Results for History of Science

Information Overload: Historians’ Edition

September 29, 2013
Jonathan Rees

Norge Refrigerator advertisement, 1953.
So I have a new book out.  It’s on the history of the American ice and refrigeration industries and the research and writing only took me thirteen years. Why would anybody work on any subject that long?  Well, to be fair, I have published three other books over that same time.  Still, I developed a few serious problems along the way that really slowed the entire writing process down to a crawl.

The first problem was picking the right level of focus for my work.  The very first documents I looked at were ice and refrigeration industry trade journals.  These are giant periodicals, available bound together in only the largest libraries, and written primarily for the refrigerating engineers who used to make what is now a mostly forgotten industry function.   Being something of a perfectionist, I was determined to understand everything they understood, from how ammonia compression refrigeration works to what the heck “raw water ice” was.  As I no longer live near any of the largest libraries in America, getting time and resources to do this research, let alone understand what I was reading, took an awful lot of time.

The second problem I faced was figuring out how to turn the story of these industries into a coherent narrative.  Biographers have the luxury of beginning at birth and ending with death, or maybe their subject’s legacy.  Describing the history of an entire industry, as well as all of its related industries, proved much tougher.  My solution was to adopt a refrigerating engineering conceit known as a cold chain, which is basically another way of saying that I started at the point of production and ended at the point of consumption.  I didn’t figure that out until 2006.

So what explains the extra seven years?  Part of it was information overload.  Sometime around the time I figured out how to organize everything, Google Books went from being a pet project to a research revolution.  All of a sudden, it was like being back at the University of Wisconsin again.  I could get any obscure tome I wanted faster than it used to take to walk to campus and hit the fourth floor of the Engineering Library for my precious trade journals.  With so much more to see, I felt obliged to read everything I could get my hands on.  I know it sounds like I’m whining, but the final book really is much better because of that effort.

The main reason for that was a choice I made in 2009.  I decided to make the book global in scope.  Yes, it’s called Refrigeration Nation (which is a reference to the United States) but to prove that America has always been refrigeration crazy I had to at least make a pass at what was going on throughout the world, which I did mostly (but not exclusively) through American sources.  That took more time still because even though I had more information at that point than I knew what to do with, I hadn’t been collecting the foreign evidence I needed to adopt this approach until very late in the game.

Research is fun.  That’s why I don’t regret a moment I’ve spent working on this thing.  However, I’m also convinced I’ll never write another book this same way again.  In an age when nearly every published source is both searchable and right
there at your fingertips, there is much less incentive to read everything available because whatever breadth of knowledge you develop will be far less impressive than it once was.  While some people might think this development a sad one, I look forward to reading history books that devote more time to organization, analysis and just plain old good writing.

Whether I just managed to produce such an animal is up to my readers to decide. 

Jonathan Rees is Professor of History at Colorado State University – Pueblo.  Refrigeration Nation:  a History of Ice, Appliances and Enterprise is making its way to distributors now.  If you can’t buy one immediately at your local bookseller or favorite online book store, it will be available very, very soon.
Information Overload: Historians’ Edition Information Overload: Historians’ Edition Reviewed by Joseph Landis on September 29, 2013 Rating: 5

Science, Religion, and the Modern West: The April Issue of Historically Speaking

April 28, 2013
Randall Stephens

In the coming week the April 2013 issue of Historically Speaking will be posted to the Project Muse site.  Subscribers can expect it soon in mailboxes.  The issue includes essays on environmental history, ancient religion, teaching, and Harry Truman.It also features interviews with Matthew Bowman on Mormonism in American history, John R. Gillis on seacoasts in history, and turning points of World War I with Ian F.W. Beckett. 

In addition the April issue includes a lively forum on "Scientific Culture in the Modern Era" with intellectual historian Stephen Gaukroger (University of Sydney).  "One of the most distinctive features of Western culture since the 17th century is the gradual assimilation of all cognitive values to scientific ones," writes Gaukroger in his lead essay. "A particular image of the role and aims of scientific understanding is tied up in a very fundamental way with the self-image of Western modernity. One striking illustration of this is the way that the West’s sense of what its superiority consisted of shifted seamlessly in the early decades of the 19th century from religion to science. From that time on, but particularly in the second half of the 20th century, this self-understanding has been exported as an essential ingredient in the process of modernization."

With this major shift in Western thought, soon enough religion came under new scrutiny. Using the perspectives of historical-critical thinking and later developments in science, researchers from the late-19th century forward began to reinterpret the sacred texts of the West. In an essay on "The Dead Sea Scrolls," also in the April issue, John J. Collins  (Yale Divinity School) examines changing perspectives and decades of wrangling about the meaning and context of the scrolls.  ""No archaeological discovery of the 20th century has aroused more interest than the Dead Sea Scrolls," Collins observes.

Below are two sections from Collins' fascinating piece on the arguments and counterarguments about the scrolls:

[American biblical scholar and historian] Robert Eisenman argued that the Scrolls, rather than the Gospels, were the primary documents of early Christianity, which was a hate-filled, xenophobic movement. Australian scholar Barbara Thiering claimed that Jesus was the figure called “the Wicked Priest” in the Scrolls. Two British writers, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, published a book called The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception in 1991, in which they argued that Allegro and Eisenman were right, but that the truth was suppressed by the priests on the editorial team at the behest of the Vatican. Most scholars dismiss all of this as nonsense, but it always finds a ready market in the press. Even now, after most of the debates have subsided, laypeople ask earnestly whether Jesus or John the Baptist were Essenes. There is no reason to think that they were.
Text from The Great Isaiah Scroll,
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

 
In fact, the relevance of the Scrolls to early Christianity is complex. They fill out many details about the world in which Christianity was born. The followers of Jesus, like the Essenes, believed that history would soon come to an end, that a savior figure would come from heaven, and that messiahs would restore the right order on Earth. Their idea of what constituted the right order, however, was very different from that of the Essenes. Jesus and his followers did not place great emphasis on purity, and were more concerned about what came out of a person’s mouth than with what went in. The sect known from the Scrolls, in contrast, was obsessed with purity, and separated themselves from their fellow Jews to avoid defilement.

The Arab-Israeli war of 1967 was a turning point in the history of scholarship on the Scrolls. Both the site of Qumran and the Rockefeller Museum where most of the Scrolls were kept came under Israeli
An aerial view of the ruins of Qumran. From the
BBC documentary Traders of the Dead Sea Scrolls (1998).
control. The Israelis did not immediately interfere in the publication process. The old editorial team remained in place for more than twenty years. But Yigael Yadin, who was both a general in the army and a distinguished scholar, took some soldiers and paid a visit to Kando, the cobbler in Bethlehem who was the middleman to whom the Bedouin brought the Scrolls. After some “unpleasant” negotiations, Yadin took possession of a long document called the Temple Scroll, which Kando had hidden in a shoe box under the floor boards. Kando later received a payment from the Israelis by way of settlement. . . .

The debates about the Scrolls have often been acrimonious. Norman Golb, long-time professor at the University of Chicago, has persistently disputed the Essene attribution, and has complained vociferously whenever his position is not acknowledged. His son Rafael, a real-estate lawyer in New York, was convicted in the State Supreme Court in November 2009 of impersonating a prominent Scrolls scholar, Lawrence Schiffman, who disagrees with his father, and pretending to confess to plagiarism in Schiffman’s name, apparently in the hope of incriminating him. Elisha Qimron, the scholar who helped publish 4QMMT, sued a magazine publisher, Herschel Shanks, for unauthorized publication of the reconstructed text and translation. Shanks was convicted by an Israeli court and had to pay damages. Exchanges about the Scrolls have often been more heated than is usual in the normally peaceful world of biblical scholarship.

It is somewhat difficult to say why this is so. For scholars like Golb, the Jewish character of the Scrolls seems to be at stake. The implication is that if they are attributed to a marginal sect, the Essenes, they are not “really Jewish” and are more akin to Christianity. For a long time Christian scholars had seemed to appropriate the Scrolls and set them against rabbinic Judaism. Certainly, some of the claims about the relevance of the Scrolls for early Christianity have been wildly exaggerated. . . .

The full essay will soon be posted at Project Muse. Subscribe to Historically Speaking here.
Science, Religion, and the Modern West: The April Issue of Historically Speaking Science, Religion, and the Modern West: The April Issue of Historically Speaking Reviewed by Joseph Landis on April 28, 2013 Rating: 5

What Has Changed, and What Hasn’t?

March 17, 2013
Dan Allosso

Working on the final revisions of An Infidel Body-Snatcher and the Fruits of His Philosophy, I’ve found myself asking, “Okay, so what’s different?” As historians, we’re always making comparisons between the past and the present, even if we disagree about the ways these comparisons ought to be used. I’m writing popular history, so my approach has been that both the differences and the similarities between my subjects in their world, and my readers in ours, should be relevant and meaningful.

First, the differences. Day to day life is so much easier now, that it’s hard for readers to appreciate the sheer work that went into staying alive from year to year in the early 19th century. Ironically, I think this can make it easier for modern readers to identify with elite characters like Thomas Jefferson (who had slaves and employees to do the day to day work of basic survival for him, as we now have technology), than with the 99%. 

And of course, the body-snatching. Medical students no longer have to sneak into rural cemeteries and steal corpses in the dead of night, in order to learn anatomy. Doctors know much more now—they have a germ theory and antibiotics to prevent most of the diseases physicians like Charles Knowlton spent his time battling. Transportation and communication seem to allow us a much wider scope of action. Knowlton never went more than about 200 miles from his birthplace in Templeton, Massachusetts—but in spite of that restriction, his Fruits of Philosophy influenced the birthrate not only in the U.S., but throughout the British Empire. 

And people generally don’t tell young men and women that exploring their sexuality will kill them or damn them. Oh, wait. Yeah, sometimes they do. Today, 182 years after Knowlton published Fruits of Philosophy, claiming that men and women had the right and responsibility to limit the number of children they bore to a number that was safe for them and reasonable for their families, many people are still being taught this is not so. 

I found myself wondering, as I wrote the story of Knowlton and his friends (Frances Wright, Robert Dale Owen, Abner Kneeland) fighting to spread the word of family planning, whether people would just say, “Yeah, duh.” But then I’d read a headline about a Planned Parenthood office being picketed, about religious leaders claiming condoms are evil and people who have unauthorized sex should be punished. I’d remember that I’ve met people who don’t practice family planning because they’ve been taught it’s not their place to interfere with divine will.

Population is still a problem. The unequal division of wealth and even basic resources is still a problem. Religion is still central to social organization.

Hopefully, my story about one of the first people in American history to advocate family planning will shed some light on the issue today. Knowlton talked about women’s health, women’s rights— even women’s sexuality—in ways that were ahead of his time. Have we caught up with him yet? We take birth control for granted—those of us who accept it. Do we stop to wonder how it ever came to exist, at a time when nearly everybody followed religious authorities who told them it was wrong? What type of person would be willing to step outside the box that far and propose reproductive choice in the early 1800s? What happened when they did? As a historian, I think those are interesting questions. But I don’t think I’d have written the book if I thought I was just cataloguing interesting facts about the past.
What Has Changed, and What Hasn’t? What Has Changed, and What Hasn’t? Reviewed by Joseph Landis on March 17, 2013 Rating: 5
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