Science, American Style
"Nathan Reingold is a pioneer in history of science, continuously productive and influential. The essays in this collection represent his best work."--Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, President, History of Science Society
What is distinctive about American science?
For thirty years, Nathan Reingold has been exploring the character of science in the United States. His lively and influential essays look at the ways American science reflects our culture, history, politics, geography, and myths. He meditates on the growth of a scientific community and institutions in this country, American attitudes toward the uses of science, and the behavior of scientists and their chroniclers. Reingold covers two hundred years of American science, from the Revolution to Hollywood's view of the Bomb, from science in the Civil War to the reception of refugee scientists in World War II. Reingold's essays have played a key role in emergence of the history of American science as a major field of historical scholarship.
For this first gathering of Reingold's essays (all but one previously published), the author has added an introduction and prefaces to each essay explaining their personal and historiographic context. Essential, stimulating reading for anyone curious about the past, present, and future of science in America.
Nathan Reingold is a pioneer in history of science, continuously productive and influential. The essays in this collection represent his best work.
Definitions and speculations: the professionalization of science in America in the nineteenth century
American indifference to basic research: a reappraisal
Science in the Civil War: the permanent commission of the Navy Department
Cleveland Abbe at Pulkovo: theory and practice in the nineteenth-century physical sciences
Alexander Dallas Bache: science and technology in the American idiom
(and Arthur P. Molella) Theorists and ingenious mechanics: Joseph Henry defines science
Joseph Henry on the scientific life: an AAAS presidential address of 1850
Graduate school and doctoral degree: European models and American realities National science policy in a private foundation: the Carnegie Institution of Washington
The case of the disappearing laboratory
Refugee mathematicians in the United States of America, 1933-1941: reception and reaction
Vannevar Bush's new deal for research; or, the triumph of the old order
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer meets the atom bomb
Uniformity as hidden diversity: history of science in the United States, 1920-1940
Science, scientists, and historians of science
Through paradigm-land to a normal history of science
