The Historiography of Contemporary Science, Technology, and Medicine: Writing Recent Science (review)

This collection of essays tackles a crucial challenge for historians of science: how to approach recent history. Although many problems and methods are similar regardless of time period, recent history introduces novel obstacles and opportunities, from ephemeral digital sources to surviving informants interested in how their history gets written. Despite its title, this book is neither a review of recent work on the history of modern science nor a comprehensive guide for those who would write histories of modern science. Instead, it is a diverse assortment of fifteen essays, many of them testimonials by leaders in the field about how they have grappled with specific issues in their own research.

Some of the testimonials do not work well. One, about efforts to create archives of recent events, raises good questions (e.g., which events are worth archiving? what sources should be kept?) but provides few answers. Another, by a science journalist who appropriately critiques himself and his colleagues for their over-enthusiastic coverage of scientific progress, promisingly calls on journalists to learn more from the history of science. But its specific recommendation is quite modest: read Kuhn for his deflation of the epistemic pretensions of science. While Thomas Söderqvist provides an excellent review of the different contributions of biographies (e.g., they reveal the lived contexts of scientific work; they are a useful genre for improving popular understanding of science), he takes a surprising turn in his conclusion and praises biographies for providing models for how to live a virtuous life.

Other essays, while thoughtprovoking, do not fully satisfy. John Krige seeks to expand the scope of histories of science and foreign policy to include the experiences of local contexts in many countries. He does so by telling the story of the Atomic Energy Commission's isotope distribution program from the perspective of a fictional researcher and patient in Trieste. While I am sympathetic to his concern, I hope that historians will find ways to give voice to local actors without resorting to fiction. Michael Dennis, taking up a different challenge of Cold War history, rejects the conventional wisdom that secrecy is the inevitable foe of science and history. Instead, he argues that some scientific work does require secrecy and that historians simply need to develop skills to triangulate what happens in these invisible spaces.

Several essays, however, are excellent. One of the principal challenges of recent history is the use and interpretation of oral history. In an insightful review, Lillian Hoddeson acknowledges the fallibility of memory and the inevitable conflicts between recollections and archival sources. Despite these limitations, she shows how historians can still use oral histories as sources of insights that cannot be found in written records. Ronald Doel and Pamela Henson make a convincing case that photographs, often used only as window dressing by historians, actually offer a treasure trove of data. For instance, one photo they include, of a chemistry class at Iowa State College in 1942, immediately and powerfully reveals the impact of World War II on science education in the United States: all of the students are women. Although photographs are susceptible to staging and doctoring, historians can just read them as carefully and critically as they read written sources.

Historians must not turn away from recent science simply because the work is difficult or might force historians, as Arne Hessenbruch argues in his essay, into potentially compromising collaborations with scientists. Instead, with science and technology playing many roles in society, it is especially important that historians understand recent science and engage with the vital debates of contemporary life and society. Although these essays in the collection do not provide a comprehensive guide for historians willing to take on the challenges, they do provide useful discussions of many of...