The Historiography of Contemporary Science, Technology, and Medicine

Ronald E Doel and Thomas Soderqvist, Oregon State University, USA Case Western Reserve University, Ohio, USA

Table of Contents 1. Introduction: What We Know, What We Don't--And Why It Matters 5 Ronald E. Doel and Thomas Soderqvist Part I: Where Are We Now? The Challenges of Writing Recent Science 2. Why Science Writers Should Forget Carl Sagan and Read Thomas Kuhn: On the Troubled Conscience of a Journalist 31 Keay Davidson 3. The History of Now: Reflections on Being a Contemporary Archivist 57 Bruce Lewenstein Part II: Whose History? Ethics, Lawsuits, National Security, and the Writing of Contemporary History 4. The Politics of Commissioned Histories (Revisited) 77 David Cantor 5. From Behind the Fence: Threading the Labyrinths of Classified Historical Research Anne Fitzpatrick 98 6. On Ethics, Scientists, and Democracy: Writing the History of Eugenic Sterilization Lene Koch 122 Part III: Witnesses to History: Issues in Biography and Ethics 7. What's the Use of Writing Lives of Recent Scientists? 149 Thomas Soderqvist 8. Scholarship as Self-Knowledge: A Case Study 201 Alfred I. Tauber Part IV: Secrecy, Politics, and Science: Probing the Meaning of the Cold War 9. The Politics of Phosphorus-32: A Cold War Fable Based on Fact 241 John Krige 10. Secrecy and Science Revisited: From Politics to Historical Practice and Back Michael Aaron Dennis 275 Part V: History Detectives: New Ways of Approaching Modern Science, Medicine, and Technology 11. The Conflict of Memories and Documents: Dilemmas and Pragmatics of Oral History Lillian Hoddeson 300 12. Reading Photographs: Photographs as Evidence in Writing the History of Modern Science 324 Ronald E. Doel and Pamela M. Henson Part VI: New Voices: Omitted and Novel Perspectives 13. What We Still Don't Know about South-North Technoscientific Exchange: North-centrism, Scientific Diffusion and the Social Studies of Science 380 Alexis De Greiff and Mauricio Nieto 14. Witnessing the Witnesses: Potentials and Pitfalls of the Witness Seminar in the History of Twentieth Century Medicine 419 E.M. Tilli Tansey 15. 'The Mutt Historian': The Perils and Opportunities of Doing History of Science On-Line 457 Arne Hessenbruch Notes on Contributors 492 Index List of Illustrations