Fall 2023 Colloquium - Matthew Lavine

History, Mississippi State University

Title: Lack of Focus Section: Acknowledging One Hundred Years of Uncomfortable Growth in the History of Science

Abstract: The History of Science Society celebrates its centennial year in 2024. A celebration is planned for the annual meeting in Mérida, Mexico. Isis will publish a rare special issue. The occasion is so august that it has even forced the organization into the podcast era. It will be, if all goes according to plan, a time for introspection, nostalgia, and a collective retelling and subtle reworking of our origin myths and just-so stories of the doings of our most prominent members in service to who we are and who we need to be. We will speak, critically but lovingly, of the gradual, sometimes glacial broadening of the Society’s membership and scope and ambitions. Most professional societies in the humanities and social sciences have had broadly comparable arcs over the same period.

This task would be greatly simplified were it not for the existence of 99 poorly-organized boxes of archival materials at the Smithsonian Institution which, in their chaotic way, tell a less polished and more interesting kind of story. For all the changes the field has undergone, HSS has rarely led from the front, and rarely been constituted in such a way that it could. Instead, its gaze has been drawn this way and that, its energies cohering in one place only to be scattered again in the next moment as the world changed around it. This talk will be a tour through memos and reports and survey responses going back to the 1940s, when George Sarton relinquished control, and which depict a field seemingly almost constantly in its infancy, never fully settling on answers about even the most basic questions about its identity: who are we? what are our obligations to one another? what is the history of science, anyway?