Sally G. Kohlstedt - US grants

A full understanding of the crisis in science teaching in the elementary and secondary schools of the United States requires a look at the historical background against which teaching of science in this country has developed. How were things done before? Why were the choices for presentation made? What were the goals of science teaching when it was first introduced? How has the situation changed? Professor Kohlstedt's project constitutes the first comprehensive analysis of the Nature Study program of teaching science in schools to consider its scientific outlook, its concern for social and environmental issues, the extraordinary diversity of its activities by region and the ways in which gender issues influenced the program and affected its stability. "Nature Study" was an international movement that came from Europe to the United States in the 1890's. It developed as a method to introduce children to the natural world in a systematic way. Professor Kohlstedt is examining the period from 1890 to 1930 when the Nature Study movement moved beyond the school system to extracurricular and public institutions. She is probing the deceptively simple clarity of Nature Study's basic proposition--learning from natural objects- -that was elaborated in textbooks and lesson plans variously directed at rural and urban children in both private and public schools. She is reassessing the outlook and activities of those administrators and teachers who established Nature Study as a curriculum and publicized it through lectures and publications. Based on the records of normal schools, university archives, school system records, and the papers of individual teachers and students as well as the numerous published books and articles on Nature Study, this research will document its philosophy, content, pedagogy, scientific outlook, and public connections. This study promises to be a most important contribution to our understanding of the processes of science teaching in the US.

Gender issues relate very directly to the participation of women in science and to issues concerning the nature of modern science and technology. Prominent scholars have individually investigated and analyzed both phenomena in recent years, but there have been no opportunities for those historians, philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists currently pursuing the social and humanistic studies of women and science, engineering, and mathematics to meet and discuss their theories and results. Dr. Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, a historian, and Dr. Helen Longino, a philosopher, are holding a workshop to bring together such researchers with the goal of improving the conversation, finding areas of agreement and contention, and publishing a result of their deliberations. The subsequent conference will allow other scholars an opportunity to present papers on related topics and a much larger audience to consider the issues and discuss the implications of research on "The Women and Science Question." The workshop and conference are being held May 10-13, 1995 at the University of Minnesota.

This study will bring to the fore essential questions concerning the center and periphery of science by focusing on the collaboration between the British savants and the British Admiralty in the early Victorian era. William Whewell and Sir Francis Beaufort were central in placing the empirical investigation of oceanic tides on a firm foundation. The present study will add an important and still unstudied dimension to William Whewell's achievements by analyzing his twenty-five year research project on the tides. It also will unveil Sir Francis Beaufort's role as the principal link between scientists and the British Admiralty in the early Victorian era. Support will be used to carry out research on the following unpublished manuscript sources: 1) the Whewell Papers at Trinity College, Cambridge; 2) the Francis Beaufort collection at the National Maritime Museum, and the Hydrographic Office; 3) John Lubbock's papers at the Royal Society; 4) Records of the Admiralty at the Public Records Office, London, and the National Maritime Museum; and 5) local records where a Royal Naval Dockyard operated: Bristol, Plymouth, Portsmouth, and Liverpool.

This dissertation research project will focus on the development and transformation of the American tradition of field natural history, particularly field zoology, between the middle of the nineteenth century and the early 1920's. This tradition, originated by the systematic and biogeographical work of Louis Agassiz and Spencer F. Baird, emerged in the context of federal surveys after the early 1850's. It found its institutional support in connection to the U.S. National Museum and several agencies that funded scientific research of relevance to the survey and management of natural resources: the U.S. Fish Commission, the Bureau of the Biological Survey, and several state natural history surveys established in the American Midwest. This study will argue that during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth this tradition of field zoology underwent a transformation as a result of - and in reaction to - institutional developments, epistemological challenges, and utilitarian concerns. Focusing on the interplay between biogeographical interests and utilitarian concerns, and paying attention to the institutional and generational dimensions of that interplay, the research will improve our understanding of several issues that have concerned historians of biology in America. It will balance the emphasis heretofore put by historians on the morphological tradition of post-Darwinian biology and its experimental transformation with attention to the studies of adaptation and geographical distribution during the second half of the nineteenth century. It will also complete our views of the emergence of ecology in America, showing that many animal ecologists did not merely mimic their botanical counterparts, extending experimental methodologies into field study. They borrowed from their own tradition of observational natural history, particularly from the body of information of animals' habits and life histories put together by naturalists interested in the management of natural resources.

This is a dissertation research study of science and scientific practices within and beyond late-Victorian and Edwardian country houses. Country house laboratories, observatories, botanical gardens, and museums thrived well into the last third of the nineteenth century, challenging in some ways the middle class visions for professional science put forth in mid-century by figures such as T.H. Huxley, J. Tyndall, and N. Lockyer. The production of scientific knowledge in these private contexts involved a complex network of aristocratic intellectuals, distinct country house values shaped by characteristic religious, political, and social norms, and a social process of research involving collaboration of family members, hired staff, and visiting scientific colleagues. The results of research in these sites contributed significantly to scientific knowledge whilst earning practitioners high reputations among their peers. Despite the political and social conservatism often found in these circles, gentlewomen experienced a high degree of flexibility to pursue their intellectual interests and make original contributions in science during a time when new professional norms, undervalued their participation in more public arenas. Rich collections of documents pertaining to the work and affairs of scientific aristocratic families reveal in detail the operations of these country house laboratories amidst domestic and professional norms. Several well-documented cases demonstrate how such contexts proved to be crucial both for the construction of scientific knowledge and the influence of aristocratic values on new institutions of science. Particularly influential were the scientific households managed by the Rosses, Balfours, Rayleighs, and Sidgwicks. The research funded allows the researcher to undertake a detailed analysis of these cases, as well as several others involving families in related same circles, in order to demonstrate the complicated networks of scientific practices shaped by country house norms which had significant consequences for gender roles and scientific institutional developments. This study thus reinterprets our historical understanding of the developments in late-Victorian science, about which historians have more often emphasized new university and industrial research facilities. The study will show the continuing importance of privately sponsored research well into the Edwardian period. It promises a broader impact both for the public understanding of science, as in the museums at Darwin's Down House and Lord Rosse's Birr Castle, and for a fuller understanding of the way in which the sciences-especially the physical science-have become gendered, relevant to initiatives that encourage women's successes in the sciences. Funds will allow the researcher to conduct archival research of collections still largely unexplored in England, Scotland, and Ireland.

Project Abstract
Sally Kohlstedt, University of Minnesota
The Nature Study Movement in Education, 1890-1932

In the late nineteenth century for the first time educators began to make instruction in the natural sciences an integral part of the public school curriculum down to the most elementary grades. Advocacy for and experiments with science teaching had been tried in private schools and even a few public ones, but only at the turn of the century was there a national movement to introduce the natural sciences into urban and rural publicly funded school classrooms. The most visible and widely advocated pedagogical technique was "nature study" and its proponents offered multiple justifications for introducing children to plants, insects, birds, meteorological observation, and other phenomena. This historical project provides the first extensive discussion of the nature study movement from its origins in the early 1890s through the 1920s when educational leaders called for a radically distinct pedagogical approach.

The often profoundly different geographic, social, and economic circumstances of children in urban centers, in suburban locations, in small towns, and in the rural countryside serviced by one and two room schools also meant programs differed in rationale, in quality of teacher preparation, in availability of resources for teaching, and in the interests of the children. Nonetheless, there were elements that made nature study a movement, including several prominent textbooks used for teacher training and for classrooms, a specialized educational journal, Nature-Study Review, and a membership organization of administrators and teachers in the movement. Increasing standardization in normal school training and in bureaucratic urban and even state-wide school systems made implementation possible, but it was broader commitment by local communities as well as school administrators and teachers that established nature study across the American landscape, although apparently not much in the poorer schools of the South. Nature study education framed a set of principles for learning first hand about the natural world that was extended into informal settings like the Boy and Girl Scouts, the new environmental nature centers ringing urban areas, and junior clubs within the Audubon and Wild Flower societies.

This project allows the investigator to spend a month doing the final research that extends the discussion of the movement to geographical locations that have not been fully investigated. It also supports the efforts of a graduate student to survey the nature study literature generated during this forty-year period, including materials from Germany. Historians of science have long noted the nature study movement, often mentioning it in passing and presuming that it was ephemeral or not highly relevant. The publications from this research establish its pervasiveness over several decades and its relationship to the dynamic changes in the natural sciences during this period.

This Science and Society Dissertation Improvement Grant supports a dissertation student in completing her dissertation by providing funds to travel to archives in Alaska and other U.S. locations. The dissertation explores the ways in which natural science depended on place even as it probed for global phenomena and how, in turn, place inevitably shaped the science under scrutiny. The case under study is the development of American ecology and American glaciology through scientific studies done in Glacier Bay, Alaska, between 1878 and 1959. Drawing on the methodologies of the history of science, environmental history, and geography, this dissertation demonstrates that place, defined by both the physical location and the spaces constructed by scientists and others, played an important role in shaping scientific practice and theory. In turn, scientific practice also greatly shaped the place and how the American public came to know and understand Glacier Bay. To support these arguments, this dissertation will employ a large collection of primary materials from archives located across the United States,from Alaska to Baltimore,including correspondence and field notebooks that have not yet been accessed for such analysis. This dissertation will also rely heavily on analysis of scientific data gathered by the scientists, including maps, photographs, and species compositions lists, much of which is located at the World Data Center for Glaciolo gy (WDC) in Boulder, Colorado, and with Bruce Molnia of the United States Geological Survey (USGS). The intellectual merit of this dissertation lies in its contributions to a growing body of literature on the placedness of science, especially more recent analyses of field research by important historians of science. This dissertation will deepen and expand the understanding of place in field research. Within this broad framework and through its focus on place, this dissertation also makes several arguments that challenge and enhance the standing historiography on American ecology and on glaciology and climate change. In addition, this dissertation explores the nature of interdisciplinary studies during this time period and challenges some of the historical arguments made about discipline building and increased specialization in the first half of the twentieth century. The broader impacts of this dissertation include promoting interdisciplinary work,
improving access to archival sources, and enhancing the historical understanding of scientific conservation and theories of global climate change. First, this project will involve several weeks of field research in Alaska with a team from the USGS. This research will contribute a historical perspective to current studies conducted in Glacier Bay while the cooperative field reconnaissance will enhance the scientific content of the proposed dissertation. Second, this project will involve working intimately with two national scientific research organizations, namely the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the USGS. In making use of materials kept at the NOAA-funded WDC, the research undertaken for this dissertation will involve helping the archivist at the WDC to more effectively organize and make available historical scientific journals and data sets. Finally, in exploring the study of place, activism by scientists to preserve such a wild study site, and the theories drawn about global climate change, this dissertation will explore the historical value of wilderness preservation for science and also the historical understanding of climate change. As both land preservation and climate change theories have become contentious issues in American society, this dissertation will bring a historical understanding from less contentious times to bear on current arguments and help to clarify current debates about wilderness lands and climate change theories. The immediate goal of the proposed research is a dissertation, with a larger plan for a book and perhaps one or two
related articles.

This Science and Society Dissertation Improvement Grant provides funding for a student to travel to archives to collect data and thereby assist in his completing his dissertation in the field of the history of science. The dissertation offers a historical explanation of the development of the research on aging in the first half of the twentieth century. It will investigate how the American scientists provided a new theory and methodology for studying senescence during the early twentieth century, and how the social turmoil in the Great Depression and the Second World War prompted them to institutionalize their research as a multidisciplinary field. The first part of the project deals with several biologists and biomedical scientists who contributed to transforming knowledge on aging, including Alexis Carrel, Alfred Cohn, Raymond Pearl, H. S. Jennings, and
young Edmund Vincent Cowdry. Unlike previous historians who have argued that there was no essential change in the scientific understanding of aging during this period, the project will study how new experimental approaches to senescence brought about the idea that aging was only a contingent and local phenomenon. This idea considerably differed from the traditional thought that aging was an inevitable consequence of the decay or decrease of some vital principle governing the whole body. The second part of the dissertation will analyze how different social structures and responses to the economic problems in America and Britain during the Depression and the War conditioned the distinct forms of gerontology's development and institutionalization in the two countries. Particularly, the role of Vladimir Korenchevsky and the Nuffield Foundation in building gerontology in Britain will be compared with that of Edmund Cowdry, Clive M. McCay, and the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation in the United States. The project will analyze how and why the latter was more successful in constructing larger multidisciplinary networks of the researchers of aging than the former, although it was the British scientists who initiated this movement and influenced the Americans. Finally, the project investigates the British scientist Peter B. Medawar's conception of the evolutionary theory of aging in 1946 and its reception in broader cultural and intellectual contexts, especially through contemporary Britons' increasing concerns about the aging of their population and the influence of new evolutionary theories. This project has two intellectual merits. First, it will explain how and why scientific ideas of aging underwent a substantial change during the early twentieth century, although it had not been greatly altered since the time of Aristotle and Galen. The dissertation investigates how scientific understanding of senescence began to be transformed through novel experimental approaches like tissue culture and genetic analysis within new institutional environments, especially those of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research, and several university biology departments. Second, the project will offer a comparative analysis on how distinct social conditions and their changes in America and Britain during the Great Depression and the Second World War brought about different forms of institutionalization of gerontology in these two countries. The broader impacts of the project upon the history and historiography of science are twofold. First, it will further our understanding of the nature of scientific discourse on the category of age, which has been much less studied than that of gender, race, and class. Second, it will analyze the nature of multidisciplinary investigation and the extent of its success in America and Britain during this period. This will reveal how and why scholars with distinct professional norms and assumptions, such as cytologists, biochemists, actuaries, psychologists, and anthropologists, decided to study aging from their diverse perspectives and to institutionalize their cooperative scientific approach.

This doctoral dissertation project, supported by the Science, Technology & Society (STS) program at NSF, examines how American ethnologists, physical anthropologists, and sociologists studied race crossing in Hawaii between 1880 and 1945. It investigates how the following projects shaped local and disciplinary knowledge about race mixing and its consequences: the establishment of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology (1889); physical anthropologists' photographic and physical measurement surveys of mixed race people; mixed race family studies by sociologists at the University of Hawaii; and race relations research at the University's War Research Lab during World War II. Combining archival research in Hawaii and the continental United States, this historical study explains the importance of research in Hawaii to the development of theory and practice in the human sciences. It also illustrates how government agencies and local businesses applied knowledge about racialized territorial subjects. The history of the scientific study of race in the U.S. has focused primarily on scientists' concerns with race relations and mixing between black and white people. Incorporating Asian and indigenous people into studies of race mixing made research in Hawaii more representative of human diversity, as it made results more ambiguous and challenging to contemporary definitions of race. This dissertation research brings together the history of racial science, the history of biology, the history of the social sciences, and the history of scientific activism. Hence, this project enhances historical understandings of the role of territories in the development of ideas about the nature of race itself; and demonstrates how the territory of Hawaii served as a disciplinary laboratory where social scientists worked out how biology should influence their disciplines. The project stands to expand and deepen STS understanding of the role of race crossing knowledge in scientists' debates about scientific racism.

Proposal 0958974 PI: Jole Shackelford
From Biological Rhythm Studies to Chronobiology: A History of a New Scientific Discipline

The idea that humans have an inner clock and that animal life is governed by circadian rhythms is commonplace today. The historical development of biological rhythm studies, or chronobiology as it is known today, has received scant attention within the historical disciplines, and yet biological rhythms research has radically transformed how we view living creatures, from relatively static organisms that stabilize themselves in a changing environment(homoeostasis) to temporally active, organic systems whose chemistries vibrate or oscillate in complex patterns that anticipate predictable changes in environmental factors such as light, heat,tides, and other periodic phenomena. Moreover, chronobiologist's own accounts of the developmental of their science often emphasize the history of their individual lines of inquiry; they do not grasp the broader historical picture of the emergence of biological rhythms as a scientific research area.
This project is a two-year investigation of the history of chronobiology, developing expertise and protocols for training students in the history of recent science. A core group of historians, philosophers, and scientists will meet in a regularly-scheduled workshop at the University of Minnesota to define the historical limits and content of chronobiology, a relatively young field in
the history of biology, but one that is contemporary with the better-studied environmental biology and developmental biology. The principal investigators will develop interactional expertise in the science through the collaborative workshop format, identify the key historical elements of the establishment of chronobiology as a new discipline, elaborate a research bibliography, locate and evaluate primary source documents pertaining to the leading researchers and their laboratories. The end result will be a working narrative of the history of rhythm studies and emergence of chronobiology as an autonomous scientific research area.
At the culmination of the grant, the principal investigators will bring together historians, philosophers, and scientists to present the results of individual studies, which are intended for publication. These steps will contribute to the long term goal of training students in the methods required to do historical research on this and comparable recent sciences.