STSC 100 History of American Science *NEW*
Offered:Fall 2009
Burnett TR 3-4:30
Scientific knowledge has been crucial to the United States' development as a nation and as a global power. This course examines the changing ways Americans have known about the natural and social world from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. We will follow three strands to understand the history of American science. First, we will trace encounters with new landscapes as white settlers migrated from the eastern shores to the prairies to the Rockies. We will examine their efforts to map and categorize nature and to control working landscapes. Second, we will examine changing theories of race, from scientific justifications of slavery and theories of Indian decline to the construction of ‘whiteness’ and the spread of eugenics. Finally, we will examine the interaction between scientific knowledge and forms of military and industrial production, from the development of industrial gunpowder, to the making of the Atomic bomb, to the building of the "gun belt" across the Southern states. Throughout the course we will also take advantage of our location at the heart of early American Science, using Philadelphia’s rich museums and collections of scientific instruments, specimens, and rare texts to illuminate major themes.
