HISTORY, SCIENCE, POPULARIZATION AND NATIONHOOD, XIX AND XX CENTURIES: Saturday, March 17, 2012

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HISTORY, SCIENCE, POPULARIZATION AND NATIONHOOD

Introduction

Who says that history is dull?

Why is history still considered boring?

This is a blog that denies those well known prejudices. Everything depends on the topics studied and non conservative methodology.

Why not write the history of sexuality as Jacques Le Goff did? Why do not analyze printers and publications as Peter Burke did? Why not teach that science has sex as Londa Shiebinger argues? Why to still believe that men such as Galileo Galilei, Nicolás Copernico, Isaac Newton or Thyco Brahe are scientist when they were natural philosophers. They studied the lower ranks of knowledge of the university because it was not a theoretical knowledge as law and theology were during this period. It was merely practical.

Nowadays, scientists still wonder why Isaac Newton devoted so much time to alchemy. Scientist ignore that Issac Newton was a natural philosopher and in his day alchemy was a science. His famous Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica was many of his long writings about alchemy[1]. For many historians, the work of Isaac Newton represents both the crowning achievement of the Scientific Revolution and the moment at which the world, and our ways of knowing it, became recognizably “modern.” Many late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century thinkers agreed: Newton was the greatest scientific genius the world had ever seen and he had revealed the fundamental laws by which nature worked. Yet this picture needs to be qualified: first, there was much of the “ancient” about this great “modern”: Newton devoted an enormous amount of his energies to alchemy and Biblical chronology; second, his great Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy represents a contentious and unstable bringing together of mathematical and philosophical ways of knowing that were problematic in the early modern period and that, to some extent, remain so today. The reading for this section is not vast, but it is somewhat demanding. You should also review some of the earlier reading in The Scientific Revolution that deals with Newton.

Why was Laura Bassi overlooked? She is the first natural philosopher of the XVI century. She was Italian, graduated from the University of Bologna and became a professor there. She became a success and even she scared men. Scholars, nobility and elite members from all over Europe went to her public dissections. This became a French-like event and performance.

In this blog you will read articles about the popularization of science, its concepts, and an example of its popularization in Great Britain and France.

You will read writings about intellectual history of science. The interesting one is the one about Thomas Kuhn because it deals with the scientific revolution. The topic was taken up mainly by social scientists rather than by both basic and practical scientists. The scientific revolution as an analytical framework explains political or economical changes.

There is writing about the first Argentine female physicians circa xix and xx centuries.

You can also find a short essay about the Argentine coup d’état and politics of the decade of 1930.

[1] Its English transcription is Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.

Popularization of Science: popular science, gender and nationhood. Science has different goals. Science can be used for political means. On the hand, I examine the concepts of popular science, it popularization in different historical contexts and its gender approach. In this blog, on the other hand, I study an English and a French case studies. Therefore, I focus on the popularization of English in the 19th century. On the other hand, I convey how the ideas of French science followers shaped an idea of French nationhood at the end of the XIXth century. During that period there were competing ideas of nationhood and there was one which highlighted the importance of science for the building of Frenchness. This work adds bibliography.

Department of History

Georgetown University

HISTORY, SCIENCE, POPULARIZATION AND NATIONHOOD, XIX AND XX CENTURIES

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Saturday, March 17, 2012

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