Scientific History

Experiments in History and Politics from the Bolshevik Revolution to the End of the Cold War

Scientific History
Elena Aronova
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NZ$ 85.99
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Hardback
h229 x 152mm - 256pg
2 Apr 2021 US
International import eta 10-30 days
9780226761381
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Increasingly, scholars in the humanities are calling for a reengagement with the natural sciences. Taking their cues from recent breakthroughs in genetics and the neurosciences, advocates of "big history" are reassessing long-held assumptions about the very definition of history, its methods, and its evidentiary base. In Scientific History, Elena Aronova maps out historians' continuous engagement with the methods, tools, values, and scale of the natural sciences by examining several waves of their experimentation that surged highest at perceived times of trouble, from the crisis-ridden decades of the early twentieth century to the ruptures of the Cold War. The book explores the intertwined trajectories of six intellectuals and the larger programs they set in motion: Henri Berr (1863-1954), Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938), Lucien Febvre (1878-1956), Nikolai Vavilov (1887-1943), Julian Huxley (1887-1975), and John Desmond Bernal (1901-1971). Though they held different political views, spoke different languages, and pursued different goals, these thinkers are representative of a larger motley crew who joined the techniques, approaches, and values of science with the writing of history, and who created powerful institutions and networks to support their projects. In tracing these submerged stories, Aronova reveals encounters that profoundly shaped our knowledge of the past, reminding us that it is often the forgotten parts of history that are the most revealing.
"With extensive source material and broad geographical range, Aronova gives us a tight and interwoven sense of trajectories of past big historical and big data ambitions and practices, relating these to shifting cultural and political contexts and observing the striking historical ironies these trajectories reveal. The book is significant in canvassing so much diverse material so efficiently and expertly, uncovering unexpected and disregarded historical connections while presenting the material engagingly and accessibly. It is a satisfying, impressive piece of scholarship that provides an explicit, extended, transnational historicization of big history. " -- Nasser Zakariya, author of A Final Story: Science, Myth, and Beginnings "Where do today' s dreams of writing history scientifically come from? Not from David Christian and Bill Gates, Anthropocene scholars, apostles of digital humanities, apologists for big data, amateur neuroscientists, or latterday cliometricians. Aronova provides a deeper genealogy of today' s data-driven obsessions, rooted instead in twentieth-century Russian ambitions for a scientific Marxism. Using ' Russia-as-method' to examine Soviet visions of history as a materialist science, Aronova' s sparklingly subversive narrative excavates foundational fights over how to write the history of science, how to practice the science of history, and how to tell the story of mankind. A work of wit, grace, and profundity. " -- James Delbourgo, James Westfall Thompson Distinguished Professor of History, Rutgers University "A captivating tale of Clio becoming a scientist! Animated by a commanding multinational cast of characters, Scientific History offers the first broad-ranging analysis of why and how the methods, approaches, values, and frameworks advanced within the natural sciences-ranging from biogeography to mathematics to genetics-became part of historians' armamentarium and profoundly influenced twentieth-century historical thought and practice. This engaging account ventures with enviable ease from the editorial offices of the Annales to the sessions of international history congresses, through the corridors of UNESCO to computer rooms at the ' scientific information' institutes in Philadelphia and Moscow. Aronova uncovers the forgotten and sometimes deliberately obscured but deep and thoroughly transnational roots of present-day historians' fascination with ' big data,' quantification, and ' big history. ' Meticulously researched and refreshingly free from Cold War-era polarizing biases, this book is a must read for anyone interested in history, science, and their intricate connections. " -- Nikolai Krementsov, author of Revolutionary Experiments: The Quest for Immortality in Bolshevik Science and Fiction
Elena Aronova is assistant professor of the history of science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the coeditor of Osiris, Volume 32: Data Histories and Science Studies during the Cold War and Beyond: Paradigms Defected.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9780226761381
Published: 2 Apr 2021
Published In: United States
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Format: Hardback
Height: 229mm
Width: 152mm
Spine: 25mm
Pages: 256

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