Browsing FAS Theses and Dissertations by FAS Department "History of Science"
Now showing items 1-20 of 31
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The American Soldier in Jerusalem: How Social Science and Social Scientists Travel
(2016-05-23)The dissertation asks how social science and its tools—especially those associated with the precise measurement of attitudes, motivations and preferences—became a pervasive way of knowing about and ordering the world, as ... -
Assembling the Cure: Materia Medica and the Culture of Healing in Late Imperial China
(2014-06-06)This dissertation examines the intersection between the culture of knowledge and socio-economic conditions of late Ming and Qing China (1550-1800) through the lens of materia medica. I argue that medicine in China during ... -
Bedlam in the New World: Madness, Colonialism, and a Mexican Madhouse,1567-1821
(2015-08-31)In spite of a vast and robust literature on madness and its institutions, colonial Mexico remains unchartered domain and little is known about the Hospital de San Hipólito in Mexico City, the first hospital of the Americas ... -
Between Figure and Line: Visual Transformations of Cartesian Physics, 1620-1690
(2014-06-06)Between Figure and Line: Visual Transformations of Cartesian Physics, 1620-1690 is the first sustained examination of the diagrams and illustrations that constituted the seventeenth century's new physics. When René Descartes ... -
Blind to Their Blindness: A History of the Denial of Illness
(2014-06-06)For many historians, sociologists, and anthropologists of medicine, "disease" and "illness" are not equivalent. Whereas "disease" denotes the physician's ostensibly objective criteria, "illness" emphasizes the patient's ... -
The Breathing Self: Toward a History of Respiration
(2016-09-12)This dissertation examines human breathing as an historical object. In particular, it traces how changing theories and practices of breathing were at once experiences and techniques of the self. Unlike historical studies ... -
Citizens of the Chemical Complex: Industrial Expertise and Science Philanthropy in Imperial and Weimar Germany
(2014-02-25)This dissertation is a social and cultural history of chemical industrialists and their role in the development of both science and capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It focuses on the case of Germany, ... -
Climates on the Move: Climatology and the Problem of Economic and Environmental Stability in the Career of C.W. Thornthwaite, 1933-1963
(2014-06-06)This dissertation examines the role of climate science in ensuring environmental stability. It traces the career of the climatologist Charles Warren Thornthwaite, beginning with his work as a population geographer for the ... -
Dinosaurs: Assembling an Icon of Science
(2013-03-08)This dissertation examines how the modern dinosaur—fully mounted, freestanding assemblages of vertebrate fossils such as we are accustomed to seeing at the natural history museum—came into being during the late 19th and ... -
The Ecology of a Healthy Home: Energy, Health, and Housing in America, 1960-1985
(2013-03-06)On November 7, 1973, President Nixon asked Americans to lower their home thermostats to a national average temperature of 68 degrees. On February 2, 1974, over half of the gas stations in the New York City area closed after ... -
Finding Patterns in Nature: Asa Gray's Plant Geography and Collecting Networks (1830s-1860s)
(2013-10-18)It is well known that American botanist Asa Gray's 1859 paper on the floristic similarities between Japan and the United States was among the earliest applications of Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory in plant geography. ... -
From Wilderness to the Toxic Environment: Health in American Environmental Politics, 1945-Present
(2013-09-30)This dissertation joins the history of science and medicine with environmental history to explore the language of health in environmental politics. Today, in government policy briefs and mission statements of environmental ... -
Indian Insanes: Lunacy in the 'Native' Asylums of Colonial India, 1858-1912
(2013-10-18)The new Government of India did not introduce legislation for `native' lunacy in colonial India as a measure of social control after the uprisings of 1857-8; discussions about Indian insanes had already occurred in 1856, ... -
Irregular Bodies: Polyhedral Geometry and Material Culture in Early Modern Germany
(2016-05-18)The dissertation explores the centrality of the Platonic Solids, and polyhedral geometry generally, to the artistic and mixed-mathematical cultures of Renaissance Germany. Beginning with Albrecht Dürer’s groundbreaking ... -
The Known and the Lived. Studies in Techno-Scientific 'Experience'
(2013-02-19)There are few doubts about the significance of science and technology for modern human culture and society. But as historians, we are still struggling to find appropriate descriptive terms to capture the broad processes ... -
Lawrence Joseph Henderson: Bridging Laboratory and Social Life
(2014-06-06)This study uses the professional trajectory of the Harvard-trained physical chemist and physiologist Lawrence Joseph Henderson to show how the nascent and highly mobile interconnections between biomedicine and social theory ... -
Making Citizens of the Information Age: A Comparative Study of the First Computer Literacy Programs for Children in the United States, France, and the Soviet Union, 1970-1990
(2015-09-08)In this dissertation I trace the formation of citizens of the information age by comparing visions and practices to make children and the general public computer literate or cultured in the United States, France, and the ... -
The Making of the Microbial Body, 1900s-2012
(2014-06-06)This dissertation examines how the relationship between microbes and the human body has been reconfigured over the course of the twentieth century and into the first decades of the twenty-first century. It presents a ... -
Mountains of Controversy: Narrative and the Making of Contested Landscapes in Postwar American Astronomy
(2013-10-08)Beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, three American astronomical observatories in Arizona and Hawai'i were transformed from scientific research facilities into mountains of controversy. This dissertation ... -
Museum, Laboratory, and Field Site: Graduate Training in Zoology at Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges, 1873-1934
(2015-09-08)This dissertation examines the development of graduate training in zoology at Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges under E. L. Mark between 1873 and 1934. It focuses on the changing spatial, institutional, and intellectual ...