================= HES POSTING =================== A new book of interest for those who write the history of recent and contemporary science and technology Thomas Soederqvist (ed.) THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY Harwood Academic, Reading, England (Studies in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Volume 4) More than 90 percent of all scientific history has been made during the last half century. So far, however, only a fraction of historical scholarship has dealt with this period. Merely a decade ago, most scientific historians considered recent science -- the scientific culture created, lived and remembered by contemporary scientists -- an area of study best left to the historical actors themselves. Today, an increasing number of historians are turning to the study of contemporary science. When doing so, they are confronted with new and unfamiliar methodological and theoretical problems. How to handle the huge amounts of published and unpublished source materials? What level of scientific training is necessary to understand contemporary science? Does the lack of historical perspective prevent good scholarship? Can (and will) historians of recent science share the turf with other professional groups, such as active scientists, scholars of science and technology studies, and science journalists? This volume aims to provide answers to these questions. The thirteen contributors are active researchers in what has been called "the last frontier" in the history of science. The book itself is the outcome of an International Workshop on Historiographical Problems in Contemporary Science, Technology and Medicine, held at Gothenburg University, Sweden, in September 1994. Contents: - Thomas Soderqvist: `Who Will Sort Out the Hundred or More Paul Ehrlichs? Remarks on the Historiography of Recent and Contemporary Technoscience' - Jeff Hughes: `Whigs, Prigs and Politics: Problems in the Historiography of Contemporary Science' - Susan M. Lindee: `The Conversation: History and History as it Happens' - Soraya de Chadarevian: `Using Interviews to Write the History of Science' - Joseph Tatarewicz: `Writing the history of Space Science and Technology: Multiple Audiences with Divergent Goals and Standards' - Ilana Lowy: `Participant Observation and the Study of Biomedical Sciences: Some Methodological Observations' - Jean-Paul Gaudilliere: `The Living Scientist Syndrome: Memory and History of Molecular Recognition' - Skuli Sigurdsson: `Electric Memories and Progressive Forgetting' - Susan E. Cozzens: `Knowledge of the Brain: The Visualizing Tools of Contemporary Historiography' - Frederic L. Holmes: `Writing About Scientists of the Near Past' - Paul Forman:`Recent Science Later-Modern and Post-Modern' - Ronald E. Doel: `Scientists as Policymakers, Advisors and Intelligence Agents' - Steve Fuller: `Who's Afraid of the History of Contemporary Science? Late May 1997 * 256pp Cloth * ISBN 3-7186-5906-9 * A US$52 / stlg34 / ECU43 ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]