ABOUT THIS BOOK

Addresses the relationships between what modern-day experts say to each other and to their constituencies

Technical Knowledge in American Culture addresses the relationships between what modern-day experts say to each other and to their constituencies and whether what they say and do relates to the larger culture, society, and era. These essays challenge the social impact model by looking at science, technology, and medicine not as social activities but as intellectual activities.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Hamilton Cravens is professor of history, Iowa State University. He is author of The Triumph of Evolution: The Nature-Nature Controversy, 1900–1941 and Before Head Start: The Iowa Station and America’s Children.

Alan I Marcus is professor of history and director of the Center for Historical Studies at Iowa State University. He is author of Agricultural Science and the Quest for Legitimacy: Farmers, Agricultural College and Experiment Stations, 1870–1890 and Technology in America: A Brief History.

David M. Katzman is professor of American Studies and of history at the University of Kansas. He is author of Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century and Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America.

REVIEWS

“This volume vigorously challenges the new social history of science, technology, and medicine. Through a remarkably cohesive series of case studies it demonstrates that underlying cultural notions in any given era shape, inform, and inspire that era’s technical knowledge and discourse. The book will appeal to established scholars and their students alike. This is revisionist history in the best sense.”
—Howard P. Segal, University of Maine
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“The editors have succeeded in producing a book that possesses both cohesiveness and coherence. The individual essays are illuminating and significant, interesting and provocative. . . . As a group they have an important message to convey that offers a counterweight to the current dominance of social history an alternate point of view that is much needed.”
—Gerald N. Grob, Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Technical Knowledge in American Culture: An Analysis

PART ONE: THE RISE OF DEMOCRATIC CULTURE, 1800-1870

I. The Ohio Mechanic's Institute: The Challenge of Incivility in the Democratic Republic

2. The American Career of Jane Marcet's Conversations on Chemistry, 1806-1853

3. From Individual Practitioner to Regular Physician: Cincinnati Medical Societies and the Problem of Definition among Mid-Nineteenth-Century Americans

PART TWO: THE AGE OF HIERARCHY, 1870-1920

4. Diagnosing Unnatural Motherhood: Nineteenth-Century Physicians and "Puerperal Insanity"

5· The Inventor of the Mustache Cup: James Emerson and Populist Technology, 1870-1900

6. Race-ism and the City: The Young Du Bois and the Role of Place in Social Theory, 1893-1901

7· The German-American Science of Racial Nutrition, 1870-1920

PART THREE: TOWARD AN INFINITY OF DIMENSIONS

8. The Case of the Manufactured Morons: Science and Social Policy in Two Eras, 1934-1966

9· Responding to the Airplane: Urban Rivalry, Metropolitan Regionalism, and Airport Development in Dallas, 1927-1965

10. Unanticipated Aftertaste: Cancer, the Role of Science, and the Question of DES Beef in Late Twentieth-Century American Culture

Afterword

Notes

Contributors

Index