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The Shaping of Modern American Science
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13237 |
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BOOK WORLD
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10 / 1987 |
2,423 Words |
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James R. Fleming
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THE LAUNCHING OF MODERN AMERICAN SCIENCE, 1846-1876
Robert V. Bruce
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987
362 pp.
Few scholars have explored the connections between the rise of modern science as a major force in history and the rise of modern America as a leading scientific nation. In the history of science, most cognoscenti have been Europhiles or those who make the sweeping claim that science is essentially international: There is no American science, only American scientists. Even among historians of American science, the majority hold the position that the "exciting" period came only late in the nineteenth century after recognizably contemporary patterns began to emerge. The earlier period is often dismissed out of hand as lacking in interest or importance. Some scholars even try to impose twentieth-century expectations and organizational models on the history of an earlier, "predisciplinary" era. The noteworthy literature is usually narrowly focused on biographies or case studies. What is clearly needed is a synthetic investigation of the foundations of modern American science that covers a broad range of individuals, institutions, and scientific specialties.
Boston University historian Robert Bruce closes part of this gap in the historical literature in his latest work. Between 1846 and 1876, he argues, "Americans established national patterns and institutions in science and technology that still prevail". Bruce assumes that indeed there was and is "American science," that it was shaped by the particulars of personality and national experience, and that it emerged in its peculiarly modern form in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. He tells the story of how American science was transformed from a pastime cultivated locally by amateurs to a profession organized around national and international ambitions.
During the mid-nineteenth century, American science...came to see itself as an established profession. Scientific education was lengthened and specialized by means of scientific schools, graduate education, and the modern university. These institutions in turn gave scientists a livelihood. Scientists learned to proselytize the public, and support by both private philanthropy and public agencies not only assumed a new scale but also developed new institutional patterns. Government agencies became founts of employment and scientific leadership. A national scientific society evolved to recruit manpower and public support for science, to give clearer direction and professional status to the work, to quicken communications and to grapple with the peculiarly American dilemma of intellectual elitism in a social and political democracy. Congress chartered a national academy to stimulate scientific zeal through the prospect of official honor. Thus were the blueprints of modern American science drawn and the foundations laid. (4)
Science in mid-nineteenth-century America was a field of inquiry ripe for further organization. Driven by fundamental questions - particularly geographical and geophysical ones about the continent's topography, geology, biology, magnetism, and meteorology - and funded by government sources expecting practical results, the institutional, theoretical, and observational horizons of science in America expanded dramatically throughout the century. Scientific groups in Europe such as the Royal Society of London and the French Academy had already
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