Scientific Authority and Twentieth-Century America

by Walters, Ronald G.

• ISBN13: 9780801853906
• ISBN10: 0801853907
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-03-09
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr

Summary

Turn-of-the-century Americans strongly believed that science--"disinterested" and authoritative--could help them to organize society and understand the natural world. Yet today, even scientists themselves are raising disturbing questions about the nature and practice of science. In Scientific Authority and Twentieth-Century America Ronald G. Walters brings together a distinguished group of contributors to reflect, often critically, on scientific and medical claims to moral, social, and political authority. Writing from a variety of perspectives--intellectual history, social history, feminist theory, philosophy, medical history, political theory, and visual analysis--the authors demonstrate that science no longer belongs exclusively to its practitioners or to any particular discipline.

Author Biography

Ronald G. Walters is a professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of American Reformers: 1815-1860 and The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism after 1830 and editor of Primers for Prudery: Sexual Advice to Victorian America and A Black Woman's Odyssey: The Narrative of Nancy Prince.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Uncertainty, Science, and Reform in Twentieth-Century America	1	(11)
Ronald G. Walters
PART I: Voices of Authority	11	(40)
How Wide the Circle of the ``We''? American Intellectuals and the Problem of the Ethnos since World War II	13	(19)
David A. Hollinger
A Historian's View of American Social Science	32	(19)
Dorothy Ross
PART II: Medical Models	51	(66)
Crime, Commerce, and Contagionism: The Political Languages of Public Health and the Popularization of Germ Theory in the United States, 1870-1950	53	(29)
JoAnne Brown
``Just Say No'': Risk, Behavior, and Disease in Twentieth-Century America	82	(17)
Allan M. Brandt
Female Science and Medical Reform: A Path Not Taken	99	(18)
Regina Morantz-Sanchez
PART III: Selling Science	117	(66)
Plugging Past Reform: Small-Scale Farming Innovation and Big-Scale Farming Research	119	(29)
John R. Stilgoe
Corporate Science on Display	148	(35)
Roland Marchand
Michael L. Smith
PART IV: Closing the Circle	183	(22)
Why History Matters to Political Theory	185	(20)
James T. Kloppenberg
Notes	205	(56)
List of Contributors	261	(2)
Index	263