What big questions and large‐scale narratives give coherence to the history of science? From the late 1970s onward, the field has been transformed through a stress on practice and fresh perspectives from gender studies, the sociology of knowledge, and work on a greatly expanded range of practitioners and cultures. Yet these developments, although long overdue and clearly beneficial, have been accompanied by fragmentation and loss of direction. This essay suggests that the narrative frameworks used by historians of science need to (...) come to terms with diversity by understanding science as a form of communication. The centrality of processes of movement, translation, and transmission is already emerging in studies of topics ranging from ethnographic encounters to the history of reading. Not only does this approach offer opportunities for crossing boundaries of nation, period, and discipline that are all too easily taken for granted; it also has the potential for creating a more effective dialogue with other historians and the wider public. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay suggests that we should understand the varieties of “popular science” as part of a larger phenomenon: the changing set of processes, practices, and actors that generate and transform public knowledge across time, space, and cultures. With such a reconceptualization we can both de‐essentialize and historicize the idea of “popularization,” free it from normative notions, and move beyond existing imbalances in scholarship. The history of public knowledge might thus find a central place in many fundamental narratives of the (...) modern world. More specifically, the essay proposes that we pay more attention to forms of knowledge outside the realm of “science,” embrace the richness, traffic, and transfer of public knowledge on a transnational scale as well as in comparative perspective, and rethink conventional forms of periodization. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay suggests that we should understand the varieties of “popular science” as part of a larger phenomenon: the changing set of processes, practices, and actors that generate and transform public knowledge across time, space, and cultures. With such a reconceptualization we can both de‐essentialize and historicize the idea of “popularization,” free it from normative notions, and move beyond existing imbalances in scholarship. The history of public knowledge might thus find a central place in many fundamental narratives of the (...) modern world. More specifically, the essay proposes that we pay more attention to forms of knowledge outside the realm of “science,” embrace the richness, traffic, and transfer of public knowledge on a transnational scale as well as in comparative perspective, and rethink conventional forms of periodization. (shrink)