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Science and the Culture of American Communities: The Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Thomas Bender
Thomas Bender*
Affiliation:
New York University
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Abstract

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Type
Essay Review II
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , Spring 1976 , pp. 63 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 by New York University

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References

Notes

1. Science has fared substantially better in studies of colonial education. See Cremin, Lawrence, American Education: The Colonial Experience (New York, 1970).Google Scholar

2. On their pervasiveness in the nineteenth century, see Bates, Ralph S., Scientific Societies in the United States (Cambridge, 1965). Their role in the eighteenth century is assessed in Hindle, Brooke, The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735–1789 (Chapel Hill, 1956); and Stearns, Raymond P., Science in the British Colonies of America (Urbana, 1970), pp. 506–513. For an example of how one might study the role of one of these nineteenth-century urban educational institutions in the transmission of scientific ideas, see Rossiter, Margaret W., “Benjamin Silliman and the Lowell Institute: The Popularization of Science in Nineteenth Century America,” New England Quarterly, 44 (December, 1971): 602–626.Google Scholar

3. Dupree, A. Hunter, Asa Gray (Cambridge, 1959); and Lurie, Edward, Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science (Chicago, 1960). On moral philosophers, see Smith, Wilson, Professors and Public Ethics: Studies of Northern Moral Philosophers before the Civil War (Ithaca, 1956); Howe, Daniel Walker, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805–1861 (Cambridge, 1970); and Meyer, Donald H., The Instructed Conscience: The Shaping of the American National Ethic (Philadelphia, 1972). A beginning has been made, however, in Guralnick, Stanley M., “Science and the American College, 1828–1860” (unpub. Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1969).Google Scholar

4. Allan Stanley Horlick's study of New York city's mercantile elite, which includes a discussion of the uses of phrenology for that social group, provides an example of what can be done in this area. See his Country Boys and Merchant Princes: The Social Control of Young Men in New York (Lewisburg, Pa., 1975), chap. 8. Although it deals with an English case, Arnold Thackray's “Natural Knowledge in Cultural Context: The Manchester Model,” American Historical Review, 79 (1974): 672–709, provides a stimulating example.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. Reingold, Nathan, ed. The Papers of Joseph Henry, Vol. I (Washington, D.C., 1972), pp. xxiii, xix.Google Scholar

6. Incidentally, such specific explorations of urban contexts will be more valuable than those purely quantitative studies that find urban areas, using simple census definitions, producing the bulk of nineteenth-century American scientists. See Tobey, Ronald C., “How Urbane is the Urbanite? An Historical Model of the Urban Hierarchy and the Social Motivation of Service Classes,” Historical Methods Newsletter, 7 (1974): 259.Google Scholar

7. Shapiro, Henry D. and Miller, Zane L., eds. Physician to the West: Selected Writings of Daniel Drake on Science & Society (Lexington, 1970), p. 324.Google Scholar

8. See, for example, Wade, Richard, The Urban Frontier (Chicago, 1964).Google Scholar

9. Twenty-five years ago Donald Fleming wrote a brief (and not entirely successful) study that he presented as a model for further studies of the relationship of science and local communities, but the study seems to have been forgotten rather than built upon. See Fleming, Donald, Science and Technology in Providence, 1760–1914: An Essay in the History of Brown University in the Metropolitan Community (Providence, 1952).Google Scholar

10. Shryock, Richard, “American Indifference to Basic Science During the Nineteenth Century,” Archives Internationales d'Histoire des Sciences, No. 5 (1948): 50–65.Google Scholar

11. See Reingold, Nathan, “American Indifference to Basic Research: A Reappraisal,” in Daniels, George H., ed. Nineteenth-Century American Science (Evanston, 1972): pp. 38–62.Google Scholar

12. Put differently, most history of American science reveals a commitment, not always articulated, to the developmental philosophy of science that is best ex-emplified in Gillispie, Charles C., The Edge of Objectivity (Princeton, 1960) rather than the more relativistic approach of Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962).Google Scholar

13. This ahistorical approach to higher education is now being challenged. The History of Education Quarterly recently devoted a whole issue to a critical reappraisal of the history of the liberal arts college. Two articles from that issue are directly relevant to this point: Axtell, James, “The Death of the Liberal Arts College,” History of Education Quarterly, 11 (1971): 339–52; and Hawkins, Hugh, “The University-Builders Observe the Colleges,” ibid.: 353–62: See also Smith, Wilson, “Apologia pro Alma Matre: The College as Community in Ante-Bellum America,” in Elkins, Stanley and McKitrick, Eric, eds. The Hofstadter Aegis (New York, 1974), pp. 125–83; Guralnick, Stanley M., “Sources of Misconception on the Role of Science in the Nineteenth-Century American College,” Isis, 65 (1974): 352–66; and Sloan, Douglas, “Harmony, Chaos, and Consensus: The American College Curriculum,” Teacher's College Record, 73 (1971): 221–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. This is suggested by Reingold, , “American Indifference to Basic Research,” p. 39.Google Scholar

15. Current skepticism about science may have just now made this possible. I am certain that my interest in re-examining the community-oriented science that was destroyed by professionalism proceeds at least in part from a concern about the place and function of “science” in modern American society. On this point I think it is significant that the reappraisals of the old time college by Sloan and Smith, cited above, both begin with a discussion of the current problems of higher education.Google Scholar

16. Kuhn, , The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. While Kuhn's notion of “paradigms” has become well known, even faddish, among historians, his second idea, which I want to stress here, has been much less remarked upon. For a fuller discussion of Kuhn's ideas and their relationship to historical scholarship, see King, M. D., “Reason, Tradition, and the Progressiveness of Science,” History and Theory, 10 (1971): 3–32; and Hollinger, David A., “T. S. Kuhn's Theory of Science and Its Implications for History,” American Historical Review, 78 (1973): 376–93.Google Scholar

17. Rosenberg, Charles, “On Writing the History of American Science,” in Bass, Herbert J., ed. The State of American History (Chicago, 1970), p. 185.Google Scholar

18. Although they are general studies, two books by Wiebe, Robert H. are relevant here: The Segmented Society (New York, 1975); and The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York, 1967).Google Scholar

19. Whitehead, Alfred North, Science and the Modern World (New York, 1948, orig. ed. 1925), pp. 91–92.Google Scholar

20. See Sloan, , “Harmony, Chaos, and Consensus,” pp. 223–27.Google Scholar

21. See Smith, , “Apologia pro Alma Matre,” pp. 131–32; Potts, David B., “American Colleges in the Nineteenth Century: From Localism to Denominationalism,” History of Education Quarterly, 11 (1971): 367–69, 371–73; and Jencks, Christopher and Riesman, David, The Academic Revolution (New York, 1968), chaps. 1, 4.Google Scholar

22. For Daniels's argument, see his American Science in the Age of Jackson (New York, 1968). On Drake's publications, see the list in Shapiro, and Miller, , eds. Physician to the West, pp. 381–419, where I count 728. Drake's teaching duties at the medical school in Louisville during the 1840s were related more to a regional identification than a professional one.Google Scholar

23. deTocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, 2 vols. (New York, 1945), II, 47; Martineau, Harriet, Retrospect of Western Travel, 2 vols. (London, 1838), II, 91; Lyell, Charles, A Second Visit to the United States of North America, 2 vols. (New York, 1849), 1, 57, 153.Google Scholar

24. Shipton, Clifford K., “The Museum of the American Antiquarian Society,” in Bell, Whitfield J. Jr., ed. A Cabinet of Curiosities (Charlottesville, 1967), pp. 36–38; Kennedy, John M., “Philanthropy and Science in New York City: The American Museum of Natural History, 1868–1968” (unpub. Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1968), p. 46.Google Scholar

25. The starting point for any consideration of the culture of American cities is Harris, Neil, “Four Stages of Cultural Growth: The American City,” in Mann, Arthur, Harris, Neil, and Warner, Sam Bass, History and the Role of the City in American Life (Indianapolis, 1972), pp. 24–49.Google Scholar

26. See Boorstin, Daniel, The Americans: The National Experience (New York, 1965), pp. 113–68.Google Scholar

27. On the “sublime” in American romantic thought generally and science in particular, see Miller, Perry, The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (New York, 1965), esp. book III.Google Scholar

28. Shapiro, and Miller, , eds., Physician to the West, pp. 146, 59: Cist, Charles, Cincinnati in 1841 (Cincinnati, 1841), pp. 129, 134.Google Scholar

29. Shapiro, and Miller, , eds. Physician to the West, p. 133.Google Scholar

30. See Tucker, Louis L., “‘Ohio Show-Shop’: The Western Museum of Cincinnati, 1820–1867,” in Bell, , ed. A Cabinet of Curiosities, pp. 73–105.Google Scholar

31. Bode, Carl, The American Lyceum (New York, 1956), pp. 92, 250.Google Scholar

32. Reingold, , ed. The Papers of Joseph Henry, p. 75. My italics.Google Scholar

33. See, for example, ibid., pp. 354–55, 407–409.Google Scholar

34. Ibid., p. 349.Google Scholar

35. Ibid., p. 435.Google Scholar

36. This point is made in more detail by Lurie, Edward, “Science in American Thought,” Cahiers d'Histoire Mondiale, 8 (1965): 656–57.Google Scholar

37. Shapiro, and Miller, , eds. Physicians to the West, pp. 170–71.Google Scholar

38. Harris, Neil, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Boston, 1973), 57, 79. This superficial empiricism is explored more systematically and with similar conclusions in Calhoun, Daniel, The Intelligence of a People (Princeton, 1973).Google Scholar

39. Harris, , Humbug, p. 65.Google Scholar

40. Reingold, , ed. The Papers of Joseph Henry, p. 409.Google Scholar

41. See Calhoun, , The Intelligence of a People.Google Scholar

42. Quoted in Daniels, , American Science in the Age of Jackson, p. 38.Google Scholar

43. For the conflict between scientists and donors at the American Museum of Natural History, see Kennedy, , “Philanthropy and Science in New York City,” pp. 4 and passim.Google Scholar

44. For an interesting and valuable consideration of the problem of community and esoteric culture in an entirely different context, see Brucker, Gene, Renaissance Florence (New York, 1969), esp. chaps. 3, 6.Google Scholar

45. On this problem, see Miller, Howard S., Dollars for Research: Science and Its Patrons in Nineteenth-Century America (Seattle, 1970); and Dupree, A. Hunter, Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities to 1940 (Cambridge, 1957).Google Scholar

46. Cohen, I. Bernard, “Some Reflections on the State of Science in America during the Nineteenth Century,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 45 (1959): 671–72. The conflicting goals for higher education during this period are surveyed by Veysey, Laurence R., The Emergence of the American University (Chicago, 1965), part I.Google Scholar

47. See Lurie, , “Science in American Thought,” p. 656; and Rossiter, , “Benjamin Silliman and the Lowell Institute,” p. 625.Google Scholar

48. In fact, the need was if anything greater. See Dupree, A. Hunter, “Public Education for Science and Techonology,” Science, 134 (September 15, 1961): 716–718.Google Scholar

49. Some of the intellectual, political, and social implications of the integration of scientists into the major institutional structures of the United States in the twentieth century are discussed by Purcell, Edward A. Jr., “Service Intellectuals and the Politics of ‘Science,’” History of Education Quarterly, 15 (Spring, 1975): 97–110.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

50. Although professional science defines what is legitimately “science” in the late twentieth century, it is important to recognize that a weakened vernacular science still survives, without prestige, in American popular culture. The key point I want to emphasize here, however, is the loss of legitimacy which forms a contrast with the mid-nineteenth century situation.Google Scholar

51. For this incident, I have relied upon the account in Miller, , Dollars for Research, pp. 39–47.Google Scholar