Science and History

At Cliopatra, Oscar Chamberlain asks why we don't teach more scientific history. I think there are two main reasons for this. One is that for historians, the application of a scientific principle is generally more important than the science itself, and there is usually a lag time while the new scientific discovery is applied in new technology that affects people's everyday lives. It is more important that students know when the TV became a household object and how that effected our culture and politics than they learn about all the technology that went into it.

The other issue is that to do a really solid job of showing scientific history, you actually have to understand the scientific principles people are working with. The semester I got to teach my own class, I did a lecture on Islamic science, and it was the most intellectually challenging to put together simply because of all the complexity in explaining a scientific principle even in general terms, and then providing historical significane in terms of what changed as a result of that discovery. Few of us want to say that Albert Einstein developed the theory of relativity and then have students not know anything about it any more than we would want them to memorize which general won which battle in a random war.

Despite these issues, I think the integration of an awareness of science and technology into our understanding of history is a crucial development in the field, and I try to include it whenever possible. Chamberlain is right that this stuff often has a greater impact on a greater number than wars or political movements. One reason my dream job would allow me to teach a world history survey is that I see that as the best way to examine these developments in a professional context. Today I took a day off from my dissertation to pore over the volume of The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Daily Life dealing with the ancient world. This work is arranged not by region, but by category, so instead of having stuff like marriage and food as subheadings under Greece, you have a broad category called "Family Life" that talks about all these ancient civilizations. While this approach does have weaknesses, it does bring out some interesting points, and in fact, most of the key developments one can see across regions, such as the gradual replacement of water with overland shipping, are the result of scientific progress.