Past futures of the history of science. Introduction. Russia as method -- 6. The quest for scientific history. Two unity of science movements ; Positivism, history, and Henri Berr's historical synthesis ; The internationalist politics of synthesis -- 2. Scientific history and the Russian locale. Russia and the West ; Russian historiography on the world stage ; Marxism and history ; The great break ; Bukharin and the history of science ; London 1931 -- 3. Nikolai Vavilov, genogeography, and history's past future. The geographies of history and the genetic archives ; The mendeleev of biology ; Vavilov's genogeography and the Bolsheviks'geopolitics ; A "new kind of history" ; The politics of history -- 4. Julian Huxley's cold wars. Julian Huxley's two careers ; A journey to a utopian future ; The crisis in Soviet genetics and Julian Huxley's Cold Wars ; Huxley's evolutionary history -- 5. The UNESCO "History of Mankind: Cultural and Scientific Development" Project. History by committee ; Febvre's Cahiers: historical journals and the making of historical knowledge ; Cold WAr internationalism and the writing of history -- 6. Information socialism, historical informatics, and the markets. Bernal's information socialism: From London 1931 to Cold War America, via Russia ; Envisioning history as data science ; Historians and computers ; The Socialist market for a capitalist data product -- Epilogue. Past futures of the history of science.
Summary:
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 calling for a reassessment of 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 experiementation 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), 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 pojects. 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. -- From dust jacket.
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