Andreas W. Daum

Varieties of Popular Science and the Transformations of Public Knowledge: Some Historical Reflections

This essay suggests that we should understand the varieties of “popular science” as part of a larger phenomenon: the changing set of processes, practices, and actors that generate and transform public knowledge across time, space, and cultures. With such a reconceptualization we can both de‐essentialize and historicize the idea of “popularization,” free it from normative notions, and move beyond existing imbalances in scholarship. The history of public knowledge might thus find a central place in many fundamental narratives of the modern world. More specifically, the essay proposes that we pay more attention to forms of knowledge outside the realm of “science,” embrace the richness, traffic, and transfer of public knowledge on a transnational scale as well as in comparative perspective, and rethink conventional forms of periodization.

Science, Politics, and Religion: Humboldtian Thinking and the Transformations of Civil Society in Germany, 1830-1870

Between 1830 and 1870 the infrastructure of civil society in Germany expanded significantly. In spite of the failure of the 1848 revolution, the culture of the Bürgertum, the middle classes, began to flourish through associations, educational efforts, and diverse media and institutions of public life. The study of natural history and the new natural sciences became an integral part of this seminal process. This essay examines the development of civil society through the interplay of science, religion, and politics, which is paradigmatically embodied in the biography of Emil Adolf Rossmässler. As a science teacher, free-religious activist, and democratic politician, Rossmässler became one of Germanys preeminent advocates of science as a civil practice, though one who acted outside university science and the mainstream of academia. Rossmässler and many of his peers understood the study of nature as a democratic exercise and sought to integrate the natural sciences into the German concept of education (Bildung). Instead of associating themselves with the philosophical materialism of the time, however, they drew heavily on the thinking of Alexander von Humboldt and prolonged a reconciliatory understanding of nature into the public sphere. A look at their efforts reveals the richness and diversity of a civil culture of nature studies outside the realm of state-supported science and university research.

Nature's Interpreter: The Life and Times of Alexander von Humboldt

obvious gaps in the military history literature that is cited and which might well have benefited the study, for example John Cookson’s excellent The British Armed Nation, 1793 1815, Oxford: Clarendon, 1997 or Ian Robertson’s A Commanding Presence, Wellington in the Peninsula 1808-1814, Spellmount, 2008. At times the author appears to be straining at the bit to break free from the artificial boundaries of medical history into a wider discussion of medicine in the political economy of the early nineteenth century. This is a fruitful line of thought that connects with the Benthamite utilitarianism of the period.

A Review of “Kennedy's Kitchen Cabinet and the Pursuit of Peace: The Shaping of American Foreign Policy, 1961–1963”

Foley focuses primarily on relations between African Americans and Mexican Americans in Texas. He begins with a discussion of the Good Neighbor Policy, which was intended by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to foster cooperation between the United States and Latin America. Foley argues that the Good Neighbor Policy linked the demand for civil rights with U.S. foreign policy, but African-American and Mexican-American activists did not use it as effectively as they would later use the rhetoric of the Cold War in demanding equality. For example, NAACP president Walter White overlooked discrimination against Latinos in the United States when he claimed that relations with Latin America would be strained because of discrimination against African Americans. Latin American countries, with their own complex race relations, therefore disproved White’s claims by supporting the United States in spite of its history of racism. Of all the Latin American countries, only Mexico protested discrimination against Latinos in the United States by not allowing Texas to receive guest agricultural workers through the Bracero Program, but it did not address the treatment of African Americans. Foley then examines the actions of the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), which was established by Executive Order 8802 to end discrimination in the defense industry. Although Mexican Americans faced discrimination in both hiring and union membership in Texas and elsewhere in the Southwest, they were not well organized, leaving FEPC claims to be dominated by African Americans. The FEPC, however, was largely ineffective in Texas because it bowed to pressures from segregationist business owners and politicians. Foley explains, “Despite its long border with Mexico, Texas was still very much a Southern state on the western border of the Deep South” (68). The intractable system of Jim Crow caused middle-class Mexican Americans to protest segregation on the grounds that they were in fact white, a strategy that they repeated in their fight for educational equality. Because Mexican Americans essentially condoned the segregation of African Americans, the NAACP legal team did not work with Mexican-American organizations such as the League of Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the G.I. Forum—even though the decision in Mendez v. Westminster, which prohibited the segregation of Mexican American students, served as a precedent for Brown v. Board of Education. This book is comprised of three lectures that Foley gave at Harvard University in 2008 through the Nathan I. Huggins Lectures Series, cosponsored by the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute and Harvard University Press. Much of this work reiterates information found in Foley’s earlier essays, particularly those published in Beyond Black and White: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the U.S. South and Southwest (Texas A&M University Press, 2003) and Not Just Black and White: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States (Russell Sage Foundation, 2005). Although the format of the lectures prevents a fuller discussion of relations between African Americans and Mexican Americans, this volume provides a useful introduction to the subject.