2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
and 19th century British naturalists. The population examined here is relatively
small. My aim in studying this group is twofold. First, to understand factors
that empowered or inhibited women’s participation in research at the Institute
by looking at the educational backgrounds of women scientists, the
circumstances that brought them to the Institute, and how their careers
developed at Rockefeller and later. Second, to bring to light individuals or
groups whose careers deserve more detailed inquiry through traditional
biographical methods.
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David␣ N. Harley University of Notre Dame
“The Scientific Revolution”: Boxing for England?
The concept of “the Scientific Revolution” has been criticized from a variety
of viewpoints, for distorting our understanding of the history of natural
inquiries. It has been observed that it remains useful for didactic purposes,
although the items that are now placed into this empty box are quite different
from the ones formerly thought crucial. There remains, however, one
characteristic of the box that seems so natural that it is virtually unobserved,
its intrinsic Englishness. The narratives that relate to this category always
seem to end in the England of the early Royal Society, whether they start with
Copernicus, Vesalius and Paracelsus or with Galileo and Mersenne. There are
several related reasons for this phenomenon. The concept is mainly deployed
by English-speaking historians. The concept was developed in post-war
Cambridge. The concept was designed as a weapon for post-war reconstruction
and the Cold War, showing that the modern world sprang from the England of
the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution, not the French Enlightenment,
which had led to totalitarianism. The concept was not challenged by socialist
historians, who wanted to show that the modern world sprang from the English
revolution of 1649 and accordingly emphasized economic developments,
artisans and politico-religious radicalism, with only a slight modification in
terms of location and chronology. However we rewrite our narratives to include
additional features, the very shape of the box will tend to lead us to the world
of Locke and Sydenham, Boyle and Newton, because that is the way it is
designed, just as the less anachronistic concepts of the Renaissance,
Reformation and Enlightenment focus our attention on particular countries.
Benjamin Harris University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Tabloid Psychology 1920-1940: Did Superstition Win?
This paper examines the changing nature of psychological authority in the
U.S. between the World Wars, using an important but previously unexamined
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