ABSTRACT In what ways can the study of science and popular culture in the American context contribute to ongoing debates on popularization and popular science? This essay suggests that, for several reasons, attention to the antebellum era offers the most significant opportunity to realize more sophisticated understandings of science in American popular culture. First, it enables us to take advantage of comparative opportunities, both by benefiting from the advanced state of historiography for Victorian popular science and by engaging with a (...) generation of historiographic innovations by scholars in U.S. history, American studies, literature, and art history. Second, the emergence of popular science in the context of the republican ethos of the antebellum period provides an important vantage point from which to assess the extent to which the general issue of “popular science” and its cognates is historically variable and multiple in terms of the politics of knowledge. Third, the ramifications of the development of popular science for relations between science and the public well into the twentieth century cannot be understood until we gain a more clearly developed sense of the emergent period. (shrink)

Whereas literature on satellites and outer space exploration has usually been dominated by vision, humankind’s initial encounter with the Earth’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, was overwhelmingly sonic. Tracking was originally enabled by the signal continuously transmitted by its radio beacon. Embedded in the International Geophysical Year (IGY) citizen science programs, radio amateurs played a crucial role in receiving the signal and assisting professional scientists in tracking the satellite in its initial phases. Their established existence as a distinctive worldwide community (...) of skilled operators and experimenters made hams special allies to IGY scientists and, in many respects, set them apart from other groups of amateur scientists. This essay focuses on radio amateurs’ practices and spaces of listening to Sputnik within the wider framework of the IGY. In transcending national and terrestrial boundaries, Sputnik’s signal shaped new spatialities at a variety of scales: from the macroscales of the globe and outer space to the intimate microscale of the domestic radio shack. Focusing on radio amateurs’ personal experiences and on the invisible agencies of Sputnik’s signal, the essay uses sound as a way into the sociocultural, political, and scientific importance of the IGY. More broadly, it contributes to a multisensory history (and geography) of science. (shrink)

Women educators played an essential role in transforming public museums that had been focused on collections and research into effective educational and informational sites that engaged broad publics. Three significant innovators were Delia Griffin of St. Johnsbury Museum in Vermont who emphasized hands-on learning, Anna Billings Gallup who shaped a distinctive model museum for children in Brooklyn and Laura Bragg of the Charleston Museum who established strong collaboration with the local public schools. Joining museum curatorial staffs and professional associations that (...) were largely male, these women educators and their peers typically provided pedagogical insights and teaching skills that enabled them to work effectively with school systems, teachers, pupils and parents. Genuinely interested in natural science, they shaped careers which included opportunities to engage with science, provided a considerable degree of autonomy and enabled them to experiment with hands-on learning. They built networks of museum educators and influenced the young American Association of Museums. Women museum educators created a bridge between semi-public natural history establishments for collection, preservation and scientific research and an active audience of teachers, pupils, visitors and patrons. Their efforts transformed museums into sites for education and broad public access to science in the early 20th century. (shrink)

This paper looks at phrenological charts as mediators of scientific knowledge to individual clients who used them as a means of self-assessment. Phrenologists propagated the idea that the human mind could be categorized into different mental faculties, with each particular faculty represented in a different area of the brain and by bumps on the head. In the US and the UK popular phrenologists examined individual clients for a fee. Drawing on a collection of phrenological charts completed for individual clients, this (...) paper shows how charts aspired to convey new ideals of selfhood by using the authority of science in tailor-made certificates, and by teaching clients some of the basic practices of that science. Hitherto historians studying phrenology have focused mainly on the attraction of the content of phrenological knowledge for the wider public, but in this paper I show how the charts enabled clients to participate actively in creating knowledge of their own bodies and selves. (shrink)