Chicago's Field Museum is making drastic cuts to basic research in order to meet a constrained budget. Lukas has argued that this shoul...
. . . By Exemplars: Kuhn in Chicago
A few weeks ago, I attended a birthday party at the University of Chicago called "Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Thomas Kuhn'...
An Experiment in Teaching Hiroshima to Tomorrow's Engineers
As many of our readers attempt to recover from the semester's end, I'm pleased to present a guest post by David Spanagel, reflecting...
The Field Museum Cuts Basic Research
Karl Akeley's famous "Fighting African Elephants" being put on display at the Field Museum in Chicago, ~1905. The Field...
"Change or Die!": The History of an Innovator's Aphorism
I asked Matt Wisnioski to share something with our readers about the history of technological change and innovation in celebration of the re...
Should Online Communities Have Rights?
On November 30th, 2012, NCsoft, a South Korea-based video game maker, shutdown one of its digital properties, a massive multiplayer online r...
The Queues of Disneyland, and other thoughts from HSS
My undergraduate course in discrete mathematics introduced me to some of the paradigmatic problems of the field, including Euler's Seven...
The Fall of Jonah Lehrer (Part 4 of 4)
This post concludes my four-part series on the cultural context of contemporary popular science writing. The preceding three parts are here...
Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions at the University of Chicago
I just arrived in Chicago where I will be attending a conference on Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions at the Univers...
After Construction/Between Loops and Kinds: Alexander's The Mantra of Efficiency
My favorite thing about this blog is that it sticks things deeply in my craw, and I cannot pull them out, so now my craw is full. Today, I&#...
The Other 2012 Prophecy
I asked Joseph November , Associate Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, to share this techno-prophesy with our audienc...
The Fall of Jonah Lehrer (Part 3 of 4)
This is the third installment of a four-part series on the cultural context of contemporary popular science writing. Part I is here , Part I...
#hsspsa12
I'm flying out tomorrow morning for the History of Science Society's Annual Meeting in San Diego. The philosophers of science will ...
The Fall of Jonah Lehrer (Part 2 of 4)
This is the second installment of a four-part series on the cultural context of contemporary popular science writing. Part I is here , and P...
Kuhn Was Right
This past weekend, Princeton hosted a workshop in honor of Thomas Kuhn called " Structure at 50: Assessing and Reassessing Kuhn and h...
Henry David Thoreau: Scientist, Capitalist, Land Surveyor
We have been talking a great deal about the history of capitalism on American Science, particularly focusing on how histories of science, ...
The Fall of Jonah Lehrer (Part 1 of 4)
How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle! O [Jonah], thou wast slain in thine high places. 2 Samuel 1:25 (King James, adapte...
Sandy Studies 3: A Teachable Moment
Yesterday, my colleague, James McClellan, and I held a discussion group on Hurricane Sandy with students at Hoboken's Stevens Institute ...
Sandy Studies 2: Darkness
Some years ago, the historian, A. Roger Ekirch , published a book titled, At Day's Close: Night in Times Past . In it, he explored the h...
Sandy Studies
The clock says, "Hoboken lost power at 9:05." Or so. City clocks are always off a bit. A Hoboken City Clock at 11th and Washin...
Embracing and Communicating Uncertainty
I am hesitant to blog about the hurricane ripping through the Mid-Atlantic, especially while I'm sitting comfortably safe and warm, six ...
On Eclipses and Scientific Thinking: Simon Newcomb, Mark Twain, Ernst Mayr, and Bing Crosby
What do Newcomb, Twain, Mayr, and Crosby have in common? No, they aren't a 60s folk rock band. The answer is that they all tell us somet...
Talking to Insects
Autumnal forest in Charlevoix, Quebec. From the series The Earth from Above by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. The painter and experimental fi...
The Strength of American Materials -- An Environmental History of Engineering Science
From the Franklin Institute's General Report on the Explosions of Steam-Boilers One of the many pleasures of writing "Tocqu...
Eye-Candy for HoTeES
" After a week of great posts by my colleagues, I give you a bit of fluff, a Flickr account dedicated to "Science and T...
Big Histories of Science
For some time now, historians of science--including those who transformed the field with their carefully wrought, local, micro-studies--...
Next Week: PACHS Introductory Symposium
As many of you know, the Philadelphia Area Center for the History of Science (PACHS) anchors an increasingly rich array of HPS offerings—ta...
Trust in Standardized Test Scores
If you are like me, you have been following the Chicago Teacher's strike over the past week. Last Friday, it seemed as though the l...
Tocqueville's Ghost
Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences recently gave me the opportunity to review three thought-provoking books and in the process m...
Editorializing
Roger Cohen's recent piece in the Times -- The Organic Fable -- has caused quite an uproar! Briefly put, Cohen reports on a new stu...
Down with epistemological rubrics!
I was struck by this passage in Erik Hmiel's review of Joel Isaac's new book, Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Par...
Just the Facts, M'am: The Historian's (Even Minimalistic) Role in Our Current Media Age
The historian of technology, Thomas Haigh , has written an interesting piece on the role of historians in an environment of blogs and speed...
Mapping Scientific Influence
Ben Schmidt at Sapping Attention has a beautiful post up (with many pretty pictures) and exactly the sort of smart analysis one expects f...
Poe, Leidy, Morton, and Some Skeletons
Now that's a picture: Edgar Allan Poe, Joseph Leidy, and Samuel George Morton at Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences Pho...
Touring The Idea Factory....or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Bell Labs
A Special Guest Post from Ben Gross, Research Fellow, Center for Contemporary History and Policy, at the Chemical Heritage Foundation (Thank...
Facebook and Conspicuous Affection
A little over 110 years ago Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the Leisure Class , in which he spelled out his now famous and well-kno...
Shotgunning, Inc.
More thoughts on beer technologies! These should go down just as smoothly as my post on canning craft beer (written up more fully here )....
Brooke Hindle on Early American Science
This retrospective look (from the 1980s, it seems, by Brooke Hindle ) at the mid-twentieth-century origins of the history of science in ear...
Individuals, Aggregates, and the Affordable Care Act
Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Today was a big day at the Supreme Court, which has just issued its ruling on Obamacare. Fo...
Hand Dryers and Brand Ascent
Something weird is going on with hand dryers. Over the last few years, I've found myself talking about hand dryers more and mo...
"New Crittercism"
This morning I enjoyed listening to Carla Nappi interviewing Graham Burnett about his book The Sounding of the Whale (previously mentioned...
Toward an Environmental History of Psychology: A Conversation with Michael Pettit
The Inspiration: A Toronto Raccoon, photo by Michael Pettit The Forum for the History of Science in America's newsletter regula...
Ease on Down Them Cyborg Highways . . .
Last week’s announcement that Nevada had OK’d Google to license driverless cars in the state reminded me of another story from last year ...
How are History of Sci/Med/Tech and History of Capitalism Teaching One Another?
Continuing our ruminations on the history of capitalism and its relationship to the history of science/med/tech or to STS ( here ) ( here ) ...
A Craft Economy: Technology, Aesthetics, and Beer
Yesterday, I awoke to two announcements. First, Steve Shapin is giving a talk in England at the end of the month called " The Tastes of...
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