current research examines the history of European universities with an emphasis on Britain and Germany.

David A. Kirby is Senior Lecturer in Science Communication Studies at the University of Manchester. Several of his publications address the relationship between cinema and the cultural meanings of genomics. His book Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema (MIT Press, 2011) examines collaborations between scientists and the entertainment industry. He is currently writing a book entitled Indecent Science: Film Censorship and Science, 1930–1968 exploring how movies served as a battleground over science's role in influencing morality.

Robert E. Kohler is Professor Emeritus of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written extensively on the history of the field sciences.

Steven J. Livesey is Brian E. and Sandra O'Brien Presidential Professor of the History of Science at the University of Oklahoma. His research interests focus on medieval science, history of early scientific methodologies, science in medieval universities, and manuscript studies. His current research project, supported by the Fulbright Commission, investigates the medieval library of Saint-Bertin, and the project goal is to reconstruct the library by identifying modern survivors of a collection that has been dispersed since the French Revolution.

Paul Lucier is historian of the earth and environmental sciences and of their interconnectedness with the mining and energy industries. He is the author of Scientists and Swindlers: Consulting on Coal and Oil in America, 1820-1890 (John Hopkins University Press, 2008) and is currently writing a history of science and capitalism in America.

Rory McEvoy is Curator of Horology at the Royal Observatory, part of Royal Museums, Greenwich. His research has a natural focus on the production, development, and use of precision horological instruments and associated technology as well as the broader history of the Royal Observatory, civil time, and its distribution.

Cyrus C. M. Mody is Professor and Chair in the History of Science, Technology, and Innovation in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University. He is the author of Instrumental Community: Probe Microscopy and the Path to Nanotechnology (MIT Press, 2011). His current research focuses on the semiconductor industry's shaping of changes in US science and science policy since 1965, and on American physical and engineering scientists' creative responses to the dire conditions of the long 1970s.

Bruce T. Moran is Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Reno, and teaches courses in the history of science and medicine. He is the author of Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2005) and Andreas Libavius and the Transformation of Alchemy: Separating Chemical Cultures with Polemical Fire (Science History Publications, 2007). A co-edited volume, Bridging Traditions: Alchemy, Chemistry, and Paracelsian Practices in the Early Modern Era, appeared in 2015 from Truman State University Press. His current project examines the relationship between private sentiment and alchemical practice.

Iwan Rhys Morus is Professor of History at Aberystwyth University in Wales. He completed his PhD at Cambridge in 1989 and since then has worked largely in the area of Victorian science, with particular interests in the public culture of science and the backstage work of scientific performance. He is the author of Frankenstein's Children: Electricity, Exhibition and Experiment in early Nineteenth-century London (Princeton University Press, 1998), When Physics became King (University of Chicago Press, 2005), and Shocking Bodies: Life, Death and Victorian Electricity (History Press, 2011) as well as co-author of Making Modern Science (University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Joshua Nall is Curator of Modern Sciences at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, in the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on mass media and material culture of the physical sciences after 1800. He is currently preparing a monograph on the role of mass media in fin de siècle debates over life on Mars.

Carla Nappi is Associate Professor of History and Canada Research Chair in Early Modern Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her first book was The Monkey and the Inkpot: Natural History and its Transformations in Early Modern China (Harvard University Press, 2009). She is currently working on the histories of translation, narrative, and embodiment in Ming and Qing China from the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries.

Tara Nummedal is Associate Professor of History at Brown University. She is the author of Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2007) and is currently completing The Lion's Blood: Alchemy, Gender, and Apocalypse in Reformation Germany.

Lynn K. Nyhart is Vilas-Bablitch-Kelch Distinguished Achievement Professor of the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The author of Biology Takes Form (University of Chicago Press, 1995) and Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany (University of Chicago Press, 2009), she is currently a Senior Fellow at UW–Madison's Institute for Research in the Humanities, working on a history of ideas about biological individuals, parts, and wholes in the nineteenth century.

Brian Ogilvie is Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2006). His current research focuses on insects in European art, science, and religion from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. He is also writing a short book on the cultural history of the butterfly for the Animal series from Reaktion Books.

Donald L. Opitz is Associate Professor in the School for New Learning at DePaul University. His research concerns the role of science in Anglo-American Victorian culture, with an emphasis on gender, class, and sexuality. He is co-editor, with Annette Lykknes and Brigitte Van Tiggelen, of For Better or For Worse? Collaborative Couples in the Sciences (Birkhaüser, 2012) and principal editor, with Staffan Bergwik and Brigitte Van Tiggelen, of Domesticity in the Making of Modern Science (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

Katherine Pandora is Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Science at the University of Oklahoma. Her research focuses on questions of scientific authority, science and popular culture, and science communication, particularly in relation to nineteenth and twentieth-century natural history and social science. She is the author of Rebels within the Ranks: Psychologists' Critique of Scientific Authority and Democratic Realities in New Deal America (Cambridge University Press, 1997), and blogs at katherinpandora.net/petri_dish.

Denise Phillips is Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, where she teaches German history and the history of science. She is the author of Acolytes of Nature: Science and Public Culture in Germany (University of Chicago Press, 2012) and the co-editor of New Perspectives in the Life Sciences and Agriculture (Springer 2015).

Kapil Raj is Directeur d'études (Research Professor) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His research examines the global intercultural negotiations which have gone into its making, the subject of Relocating Modern Science (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) which focuses on the role of circulation and encounter between South Asian and European skills and knowledges in the emergence of crucial parts of modern science. He has also co-edited The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820 (Science History Publications, 2009) and has just co-edited another collective work on the history of knowledge and science in the long nineteenth century which will appear in French at the end of 2015. He is currently engaged in researching for his next book on the urban and knowledge dynamics of Calcutta in the eighteenth century.

Lukas Rieppel is David and Michelle Ebersman Assistant Professor of History at Brown University. He received his PhD at Harvard University in 2012 and is currently writing a book that explores what the history of dinosaur paleontology can tell us about the culture of capitalism in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century America. Under contract with Harvard University Press, the book is tentatively titled Assembling the Dinosaur: Science, Museums, and American Capitalism, 1870–1930. Together with Eugenia Lean and William Deringer, he is also editing the 2018 volume of Osiris on the theme of Science and Capitalism: Entangled Histories.

Nathan Sidoli received a BA in Liberal Arts from St. John's College, Santa Fe, and an MA and PhD from the University of Toronto in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, with a dissertation on the mathematics of Claudius Ptolemy. He was a principle-investigator postdoctoral fellow for the US National Science Foundation and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, before taking up a position at Waseda University (Tokyo, Japan), where he is currently Associate Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science. His current research focuses on foundations and practices in Greek mathematics and the transmission of Greek mathematical sciences in Arabic sources.

Josep Simon teaches the history of science, technology, and medicine at the Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá. He is the author of the award-winning Communicating Physics: the Production, Circulation and Appropriation of Ganot's Textbooks in France and England (1851–1887) (Routledge, 2011), the Handbook chapter Physics Textbooks and Textbook Physics in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Oxford University Press, 2013), the Encyclopedia of Science Education entry History of Science (Springer, 2015) and a number of special issues, and articles on science, education, and their historiographical interfaces.

Robert Smith is Professor of History in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta. In addition to books and numerous articles on twentieth-century astronomy and the history of large-scale science, he has also written on a range of topics in the history of nineteenth-century astronomy broadly conceived.

Mary Sunderland is a historian of science and technology at the University of California, Berkeley where she is affiliated with the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society and the Department of Nuclear Engineering. She is interested in the twentieth-century life sciences. At present, her research focuses on engineering education and translational research. Questions about how the societal roles of scientists and engineers are shaped by pedagogy motivate her work.

Liba Taub is Director and Curator of the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, and Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on material culture of science, and Greco-Roman science. With Frances Willmoth, she co-edited The Whipple Museum of the History of Science: Instruments and Interpretations, to Celebrate the 60th Anniversary of R.S. Whipple's Gift to the University of Cambridge (Cambridge University Press, 2006). She retains fond memories of Things of Science.

Joyce van Leeuwen is Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She pursued graduate studies at the Humboldt University Berlin and Stanford University. Her research interests lie in Greek paleography, diagrammatic reasoning, history of mechanics, and early modern science. The Aristotelian Mechanics: Text and Diagrams will appear in 2015 in Springer's Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science.

Hector Vera is a researcher at Instituto de Investigaciones sobre la Universidad y la Educación, at Mexico's National University (UNAM). He has a PhD in sociology and historical studies from The New School for Social Research. His doctoral dissertation, The Social Life of Measures: Metrication in Mexico and the United States, 1789–1994, is a historical-comparative analysis on how diverse institutions and groups (state agencies, scientific societies, chambers of commerce and industry) appropriated and signified the decimal metric system. He is the author of A peso el kilo. Historia del sistema métrico decimal en México (Libros del Escarabajo, 2007), a monograph on the adoption of the metric system in Mexico. He is also co-editor, with V. García-Acosta, of a volume on the history of systems of measurement, Metros, leguas y mecates. Historia de los sistemas de medición en México (CIESAS, 2011).

Jeremy Vetter is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Arizona. He works at the intersection of history of science and technology, environmental history, and the history of the American West. He is author of Field Life: Science in the American West during the Railroad Era (University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming).

Paul White is an editor on the Darwin Correspondence Project and teaches in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Thomas Huxley: Making the ‘Man of Science’ (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and various articles on Victorian science, literature, and culture. He is working on a book on Darwin and the Evolution of Emotion.

Nick Wilding is Associate Professor of History at Georgia State University. He works on early modern science and modern forgery. He is the author of several articles, reviews, and digital projects on Hooke, Wilkins, Galileo, Sagredo, and Kircher. Galileo's Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and the Politics of Knowledge, which came out with the University of Chicago Press in 2014, has won the Aldo and Jeanna Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies from the Modern Language Association.

Acknowledgements

This was a particularly demanding project, both because of the size of the volume and the range of the topics. Since I began work on it in 2012 I have called upon many of my colleagues for help. I am indebted to those colleagues who suggested the names of possible chapter contributors, including Mario Biagioli, Dana Freiburger, Klaus Hentschel, Adrian Johns, Edward Jones-Imhotep, Daryn Lehoux, Lissa Roberts, Grace Shen, and Larry Stewart. Several colleagues helped not only to suggest possible contributors but also to conceptualize specific sections of the volume. They were David Livingstone, Alison Morrison-Low, Tacye Phillipson, and Klaus Staubermann. I am especially grateful to those who gave me advice on how to structure the entire volume, which was a particularly complicated task. They were Katey Anderson, Janet Browne, James Elwick, and Bob Westman.

Then there were a small number of scholars who I consider to be unofficial advisors to the project. I saved some of the most troublesome questions for them. Liba Taub was an invaluable help in working through the Tools section, the area covered by the volume about which I know the least. Rob Kohler and Lynn Nyhart gave me sound advice on the structure of the volume and many other difficult issues. When contributors were unsure what to read on developments in science that took place in Asia, South America, or Africa, I was fortunate to have Sonja Brentjes advise me on what to suggest. Finally, the basic structure of the volume was worked out one night over dinner with Anne and Jim Secord.

I have found the editors at Wiley to be well organized and efficient, as well as a pleasure to work with. I want to thank Sally Cooper, Tessa Harvey, Georgina Coleby, and Karen Shield for their guidance throughout the entire life of the project. Alec McAulay was a superb copy-editor and Shalini Sharma managed the production activities with great skill.

My greatest debt is to my wife, Merle, to whom I have been married for almost 40 years. Her love has sustained me through good times and bad. I dedicate this work to her.

Introduction

Bernard Lightman1

For those of us who populate the industrialized regions of the world, it is not very controversial to assert that our lives are profoundly shaped by science. In our everyday, mundane existence we are constantly encountering, using, and relying on specific technologies that are based on scientific discoveries. In addition, we see how science has transformed the physical world that forms the stage on which we go about our business day after day. Our relationship to nature, for better or for worse, is mediated through science. The very way we think is indebted to scientific ideas. The culture surrounding us is saturated with them. Popular films bring the lives of colorful scientists, such as Stephen Hawking, Alan Turing, and Albert Einstein, to the big screen. Controversies over scientific issues appear regularly in our media, whether it be the theory of evolution, the possibility of life on other planets, the dangers of climate change, or the authority of the modern scientist. But how and when did this come to be? Science was not always so central to human culture. And what is the larger significance of its centrality? These are among the questions tackled by historians of science.

Over the last 35 years the study of the history of science has been transformed by the gradual adoption of a new historiographical approach. Whereas the history of science previously stressed a big picture focusing on the theoretical progress made by great scientific heroes like Galileo and Newton, the field is now dominated by scholars offering rich, thickly descriptive, local studies. Rather than emphasizing the discovery of new scientific theories, historians of science became interested in how science was practiced in the laboratory as well as in other sites. A whole new cast of characters has been added to the story, most of them from outside the intellectual elite, including women, invisible assistants, popularizers, and members of the working class. Historians of science have integrated modes of scholarship from other fields into their work. They have looked to cultural studies, communication studies, women's studies, visual studies, and the scholarship on science and literature, to name just a few. The result has been the development of a dynamic field out of which has come some of the most exciting scholarship in the world of academe.

Those of us who witnessed this seismic shift in the 1980s and 1990s, and who maybe even contributed to the upheaval, will have a particular book or article that inspired them to see the field in a different way, or that helped them understand just how much the ground had shifted underneath us. For me, and I suspect for many others, it was Paul Forman's stirring declaration Independence, Not Transcendence, for the Historian of Science, published in Isis in 1991. The point of Foreman's article was to provide a principled basis for those historians of science who wanted independence from the sciences. He argued that the role of the scientist and the role of the historian of science were fundamentally different. While the scientist embraced transcendence, the historian of science cultivated independent moral judgment (Forman 1991, 71). Historians of science, then, had to supply their own agenda for their discipline rather than accepting that of the scientist. We could not be intellectually subservient like historians of science from earlier decades. Our business was not celebrating the past achievements of scientists. Nor was it studying those scientific theories that were considered correct by contemporary standards. If we had to understand the science of any period we sometimes had to look at scientific pursuits now seen as marginal or pseudoscientific. Whereas the defenders of the old scholarship would have considered an investigation of phrenology or mesmerism as a waste of time, those seeking independence had to be prepared to pursue the understanding of science in a particular period wherever it took them. Our job was to completely historicize scientific knowledge—explaining possession of specific pieces or structures of it, not by appealing to a transcendent reality…, but by reference to mundane factors and human actors (Forman 1991, 78). Forman believed that historians of science had been groping their way towards genuine intellectual autonomy; however, they had not fully grasped that the new history being developed was based on a renunciation of transcendence (Forman 1991, 85).

Forman's declaration of independence on behalf of historians of science was, for many, a revelation. It contributed to a reorientation of the discipline that was both exhilarating and daunting. Exhilarating because it opened up a whole new set of questions by casting a different light on some of the basic assumptions of the older scholarship. Was there a scientific revolution in the early modern period that led to the formation of what we think of as modern science—or not? Was there really such as thing as the Darwinian revolution in the nineteenth century? Could we really make the concept of progress the main feature of the story we told about science? But these big questions were daunting as well. They added up to one gigantic question: what, exactly, were historians of science studying? In other words, was there no essential thing that we could call science that began in ancient times and survived to the present? (Golinski 2012). In gaining our independence we had to reconstitute our discipline. The aim of the Blackwell Companion to the History of Science is not exactly to provide a single, unified big picture—something that many view as epistemologically suspect. Rather its object is to survey recent developments that have resulted from the effort to re-envision the field.

Deciding on a structure for this volume was anything but straightforward. The structure had to reflect the significant historiographical shift that took place since the 1980s. The chapters themselves had to be synthetic, midscale studies rather than microstudies (Kohler and Olesko 2012). But what topics should the chapters focus on, and how should the chapters be organized into parts? The initial temptation—almost irresistible for a historian—was to think along chronological lines. A chronological approach, starting with the ancient period and then moving through the middle ages, the early modern period, the eighteenth century, and the modern era, was fairly common for previous surveys of the history of science. Andrew Ede and Lesley Cormack's one-volume A History of Science in Society (2004) followed that format (Ede and Cormack 2004). So did the eight-volume Cambridge History of Science series, edited by Ronald Numbers and David Lindberg (Lindberg and Numbers 2003–). Moreover, there are many books that deal with specific periods in the history of science. I wanted to try something different. Perhaps a structure that combined chronological and thematic approaches would be best? In effect, this was the structure adopted by The Routledge Companion to the History of Modern Science (1990) (Olby, Cantor, Christie, and Hodge 1990). But there are 67 chapters in that book and I had fewer to work with. Trying to cover both key chronological periods and important themes would be impossible. I also wanted to have a tighter focus for the thematic chapters. After consulting widely with colleagues, I finally decided on a four-part thematic approach reflecting the broad analytical categories central to history of science today. Adopting this structure helps us to move the emphasis in the volume away from the discovery of abstract scientific theories, the theme of progress through the ages, and the contributions of specific elite scientists. There is a loose chronological order within some of the parts so that developments over time can be tracked. But the thematic structure has allowed contributors to cut across traditional chronological and geographic boundaries in exciting ways.

The first chapter is actually a prologue to the four parts. Here, Lynn Nyhart provides a much more detailed and nuanced discussion than the one in this introduction of the historiographical trends over the last 35 years that have made four analytical categories so important for historians of science. It is a complicated story, which illustrates how historians of science have borrowed from other disciplines as the ground beneath their feet began to shift. She examines the impact of social constructionism and feminist scholarship on the history of science, with their emphasis on how science has been constructed by a diverse group of individuals, by no means just male intellectuals, through a complex social process. Then she shows how this led historians to explore the nature of past scientific activity, or what has been called scientific practice. Looking at the making of scientific knowledge opened up new doors. It led historians of science to investigate communicative practices, whether it be the movement of knowledge between scientists, or between scientists and the public, or even from the local or national context to the global context. The turn to practice also raised interesting questions about the material culture of science, the stuff that scientists worked with, from specimens to gigantic instruments. The four analytic categories, then, deal with the roles, places and spaces, communication, and tools of science.

The chapters in Part I, on Roles, will explore the various roles of the scientist from ancient times to the present. The term is in quotation marks as the chapters will emphasize how the idea of the scientist has changed dramatically over time and to indicate that the chapters are more concerned with what could be called roles in science. The term itself was not coined until 1834 by the English polymath William Whewell (Whewell 1834, 59). The article in which he introduced the term was actually a laudatory review of Mary Somerville's On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834). Whewell did not have in mind the specialized, professional scientist that we are familiar with today. He was using the term to counter the tendency of his contemporaries to subdivide science into separate disciplines. Inventing the term scientist was part of Whewell's plea for unity in science and his rejection of specialization.

It is not likely that Whewell would have expanded the term scientist to include invisible technicians, instrument makers, artisans, or human experimental subjects. But given the diverse roles played by scientific figures in the past there is a good argument for including them. If we were to apply the term only to those who fit the current criteria for defining who is and who is not a scientist, the number of those who met the qualifications would diminish the further back we went into the past. Understanding how lines were drawn between who was considered to be in possession of natural knowledge and who was not is one of the goals of these chapters. The social role of individuals with special relationships to natural knowledge must be considered in various cultural settings located in different times and places.

The chapters in Part II, Places and Spaces, all examine the situatedness of knowledge. All scientists, whatever role they assume, must perform that role in a specific place. Historical geographers of science like David Livingstone have emphasized that space is not a neutral container in which social life takes place. Space, Livingstone asserts, is not (to change the metaphor) simply the stage on which the real action takes place. Rather, it is itself constitutive of systems of human interaction (Livingstone 2003, 7). When we are considering critical sites in the generation of knowledge, such as the university, the field, or the laboratory, we always need to ask, who manages that space? What are its boundaries? Who is allowed access? Paying attention to place, by contrast, means taking into account the local, regional, and national features of science. If we take Forman seriously then we will not think of science, as Livingstone puts it, as some transcendent entity that bears no trace of the parochial or contingent. Rather we will cultivate a geography of science that reveals how scientific knowledge bears the imprint of its location (Livingstone 2003, 13).

Part II, then, will examine the sites from which scientific knowledge has emerged, and will concentrate more on the local rather than the regional or national scale. It is striking to see how sites of knowledge have varied from the ancient period to the present. Durable sites, such as the university and the observatory, have changed dramatically over time. But there is nothing analogous to some of the older sites, such as the European court of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, while new sites, such as the scientific society, did not exist prior to the early modern period. Some of these spaces, such as the laboratory and the museum, have long been recognized by historians as privileged places of power. But the importance of others, such as domestic and commercial spaces, have only recently been recognized. In this section we have only touched on a relatively small number of scientific sites. Studying the remarkable range of sites in which scientific work has been undertaken illustrates why space and place matter.

After examining how location figures into the generation of knowledge, Part III focuses on how ideas and images travel between sites. As they circulate, scientific ideas and images undergo translation and transformation, since people encounter representations differently in different circumstances (Livingstone 2003, 11). Jim Secord's widely cited article Knowledge in transit (2004) outlines the contours of this dimension of the historical mode of enquiry. Secord points out that focusing on how knowledge is generated locally, at times, produced an obstacle for historians. The more local and specific knowledge becomes, Secord declared, the harder it is to see how it travels (Secord 2004, 660). To counter this problem, Secord suggested that we understand science as a form of communication in which the processes of movement, translation, and transmission become central. This means thinking always about every text, image, action, and object as the trace of an act of communication, Secord asserted, with receivers, producers, and modes and conventions of transmission. It means eradicating the distinction between the making and the communicating of knowledge (Secord 2004, 661).

In Part III, Communication, the authors examine how knowledge was transferred between sites through a variety of media, including print, visual, and oral media. There are chapters on manuscripts, letters, periodicals, books, textbooks, lectures, film, radio, and television. But there is also some attention to the changing technologies of communication, in particular print forms of communication, as in the chapter on the printing press. The chapters deal both with how scientists communicated to each other, and how they communicated to the public. We could have included many more chapters on Communication. It has been a topic of much scholarly interest since the turn of the century. Moreover, there are many more modes of communication central to science and connected with specific places that we could not cover due to space constraints, such as field notebooks, museum catalogues, and the experimental register. We have included, primarily, those modes of communication that have received the most attention from scholars.

Secord has pointed out that the key to creating a history of science as a form of communication is our new understanding of scientific knowledge as practice. All evidence from the past is in the form of material things (Secord 2004, 665). This is as true of periodicals, books, and notebooks as it is of experimental instruments, natural history specimens, and two-dimensional models. Studying the communication of science therefore leads us to the investigation of its material culture. Part IV deals with the tools of science, which also circulate between scientific sites. Chapters will cover important scientific instruments and material objects as a way to illuminate the changing practices of science. We will encounter chapters on timing, measuring, calculating, and recording devices; instruments, such as microscopes, telescopes, and spectroscopes, that enhance the senses; and material objects that have been used by scientists including specimens, collections, diagrams, and three-dimensional models.

Scientific objects are the things studied by scientists, whereas instruments are the tools by which those objects are studied. Instruments and objects have been the subject of investigation for several decades. Though they are treated by historians of science as part of material culture, this does not preclude attention to their epistemological dimensions. Daston's edited collection Biographies of Scientific Objects (2000) dealt with how whole domains of phenomena—dreams, atoms, monsters, culture, mortality, centers of gravity, value, cytoplasmic particles, the self, tuberculosis—come into being and pass away as objects of scientific inquiry (Daston 2000, 1). Daston was not just interested in objects as material. She wanted to understand how material objects contained a significant intellectual component. Though it is less obvious, instruments also have immaterial attributes. Liba Taub has noted that the turn toward scientific practice beginning in the 1990s brought with it attention to instruments. At the same time, Taub affirms, there was a growing fascination on the part of many scholars, in a range of disciplines, with ‘materiality’ (Taub 2011, 690). However the fascination with materiality does not limit historians of science to the object qua thing. Taub argues that the work on instruments problematized them by forcing scholars to confront how they understood the term instrument itself (Taub 2011, 696), just as Daston asked how and when a scientific object came to be. Object and instrument both have material and immaterial attributes.

By focusing on the roles, places, communicative practices, and materials of science in the past we hope to capture what has made current scholarship in the field so vibrant and exciting. But the field continues to evolve. Undoubtedly, new analytical categories will be developed in the future by enterprising historians of science. These kinds of experiments in historical innovation are to be encouraged if the field is to retain its vitality and its relevance. Moreover, they are essential if historians of science hope to maintain their independence.

Endnote

1. I am indebted to Lynn Nyhart for her extremely helpful suggestions on how to strengthen this introduction.

References

Daston, Lorraine (ed). 2000. Biographies of Scientific Objects. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ede, Andrew, and Lesley Cormack. 2004. A History of Science in Society: From Philosophy to Utility. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press.

Forman, Paul. 1991. Independence, not transcendence, for the Historian of Science. Isis, 82: 71–86.

Golinski, Jan. 2012. Is it time to forget science? Reflections on singular science and its history. Osiris, 27: 19–36.

Kohler, Robert E., and Kathryn M. Olesko. 2012. Introduction: Clio meets science. Osiris, 82: 1–16.

Lindberg, David, and Ronald L. Numbers (eds). 2003– . The Cambridge History of Science. 8 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Livingstone, David N. 2003. Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Olby, R. C., G. N. Cantor, J. R. R. Christie, and M. J. S. Hodge (eds). 1990. Companion to the History of Modern Science. London: Routledge.

Secord, James A. 2004. Knowledge in transit. Isis, 95 (December): 654–672.

Taub, Liba, 2011. Introduction: Reengaging with instruments. Isis, 102: 689-696.

[Whewell, William.] 1834. On the connexion of the physical sciences. By Mrs. Somerville. Quarterly Review, 51: 54–68.

Chapter One

Historiography of the History of Science

Lynn K. Nyhart

Over the past 35 years or so, the subject matter, people, places, and processes associated with history of science have grown vastly. Exaggerating only slightly for effect, an older predominant history of science might be captured by the image of a tree of scientific ideas rooted in the base of Western culture (perhaps extending downward earlier to ancient Egypt and Babylonia); the task of the historian of science was to trace the tree's growth and branching. Today a more fitting image would be of the history of science as a densely tangled bank of people and material things teeming with social, cultural, economic, and religious life, that covers the globe. The historian's task now is to tease out how certain forms of knowledge and practice within this mass of activity came to be understood as science; what has sustained science socially, culturally, and materially; and who has benefitted and who has suffered in its formation. What happened in the past did not change: what we expect professional historians of science to know and care about has.

The four parts of this volume—Roles, Places and Spaces, Communication, and Tools of Science—reflect broad analytical categories central to today's history of science. They cut across historical periods, geographical locations, and sciences to provide a common vocabulary that helps tie our far-flung history together. Rather than reproduce these categories in the present essay, I sketch out some of the historiographic trends that made it possible—even commonsensical—to use them to thematize contemporary history of science scholarship written in English.

I focus first on the social constructionist turn of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and its consequences for how we think about the nature of scientific knowledge and who is involved in its making. I then turn to the subsequent (re-)formulation of approaches to answering two fundamental questions in our field. One focuses on making scientific knowledge, asking How is scientific knowledge constructed in a given context? Historians' answers to this question since the early 1990s have become increasingly attentive to scientific practice, its settings and material culture. A second question focuses on moving scientific knowledge. As James Secord (2004, 655) put it, How and why does [scientific] knowledge circulate? How does it cease to be the exclusive property of a single individual or group and become part of the taken-for-granted understanding of much wider groups of people? Scholars working on this question have highlighted the tropes of communication and circulation, and indeed often question the very distinction between making and moving.

Recent history of science has been profoundly shaped by its historians' interactions with scholars from other disciplines across and between the social sciences and humanities. In these exchanges, historians of science have both given and received, but they have often shied away from direct theoretical statements in favor of a more empiricist style that integrates analytical insights into narrative structures. Within the broad themes of this essay, I highlight works that articulate or exemplify analytical approaches and conceptual tools that might be applicable to different places and periods. While these often originate from individual authors, I have been particularly struck by the importance of thematic journal issues and that most maligned of genres, the multi-authored edited volume. Thematic volumes are notoriously hard to get published, yet they can raise the visibility of an approach or topic well above the level of the individual article or even book, and give a sense for the significant conversations in which our community participates. The liveliness of these conversations is evidenced by the large number of collective works cited in the present essay—and also, of course, by this volume, which as a whole attests to the community-based nature of the history we make.

Constructing Scientific Knowledge, Socially

Since the late 1970s, historians of science have gradually come to accept a predominantly social constructionist account that views the development of scientific knowledge as depending heavily on particulars of local circumstances, people, epistemes, and politics, and that doesn't necessarily drive ever closer toward a single truth. Although historians of science had long been interested in recovering earlier knowledge systems and the means by which they were transformed over time (e.g. Kuhn 2012), social constructionism offered new tools for doing so. The sociologists of the Edinburgh School and the Bath School developed many of these tools in the 1970s and early 1980s; despite differences in approach, they broadly articulated what was known as the Strong Programme of the social construction of scientific knowledge. (For retrospective analyses of the early situation, see Golinski 2005; Shapin and Schaffer 2011; Kim 2014; Soler et al. 2014).

The new sociologists of scientific knowledge participated in a broader postmodern rejection of our unmediated access to reality, often associated with other critiques of science's truth value. Michel Foucault (especially 1970, 1973) challenged historians to understand how the structures of knowledge, discourse, and institutions instantiated forms of power (the entire bundle called epistemes) that were virtually invisible to those living inside their regimes. Since he offered no clues as to how one episteme turned into another, and little in the way of specific empirical evidence for his provocative claims, Foucault's work remained largely (if importantly) inspirational. From a different direction, feminist scientists would soon expand the purview of social constructionist criticism of science (Bleier 1984; Fausto-Sterling 1992). Uneasy with both the implications of radical social constructionism and the all-seeing stance represented in standard claims to objectivity, however, Sandra Harding (1986) and Donna Haraway (1988) developed, respectively, the crucial ideas of standpoint epistemology and situated knowledges. Haraway (1988, 590) in particular advocated the partial perspective, which lent the authority of agency to individuals previously without standing and demanded communal effort to arrive at shared reliable knowledge.

Such perspectives collectively challenged the received view of history of science in two fundamental ways. First, they demonstrated that scientific knowledge was constructed by human beings, not discovered in nature. Second, this process was not the work of individual minds but was ineluctably social. The implications for history were profound.

If knowledge of nature is made, not arrived at, then we should not expect that science will progress toward a pre-existing universal truth. One important implication is that the truth value of a claim in the past cannot be assessed by what we now believe to be true—an account of the success or failure of a scientific claim must be neutral with respect to that outcome. Evaluations of success must depend on other grounds—social, political, rhetorical—and both successes and failures must be treated similarly. In the 1980s cutting-edge historians of science adopted these principles of neutrality and symmetry (Bloor 1976), taking up the challenge of treating the outcomes of scientific controversies as determined not by the truth winning, but by social interactions.

The paradigmatic example of this sociological-historical approach is Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985). They interpreted the contest between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes as not just over the existence and nature of the vacuum and its experimental proof, but over what sort of knowledge would be counted as scientific (or, more properly, natural philosophical), and what adjudged not. The very division between science and non-science was at stake, and the winner not only won the specific controversy but also the right to claim what kind of knowledge would be constituted as authoritative (experimental knowledge), who would be considered a natural philosopher in the future (Robert Boyle), and who would not (Thomas Hobbes).

Developing the commitment to neutrality with respect to the outcome of a controversy led Martin Rudwick to take a different tack. His Great Devonian Controversy (1985) experimented with a radically anti-teleological narrative of controversy, persuasion, and power that steadfastly resisted letting the reader know how this geological story came out until its end. It thereby called attention to the conventions of histories that anticipate the outcome, challenging readers to problematize the very structure of historical narrative and to recognize the contingency of the development of science.

Both books also forcefully showed the extent to which the construction of scientific knowledge was social, in the sense of involving many people (see also Smith 1998 on the collective discovery of the conservation of energy). The diversity of kinds of people included in this social reckoning has only expanded over time. If Michael Ruse was innovatively broad, in his 1979 Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw, for including over a dozen British male natural philosophers as the relevant community that helped to make the revolution in Darwin's name, its scope seems narrow today, when we see that revolution as preceding Darwin in many of its features (Desmond 1992; Secord 2000) and extending far into nineteenth-century British and European culture (e.g. Beer 1983; Glick and Engels 2008)—and indeed cultures worldwide (Pusey 1983; Elshakry 2013).

The key second claim of social constructionism, then, was that the development of science involved many people, doing many different kinds of things. As microsociological laboratory studies demonstrated the centrality of postdocs, graduate students, and technicians to making knowledge (Latour and Woolgar 1979), historians wondered, Who were the invisible technicians of the past (Shapin 1989; Hentschel 2007)? How were the social relations of knowledge production managed, and how did these change over time?

Feminist scholars observed that European women were in fact also involved in many aspects of making knowledge about nature, though only exceptionally afforded opportunities to do science in ways we easily recognize (Schiebinger 1989; Findlen 1993; Terrall 1995). Women participated in science as patrons and salonnières, as illustrators, as teachers of children, as popular writers (Shteir 1996), and as partners working with their scientific husbands (Pycior, Slack, and Abir-Am 1996) long before careers in science were generally available to women. As historians looked beyond European laboratories and the social structures that surrounded and sustained them, they found not only women but also men who helped make science in the field in these and other ways as well—as servants, collectors, and taxidermists; as translators, providers of local or indigenous knowledge, and other sorts of go-betweens; and as experimental subjects. (See Part I, Roles, in this volume.) The peoplescape of contributors to science has grown accordingly.

As the kinds of people recognized as involved with science have diversified, the notion of the scientist itself has undergone new scrutiny, most prominently with the development of the idea of scientific personae (Daston and Sibum 2003). This concept simultaneously offers a theorized way to differentiate among kinds of scientists, describe certain collective patterns of scientific behavior, and offer an intermediate level of analysis between the individual and the institution. The scientist as expert has spawned a distinctive specialist literature as well (Lucier 2008; Broman 2012; Klein 2012). To be sure, more traditional biography has hardly disappeared from the history of science—indeed, four of the eleven winners of the History of Science Society's Pfizer Prize for best scholarly book between 2003 and 2013 were biographies (Terrall 2002; Browne 2003; Antognazza 2009; Schäfer 2013). Historians have also been inspired to revisit how scientific biographies themselves are constructed—by scientists (Otis 2007), by admirers (Rupke 2005), and by historians (Söderqvist 2007).

Doing Scientific Things with Scientific Things: Practice and Materiality

Historians of science today do not write only about scientists and others producing and supporting science. They write about the stuff of science: about glassware, computers, fruit flies, oceans, books, diagrams, maps, models, and particle accelerators. They write about theory, too—but their goal is less often to elucidate how scientists derived their theories than to present a broader historical web of scientific and cultural practices that in turn are solidly embedded in the physical world. This rich material tapestry has been woven together from diverse strands: the social-constructionism-inspired turn to experimental practice; the formerly distinct scientific instrument tradition; attention to natural history collections and fieldwork; and interdisciplinary studies of material culture.1

The central feature, which gained heft from the social constructionism of the 1980s, has been the turn toward practice (Soler et al. 2014). Literary postmodernists of the period might declare with Derrida that all thought is discourse, and thus all products of thought were forms of text, amenable to deconstruction. Not so analysts of science. Shapin and Schaffer (1985, 25), for instance, bent far backward to call written arguments literary technologies, which along with material and social technologies established scientifically legitimate matters of fact in the Scientific Revolution. To them, seeing science as constructed meant focusing attention on the physical, material means of that construction. Since the 1980s, broader trends have helped to keep historians' attention on the materiality of science. The digitization and virtualization of our academic and social world has wrought renewed appreciation for physical things, while at the same time, ever-increasing awareness of our dependence on a rapidly degrading nature has lent new urgency to that appreciation. We can no longer afford to attend primarily to theory.

Attention to materiality is not new to the history of science. An older Marxist tradition insisted on the central role of material and economic needs in shaping science (Bernal 1971). Separately, a long tradition studied historical scientific instruments; with its valuation of object-connoisseurship connected to art history and museum work, this was often treated as a sideline in the field. Then in the mid-1990s, scholars of material culture—mostly working in museums—made new claims for their importance to the study of history of science and technology (Lubar and Kingery 1993; Kingery 1996). Combined with the history of science's new focus on practice, this helped push instruments and other materials toward the center of the field (van Helden and Hankins 1994).

Analyses of the material nature of scientific practice have looked different as they intervened in different historical subspecialties. In early modern studies, for instance, such analyses have carried forward the theme of the scholar–craftsman union (Zilsel et al. 2000; Roberts, Schaffer, and Dear 2007; Long 2011); a similar concern with the relationship between abstract knowledge and craft knowhow has animated recent work on ancient and non-Western understandings of nature (e.g. Robson 2008; Schäfer 2011). In the history of modern physics, the study of experimental practice challenged the historiographic dominance of theoretical physics. As Peter Galison (1997) has argued, developments in theoretical and experimental physics have not been yoked together; tracing the history of experimental physics, its instruments and material practices, yields new historical narratives that change our picture of physics—even challenging its unity as a science.

In the history of twentieth-century experimental life sciences, attention to practice and material culture led to new ways of thinking about the unique tools for investigating living processes (Clarke and Fujimura 1992). Robert Kohler's iconic Lords of the Fly (1994) analyzed the Morgan school of Drosophila geneticists, showing how the organisms themselves began to drive the systems of investigation (and indeed, the entire moral economy of the school) and analyzing how the scientists responded. Subsequent scholarship further refined analyses of knowledge-making systems involving people, model organisms and organic materials, and experimental set-ups in the life sciences (e.g., Rheinberger 1997; Creager 2002; Landecker 2007).

Historical studies of experimental practice, then, have shared a focus on the use of instruments and experimental systems that extend our senses and manipulate nature to tease out its processes, their underlying structures, and, ultimately, their laws. Historians of natural history have attended to quite different aspects of material practice, including not only the life and work of scientists in the field (Kuklick and Kohler 1996; Vetter 2011) as they searched for natural objects and materials, but also the practices of collection and preservation, and the organization of specimens into ordered collections (Heesen and Spary 2002; Endersby 2008; Johnson 2012). Here, the history of science has intersected with the history of museums and collections, and with the broader material culture perspective that museums have promulgated (Nyhart 2009; Alberti 2011; Poliquin 2012).

Such approaches have drawn attention to the spatial dimensions of scientific practice—another aspect of its materiality closely intertwined with social organization (Finnegan 2008). Modern scientific activity typically takes place in recognized kinds of venues: observatories, laboratories, museums, and the field are perhaps the four most prominent categories (see Part II, Places and Spaces, this volume). Each of these has evolved over time and developed characteristic forms of social organization and practices, though historians have repeatedly noted how permeable and variable these sites are (e.g., Gooday 2008). This focus may be understood as part of a broader interdisciplinary spatial turn visible recently across the humanities and social sciences (e.g., Warf and Arias 2008). Geographers have offered taxonomies of scientific spaces and places that draw useful distinctions (such as that between particular locations in the world—Brazil, say—and kinds of places—such as the tropics), and have called attention to important differences in the scales at which spatial analysis of science may be undertaken (see esp. Livingstone and Withers 2011). Spatial and geographical language—referring to actual places, kinds of places, and metaphors of place and mapping—now provides a prominent vocabulary and mode of analysis among historians of science.

Moving Knowledge Around: Communication and Circulation

A long-accepted tenet of the social constructionist history of science is that scientific knowledge begins locally. If this is the case, then how does it spread? Over the last three decades historians have pursued this fundamental question in many directions, and the analysis of the ways in which people, ideas, and artifacts travel and communicate to move science around has yielded an especially rich set of intellectual tools.

The communicative practices within and surrounding science are central to its spread, and writing is the practice historians have studied longest and most deeply. For decades, if not centuries, historians of science have analyzed texts. In the 1980s rhetoricians joined them to examine anew both the persuasive strategies of scientists and the forms of scientific publication, especially the scientific article (e.g., Bazerman 1988; Dear 1991; Gross, Harmon, and Reidy 2002). Unpublished (if not always private) forms have also received scrutiny, especially as they reflect the broader social structures in which they were embedded, such as the correspondence network or the archive (Hunter 1998; van Miert 2013).

Beyond its rhetorical dimensions, the historical study of science communication has been transformed by the dramatic expansion and increasingly sophisticated historiography of popular science (often conflated with science popularization). An older, diffusionist model tended to treat popular science as a watered-down version of real science, popularizers as lesser lights who lacked the chops to do their own research, and readers as a passive audience. This has given way to a perspective in which both writers for the general public and that public itself are treated as active cultural interpreters and knowledge-makers worthy of study (Cooter and Pumfrey 1994). James Secord (2000) has shown just how far one can take this approach, with his classic study Victorian Sensation, which treats Robert Chambers' 1844 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation as a remarkably fluid text: he shows how its many editions developed in conversation with its critics, while also illuminating localized styles and cultures of reading. More recently, Topham (2009) has suggested considering science popularization more seriously as an actor's category, while Daum (2009) has proposed a broader historiographic transformation that would consider popular science as part of a larger notion of public knowledge.

Daum has rightly criticized the existing historiography of popular science for its parochial focus on nineteenth-century Britain—a trend reinforced by the large number of literary scholars of Victorian culture who have reached out to meet historians of popular science, especially (though not exclusively) via a mutual interest in the genre of the general periodical (e.g., Cantor et al. 1994; Cantor and Shuttleworth 2004; Lightman 2007). It is refreshing, therefore, to see innovative analyses of popular science being developed for new contexts such as the twentieth-century Soviet Union and China, where the relationships among public science, the state, and forms of identity have been both fraught and different from British-inflected Western assumptions (Andrews 2003; Schmalzer 2008; Fan 2012a).

Communication has a material history, too, explored powerfully through its print culture. Historians of