Open Court began publishingThe Monistin 1890 as a journal“devotedto the philosophy of science”that regularly included mathematics. The audiencewas understood to be“cultured people who have not a technical mathematicaltraining”but nevertheless“have a mathematical penchant.”With these constraints,the mathematical content varied from recreations to logical foundations, but every-one had something to say about non-Euclidean geometry, in debates that rangedfrom psychology to semantics. The focus in this essay is on the contested value ofmathematical expertise in legitimating what should be considered as mathematics.While some mathematicians urgedThe (...) Monistto uphold disciplinary standards ofgeometrical reasoning, authors opposed tonon-Euclidean geometry aligned theirreasoning with practical applications, universal know-how, and nonhierarchicaldemocracy. As one contributorinquired,“How isthe professional expert betterfit-ted to see more lucidly in dealing with the elements of geometry than any otherperson of good geometric faculty?”. (shrink)

In the early decades of the 20th century, women's access to the historical discipline followed fundamentally two paths. For the first time, some (a small minority) entered the profession as academic historians; others worked outside or on the margins of academia, pursuing their research interests as independent scholars. What did being an independent scholar mean for these women? Was it always a form of externally imposed marginalization? My paper argues that this is not the case. First of all, being an (...) independent scholar did not necessarily mean marginality. Some of these women scholars exerted a deep influence on 20th century historiography, and their work is still influential today. Quite apart from posthumous fame, moreover, it should be noted that the lack of academic affiliation did not necessarily preclude for some of these women the possibility of recognition and influence during their lives. Secondly, we should be careful not to assume that being an independent scholar was invariably an externally imposed marginalization. Some of these women scholars can be defined as ‘obligatory amateurs,’ because they were frustrated in their attempt to pursue an academic career. But others, in contrast, deliberately chose independent scholarship over an academic job, and can thus be defined ‘amateurs by choice.’ What was the motivation behind this choice? I argue that an important factor was the resilience of the amateur tradition in historical writing. The amateur tradition offered a strong counterbalance to women's marginality in academia and a source of positive values and models for their participation in the intellectual life. (shrink)

The essays in this special issue of Centaurus examine overlooked agents and sites of knowledge production beyond the academy and venues of industry- and government-sponsored research. By using gender as a category of analysis, they uncover scientific practices taking place in locations such as the kitchen, the nursery, and the storefront. Because of historical gendered patterns of exclusion and culturally derived sensibilities, the authors in this volume find that significant contributions to science were made in unexpected places and that these (...) were often made by women. The shift in focus to these different sites and different actors broadens the spectrum of what counts as science and where science happens. That is, in moving beyond the parameters of formal academic structures, this special issue seeks to recast the ways in which the production of science itself is defined and to engage readers in the redesign of the boundaries of our discipline. (shrink)

“Pure science” and “applied science” have peculiar histories in the United States. Both terms were in use in the early part of the nineteenth century, but it was only in the last decades that they took on new meanings and became commonplace in the discourse of American scientists. The rise in their currency reflected an acute concern about the corruption of character and the real possibilities of commercializing scientific knowledge. “Pure” was the preference of scientists who wanted to emphasize their (...) nonpecuniary motives and their distance from the marketplace. “Applied” was the choice of scientists who accepted patents and profits as other possible returns on their research. In general, the frequent conjoining of “pure” and “applied” bespoke the inseparable relations of science and capitalism in the Gilded Age. (shrink)

This essay argues that taking the economy seriously in histories of science could not only extend the range of activities studied but also change—often quite radically—our understanding of well-known cases and instances in twentieth-century science. It shows how scientific intellectuals and historians of science have followed the money as a means of critique of particular forms of science and of particular conceptions of science. It suggests the need to go further, to a much broader implicit definition of what constitutes science—one (...) that implies a criticism of much history of twentieth-century science for defining it implicitly and inappropriately in very restrictive ways. (shrink)

Throughout the late 1840s and the early 1850s, Harvard botanist Asa Gray and his close friend George Engelmann of St. Louis engaged themselves with recruiting men who sought to make a living by natural history collecting, sending these men into the field, searching for institutions and individuals who would subscribe to incoming collections, compiling catalogs, and collecting subscription fees. Although several botanists have noted Gray and Engelmann’s bold experiment as having introduced America to a mode by which European naturalists had (...) devised to organize scientific expeditions, historians of science have not taken the “subscription mode” seriously. I argue that it was specifically by undertaking the labor of cataloging species and charging subscription fees for the cataloged species that Gray established himself as a metropolitan botanist. One crucial consequence of Gray’s rising profile was that he acquired sufficient “cataloging power” to secure his status as an authoritative cataloger of species, and as a kind of “mint” or “storehouse” :1–28, 2001a) who produced well-pruned lists of American species to enable transactions between American and European botanists. But this essay is not focused on the Europeanization of American taxonomy. Drawing on work by scholars who place emphasis on how new forms of knowledge get produced when knowledge travels, my focus here is the evolution of the subscription mode when Gray and Engelmann adapted it to American natural history. My conclusion examines what historian of science Vanessa Heggie :318–334, 2014) identifies as the “danger of category dominance” in today’s historiography of science and shows how a kind of “assemblage thinking” may help historians cope with this danger. (shrink)

The United States Patent Office of the 1850s offers a rare opportunity to analyze the early gendering of science. In its crowded rooms, would-be scientists shared a workplace with women earning equal pay for equal work. Scientific men worked as patent examiners, claiming this new occupation as scientific in opposition to those seeking to separate science and technology. At the same time, in an unprecedented and ultimately unsuccessful experiment, female clerks were hired to work alongside male clerks. This article examines (...) the controversies surrounding these workers through the lens of manners and deportment. In the unique context of a workplace combining scientific men and working ladies, office behavior revealed the deep assumption that the emerging American scientist was male and middle class. (shrink)

This article undertakes a history of labor as seen through acknowledgment sections of the journals of the History of Science Society—Isis and Osiris—and documents what has been intentionally removed from acknowledgments over the decades. It focuses on the Society’s editorial office, with special attention to the career of manuscript editor Joan Vandegrift. Alongside a reading of select printed acknowledgments, this article offers a vernacular history of labor and identifies a paradox: the web of people and things included in acknowledgments expanded (...) amid an intentional, systematic exclusion of paid editorial staff. Over the century, acknowledgments in the Society’s journals echoed changes in the historiography—as the field shifted from stories of atomized individuals discovering truths to accounts of sociopolitical relationships through which knowledge was crafted. Historical work has always depended on relationships of various forms, but the acknowledgment of these interdependences began to appear only in the 1970s as feminist and postcolonial approaches to scholarship emerged. At the same time, acknowledgment of direct paid labor of Society employees, who improved and manifested historians’ publications, was actively removed from articles. In the process, editorial staff such as Joan Vandegrift were excluded from one of the few historical records of their labor and from the economies of credit that structure publishing industries. Overall, the aim of this piece is to support better understanding, continued rewriting, and ongoing transformation of the labor inequalities in our field. (shrink)

Although the buying, selling, and trading of fossils has been a principle part of paleontological practice over the centuries, the commercial collection of fossils today has re-emerged into a pervasive and lucrative industry. In the United States, the number of commercial companies driving the legal, and sometimes illegal, selling of fossils is estimated to have doubled since the 1980s, and worries from academic paleontologists over this issue has increased accordingly. Indeed, some view the commercialization of fossils as one of the (...) greatest threats to paleontology today. In this article, I address the story of “Sue”—the largest, most complete, and most expensive Tyrannosaurus rex ever excavated—whose discovery incited a series of high-profile legal battles throughout the 1990s over the question of “Who owns Sue?” Over the course of a decade, various stakeholders from academic paleontologists and fossil dealers to Native Americans, private citizens, and government officials all laid claim to Sue. In exploring this case, I argue that assumptions of authority are responsible for initiating and sustaining debates over fossil access. Here, assumptions of authority are understood as assumptions of ownership, or expertise, or in some cases both. Viewing the story from this perspective illuminates the significance of fossils as boundary objects. It also highlights the process of boundary-work by which individuals and groups constructed or deconstructed borders around Sue and fossil access to establish their own authority. I draw on science studies scholarship as well as literature in the professionalization, commercialization, and valuation of science to examine how assumptions of authority facilitated one of the most divisive episodes in recent paleontological history and the broader debate on the commercial collection of vertebrate fossil material in the United Sates. (shrink)

SUMMARYThis examination of an important paper by Sydney Ross is the first in a projected series of occasional reflections on ‘Annals of Science Classic Papers’ that have had enduring utility within the field of history of science and beyond. First the messages of the paper are examined, some well known but others, particularly Ross's own contemporary concerns about the use of the word ‘scientist’, less so. The varied uses made of the paper by scholars are then traced before Ross's biography (...) is examined in order to try to understand how a figure professionally marginal to the field of history of science came to write such a significant piece. Ross’s interest in the topic appears to have been informed by a romantically tinged scientific progressivism and a deep concern with the importance of linguistic precision in science and in public affairs. The inspirations of the author and the interests of his audience have been only partially aligned, but the paper's insights remain of broad historical interest and have wider ramifications since the denotation ‘scientist’ and its proper application are much debated today in contests over the authority of science. (shrink)

For William Whewell and, later, Charles Peirce, the methods of science merited scientific examination themselves. Looking to history to build an inductive account of the scientific process, both men transformed scientific methods into scientific evidence. What resulted was a peculiar instance of what Ian Hacking calls “the looping effects of human kinds,” in which classifying human behavior changes that behavior. In the cases of Whewell and Peirce, the behavior in question was their own: namely, scientific study. This essay brings Hacking’s (...) formulation to bear on the status of science in nineteenth-century intellectual history, revealing the continued entanglement of science and philosophy even as they were being prized apart. Focusing on how Whewell and Peirce turned themselves into “scientific kinds,” the essay reveals the slippage between “what” and “how” across what Peirce once called “the age of methods.”. (shrink)

Beginning in the 20th century, scientific research came to be dominated by a growing class of credentialed, professional scientists who overwhelmingly displaced the learned amateurs of an earlier time. By the end of the century, however, the exclusive realm of professional scientists conducting research was joined, to a degree, by “citizen scientists.” The term originally encompassed non-professionals assisting professional scientists by contributing observations and measurements to ongoing research enterprises. These collaborations were especially common in the environmental sciences, where citizen scientists (...) participated in counting wildlife and measuring environmental conditions. Later, patient groups began to play a more active role in supporting clinical trials and collecting health records from affected individuals. (shrink)