Abstracts of the History of Science Society 2004 Austin Meeting 18 ...

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 3:30 - 5:30 PM - Texas Ballroom VI
Great Expectations: The Intellectual Context for State Geological and Natural History Surveys in Antebellum America
By 1860, 30 of the 33 states in the Union had established geological surveys. In order to understand why so many states regarded inventories
of their flora, fauna, and minerals as a necessary government function we need to remember that antebellum Americans believed
that they lived first, in a world designed and created by a benevolent deity and second, in a nation uniquely favored by that God. Survey
supporters argued, logically in this context, that since God wished the United States to prosper and expand, He ensured that the
resources that Americans would need were placed where they would be needed. It was thus incumbent on each state to identify the
resources that would set it on its unique path to preordained prosperity. This paper explores the internal logic of this belief system and
explains how it led to the establishment of the state surveys. It also shows how this activity was given added impetus by other contemporaneous
movements—especially the annexation of Indian lands. Opponents of Indian territorial sovereignty argued that they were
morally justified in taking the land because Indians were not using it as God intended. Surveys would ensure that white Americans fully
(and in this context) morally exploited their divinely designed environment.
Lynn Gorchov, Oberlin College (lynn.gorchov@oberlin.edu)
Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Hill Country C
Dismissing the Experts: The 1950 Senate Sex Perversion Hearings
While most historians have characterized the 1950s as a period when social scientists and psychiatrists were ascendant in American culture,
the 1950 U.S. Senate hearings on “The Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government” demonstrate the
relative ineffectuality of social scientific and psychiatric expertise in influencing federal policy on sexuality. My paper shows how testimony
by intelligence officials and police vice squad detectives, not the recently published findings of Alfred Kinsey or the testimony of
psychiatrists, led the federal government to ban homosexuals from Civil Service employment.
Michael D. Gordin, Princeton University (mgordin@princeton.edu)
Friday, 19-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Hill Country A
The Weekday Chemist: Music, Science, Training, and Aleksandr Borodin
Ever since the days of George Sarton, Aleksandr Borodin (1833-1887) has been elusive prey for historians of science. Educated at the
Medico-Surgical Academy in St. Petersburg as a physician and then sent abroad to Heidelberg for postdoctoral work in chemistry, he
was employed from his return in 1862 until his death at his alma mater as professor of organic chemistry. His initially promising experimental
researches soon dribbled to next to nothing by the early 1870s, and aside from some brief and not very heated (by Russian standards)
priority altercations with August Kekulé and Adolphe Wurtz, he leaves a small but significant mark on the history of Russian
chemistry. Yet there is more secondary literature on Aleksandr Borodin than on almost any other Imperial Russian chemist. For aside
from his organic chemistry, Borodin also spent his time composing music, much of it quite famous (the opera “Prince Igor,” the symphonic
poem “The Steppes of Central Asia,” his Second Symphony, and his Second String Quartet being the most prominent). But
even here his productivity was low and there are roughly as many musical compositions to rival his meager number of chemical works.
Borodin has attracted so much attention because he represents the “holy grail” of a scientist who transcended C. P. Snow’s “two cultures,”
emerging in the end as one of the most famous Russian composers of any period. Much of the voluminous literature on
Borodin — dating from some highly influential obituaries — focuses on Borodin as plagued by a problem of “dual vocation”: he was
either “truly” a musician distracted by chemistry, or “truly” a chemist distracted by music. Drawing upon Borodin’s extensive and largely
underutilized correspondence, this paper argues that the formulation of “dual vocation” does not capture the parallels and anti-parallels
between Borodin’s music and his science. Instead of essentializing a concept of “career,” the crux of the connection between
music and science for Borodin centered on the issue of how to appropriately “train” specialists for a modernizing Russia.
Pamela Gossin, University of Texas, Dallas (psgossin@utdallas.edu)
Friday, 19-Nov-04, 3:30 - 5:30 PM - Hill Country B
Literary History of Astronomy: Thomas Hardy’s Personal Construct Cosmology
Interdisciplinary scholars such as Kathyrn Neeley have identified and described the multifarious formal and generic categories in which
the historiography of science participates, among them: comprehensive history, monumental encyclopedic history, progress narratives,
representative history, dramatic history, biographical and intellectual history. Such concerns, regrettably, rarely attract the direct focus
of their primary authors’ attentions. Whether standing upon the hefty shoulders of traditionally formulated history of science or
responding (consciously or subconsciously) to the internalized conventions and rhetorical structures of “Isis” or JHA style, today’s professional
historians of science, in general, and historians of astronomy, in particular, know their historiography when they see it. In nineteenth-century
Britain, the formal expectations for histories of astronomy and cosmology were still in the process of being constructed
and drew upon a wide variety of discursive models, including: spoken eulogies, memorials in poetry and prose, “great men of science”
hagiographies, triumphant histories of the empire, academic and popular lectures, critical essays, verse medleys, drama, and the
historical, realist and naturalist novel. Read individually and collectively, Thomas Hardy’s novels synthesize the technical content, rhetoric,
themes, and tropes he found in natural histories, popularizations of astronomy and other proto-histories of science, with the style
and content of early works of anthropology, archaeology, comparative mythology, and classical and contemporary literary texts. From