ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

What Is the History of Science? Part 1

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

The discipline of the history of science arose during the twentieth century, concentrated in Europe and the United States, though not exclusively so. In the early part of the century before it became institutionalized and professionalized, it coalesced among scholars trained in a variety of fields, primarily history, philosophy, the sciences, and medicine. After World War II, the field took off. History of science, technology, and medicine, became part of a larger development of science studies that included sociologists, philosophers, and other humanists and social scientists. Over the last seventy years, science studies has blossomed into a complex and vibrant academic area. The goal of this two-part symposium is to bring scholars from different countries together to help us understand more about how the history of science emerged and developed over the last century and put it into the context of the larger institutional history of knowledge.
The papers in the symposium explore the history of the history of science from different perspectives and with different scopes. We have papers that deal primarily with important individuals (in the Czechoslovak case) to those that explore broader institutional histories (in France, the US and Canada, Britain, and the Baltics) to an analysis of a survey of early career scholars today. The methodologies differ as well, from biographical studies, to institutional history, to intellectually focused histories, to data analytics. The papers explore different institutions: universities, academic societies, publishers, libraries, and archives. They show how history of science grew within free societies and authoritarian regimes alike. Together, the symposium papers draw a big picture of an active discipline emerging from within the academy at a time when science and technology became keys to progress in the modern world.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Francesco Luzzini, University of Eastern Piedmont

Individual Presentations

• The Importance of Passion: Quido Vetter and his role in cultivating histories of mathematics and the exact sciences - Helena Durnová, Masaryk University

• Making Technology an Intellectual Matter: History of Technology in France and its International Connections, 1900–1945 - Marcos Camolezi

• A Historiography in Flux: History of Science in the Baltic States - Birute Railiene, Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences

Session Organizer

• Stephen P Weldon, University of Oklahoma