OU - Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/11244/10476

Browse

Now showing 1 - 20 of 29

Open Access
The Accademia dei Lincei and the Apiarium :
(1970) Kidwell, Clara Sue.
Open Access
All That is Solid Melts into Air Travel: Environments, Technologies, and the Modern Nation at Trans-Canada Air Lines
(2019) Stein, Blair; Heyck, Hunter; Barker, Peter; Brosnan, Kathleen; Jones-Imhotep, Edward; Moon, Suzanne; Soppelsa, Peter
This dissertation explores how Trans-Canada Air Lines (1937-1965) built, maintained, and subverted what I call the “modern envirotechnical nation” in its public-facing discourse. Euro-Canadian national identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been rooted in both the environment—Canada was imagined as very big and very cold—and communications technologies that allowed settlers to traverse long distances and transcend harsh climates. At first blush, these appear both contradictory and self-reinforcing. How can we, for example, celebrate Canada’s size while at the same time technologically annihilating distance? Although clearly commensurate, environmental and technological nationalisms must work for that commensurability, especially in modern, high modern, and late/postmodern Canada. I refer to this work, as well as the discursive products of that work, the “modern envirotechnical nation.” I work mainly with the airline’s public-facing material, including advertisements, publicity images, media reports, press releases, and speeches by executives and sympathetic politicians to explore this phenomenon. As a state airline, TCA was beholden to taxpayers and worked with government advertisers, which meant that it forwarded something of a state-sanctioned narrative of environment, technology, and nation and used its discourse to express larger anxieties about what it meant to be a modern Canadian. TCA worked throughout its first two decades to maintain the modern Canadian envirotechnical nation in this material. Ultimately, it was unable to reconcile the role of air travel in creating new relationships between space, place, time, and the everyday experience of mobility with this paradigm as high-powered jets took Canadians faster and farther than the “modern envirotechnical nation” would allow. I treat air travel in Canada as a high-modern megaproject, a state enterprise designed to forward collective visions of nature, technology, and nation through the implementation of large-scale infrastructure. Therefore, this dissertation brings together the historical study of modernity, business, and the relatively new field of “envirotech.” Bridging environmental history and the history of technology, “envirotech” sits at the nexus of nature, culture, technology, and power, allowing for a multivalent analysis of technological systems as mediators for human experiences with their environments. I push the boundaries of “envirotech” by interrogating the role of technology in changing perceptions of the environment; TCA’s public-facing articulations of the “modern envirotechnical nation” represented Canadian environments not just how they were, but how it ought to and appeared to be to the airline’s passengers.
Open Access
Architects of the self: Social scientists and the construction of the individual in postwar America.
(2004) Eddy, Mark Alan.; Ogilvie, Marilyn B.,; Taylor, Kenneth L.,
American social science experienced unprecedented institutional growth during and after the Second World War due in part to the increased need for techniques in human resource management. As a result, scientific representations of the individual underwent reassessment and modification. This dissertation examines the public careers of two prominent social scientists during the postwar period and their contrasting visions of the individual as an efficient automaton and a multidimensional whole. The psychologist Burrhus Frederic (B. F.) Skinner and the cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead each crafted unique visions of humanity and applied them to critiques of postwar American culture. My research on Mead and Skinner as public intellectuals and as representatives of American culture has three objectives. The first is to explore their scientific depictions of self and society in the context of burgeoning technocracy in twentieth century America. In crafting and developing their theories of the self and of society, Mead and Skinner were both influenced by the social reform movements of the progressive era, the Interwar period, and the 1960s social protest movements. While Skinner's vision of future society entailed a mechanized self and a scientific meritocracy, Mead promoted interdisciplinary social science in service of American democracy and human dignity. The second objective is to examine the popularization of Skinnerian and Meadian science, technology, and social ideology in postwar American culture. My research explores some of the specific ways in which mechanistic and holistic visions of the self and society were appropriated and critiqued by Americans. Skinner's vision of the programmable self had a lasting influence on education and training programs in the United States and abroad. Mead's holistic vision of the self became inextricably linked to the politics of feminism and the youth counterculture in the 1960s. The third objective is to examine how conflicting scientific images of human nature in the postwar decades reflect the modern American tension between the desire for human freedom on the one hand, and systems of social control on the other. Americans have used both of these images of the self selectively to explore individual identity and to refine systems of societal management.
Open Access
An astronomer beyond the observatory: Harlow Shapley as prophet of science.
(2000) Palmeri, Joann.; Taylor, Kenneth L.,; Mitman, Gregg A.,
By 1918 American astronomer Harlow Shapley (1885--1972) had completed the work that established his reputation as a scientist and secured his place as one of the most important contributors to the development of twentieth-century astronomy. This work included techniques to determine stellar distances and the discovery of the eccentric location of the solar system within the Milky Way. While Shapley continued to conduct scientific research for the next five decades, his most important contribution to astronomy during these years lay in his Directorship of the Harvard College Observatory. Preoccupation with Shapley's early work neglects other important facets of his professional life. From lecturing in colleges and churches, to promoting international cooperation, to participating in multidisciplinary postwar planning, to political lobbying, to popularizing science, Shapley devoted substantial time and effort to activities outside the scope of his roles as astronomer and observatory director. Throughout his life Shapley devoted himself to the mission of spreading the word of the significance of the cosmic facts for humanity, and pointing out the philosophical, social, and religious implications of science. In this dissertation I characterize Shapley as a prophet of science to highlight the continuing mission on behalf of science that underlies his wideranging activities in the public arena. In this study I document Shapley's shifting strategies to promote science from the 1920s through the 1960s and his personal and professional motivations for doing so. While Shapley's missionary impulse on behalf of science was rooted in the 1920s, the intellectual and cultural climate of postwar America provided inspiration and opportunity to promote science as "rational religion." His interest in biological subjects led him to emphasize "cosmic evolution" as the foundation for a new "stellar theology." Shapley helped create a new niche for the astronomer within the public arena, and helped to establish the cosmos as a compelling public venue for pondering the fate of humanity and addressing questions of moral and spiritual significance.
Open Access
Astronomy in Safavid Persia: Bahāʾ al-Dīn ʿĀmilī and the Patronage of Science
(2021-08-05) Mahdavi, Younes; Barker, Peter; Crowther, Kathleen; Livesey, Steven; Magruder, Kerry; Nair, Aparna; Marashi, Afshin
This dissertation offers the first account of a scientific tradition in theoretical astronomy (ʿilm al-hayʾa) initiated by Bahāʾ al-Dīn al-ʿĀmilī (1547-1621), a polymath and a chief jurisconsult in the Safavid monarchy (1501-1722) in Persia. ʿĀmilī’s campaign to acquire royal patronage, depended on multiple rededications of an introductory work on astronomy, The Dissection of the Orbs (Tashrīḥ al-aflāk), composed before 1576. The last shah to receive this dedication was ʿAbbās I (r. 1588-1629), who raised ʿĀmilī to the position of chief jurisconsult for the Safavid empire in 1001/1592-3. ʿĀmilī’s new position at the imperial court enabled him to legitimize astral sciences among the Safavids, for example, in The Crescent Garden (al-Ḥadīqa al-hilāliyya) completed in 1595. He also completed an extensive Gloss on the Dissection and began to train students in astronomy before 1599. The active research tradition in ʿilm al-hayʾa founded by ʿĀmilī was continued by his disciples and subsequent scholars in Persia and Mughal India in commentaries that make use of the Gloss and the Dissection. ʿĀmilī and his commentators continued the scientific tradition of Marāgha and Samarqand. They differed from earlier scholars in accepting the work of another Safavid scholar, Shams al-Dīn Khafrī (d. after 1525), as the solution to the canonical list of problems in Ptolemaic astronomy, although there is evidence that ʿĀmilī proposed new models for the problematic cases of Mercury and the Moon. Original research material in this period appeared in the form of commentary and super-commentary literature on contemporary and previous authorities in astronomy. After describing the contents of the Dissection and the Gloss, I will introduce and discuss two commentaries on the Dissection by ʿĀmilī’s disciples; one by Shams al-Dīn ʿAlī Khalkhālī (fl. 1088/1599) written in India for the Mughal Emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605), and the other by Muḥammad Kāẓim Tunikābunī (d. after 1033/1624) written in Persia for ʿAbbās I. Commentators on ʿĀmilī’s astronomical works did not simply imitate him or previous Islamicate scholars; instead, they took the commentary style as a vehicle for manifesting their critical ideas and uncertainties concerning technical issues, besides showing their mastery of the literature of the discipline. Considering commentary literature as original research material, this dissertation emphasizes the necessity of a reformed attitude in understanding the intellectual productions of the Islamicate postclassical period (1200-1900) in its social and cultural context.
Open Access
Buffon, organic change, and the races of man.
(1977) Eddy, John Herbert,
Open Access
Building the foundation for an American mathematical community: The Bowditch generation, 1800--1838.
(2002) Timmons, William Todd.; Ragep, Jamil,
The first third of the nineteenth century was an important period for the development of American mathematics: Nathaniel Bowditch emerged as a new leader with an international reputation; general topic scientific journals filled a void by publishing mathematical papers until permanent mathematical journals were established later in the century; and American mathematicians began to turn away from the British-dominated mathematical philosophy of their past and to turn towards the modern mathematical approach as represented by the French textbook authors. Each of these factors contributed to a work-in-progress as American mathematicians struggled to build a foundation upon which a research community would form.
Open Access
Chemical Affinity in Eighteenth-Century Scottish Physiology and Agriculture
(2013) Stewart, John; Barker, Peter
The standard historiography of eighteenth-century chemistry focuses on the chemical revolution. French chemists, most notably Lavoisier, replaced the phlogiston theory of combustion with a new one based on oxygen and modernized the chemical nomenclature. This history has largely been treated as internal to the history of chemistry.
Open Access
Discordant Consensus: Dialogues on the Earth's Age in American Science, 1890--1930
(2009) Ratowt, Sylwester Jan; Barker, Peter
The history of investigation of the Earth's age during the second half of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries has been often presented as a narrative of a disciplinary conflict. In this dissertation, I investigate the evidence which supports such accounts as well as evidence contrary to it. I conclude that this disciplinary conflict narrative underestimates the complexity of the historical situation and points to broader inadequacies in understanding of group knowledge and consensus. The larger question I ask is ``what does it mean for a group of people to know something?'' I argue that we need view the historical actor as composed of (dialogically interacting) multiple subjects: the individual who strives for understanding and multiple community members who strive to communicate. Furthermore, I introduce the concept of an imagined community member, the image that an interlocutor has of an anonymous member of a given community, who represents its knowledge, assumptions, and expectations.
Open Access
The electrical decomposition of water :
(1977) Sudduth, William M.,
Open Access
Encounters with Alcabitius: Reading Arabic Astrology in Premodern Europe
(2017-08-01) Gaida, Margaret; Vermij, Rienk; Livesey, Steven; Magruder, Kerry; Crowther, Kathleen; Magnusson, Roberta; Burnett, Charles
This project examines the transmission and reception in medieval and early modern Europe of the Introduction to Astrology, written by the tenth-century Arabic author al-Qabīṣī and known to his Latin readers as Alcabitius. First composed in Aleppo and translated into Latin in the twelfth century, the work became one of the most influential texts on astrology in medieval and early modern Europe, particularly at universities. A close study of different forms of readership (translations, annotations, commentaries, and materialities) demonstrates how attitudes and perceptions of Arabic astrology shifted (or remained stable) among diverse groups of medieval and early modern readers in Europe. The readership of the Latin manuscript and print traditions, understood in conjunction with a contextualized study of the Arabic original, reveals how the astrological tradition in Europe emerged and evolved by assimilating and adapting Islamic ideas.
Open Access
The exact sciences in Lutheran Germany and Tudor England.
(2005) Tredwell, Katherine Anne.; Barker, Peter,
The final chapters shift focus to England, where a revival of mathematical education was underway by mid-century. In this section, astronomy is defined broadly to include astronomical navigation, since the potential economic and political benefits of undertaking voyages of discovery provided part of the justification for mathematical studies. Elizabethan authors frequently cited and even translated Lutheran works, suggesting that Lutheran influence played an important role in the English mathematical renaissance. Most readers turned to Lutheran sources for technical guidance, in part because Melanchthon's followers had produced the leading works on Copernican astronomy. A smaller group, including some of the leading Tudor mathematicians, also adopted Melanchthon's providential reading of astronomy. Thus, English mathematical practitioners were not intellectually isolated, but form part of a continuous tradition that began in Wittenberg.
Open Access
Exploration in the mare incognita: Natural history and conservation in early twentieth century America.
(2000) Kroll, Gary M.; Mitman, Gregg,
More a space than a place, the ocean had long occupied the American imagination as a geographical border to be crossed. The process of coming to know of the ocean as a place began in the nineteenth century, but it was not until the twentieth century that the ocean---the ocean beyond America's shores---became known as a part of nature, as a wilderness. This dissertation provides a cultural history of those explorers and naturalists who did the work of filling in the "blank spaces" of the ocean realm. More important, they were largely responsible for making the ocean known to the American imagination as a place be managed and conserved, and as a place of beauty and recreation. This dissertation ends just at the point that Americans began including the ocean within a wider environmental concern---as a geography to be preserved. The oceanic naturalists discussed here were partly responsible for ensuring that the ocean would be included within the politics of modern environmentalism. They ventured into territories to examine a wide range of oceanic phenomena and then constructed representations for popular audiences back home.
Open Access
Fancy and imagination: Cultivating sympathy and envisioning the natural world for the modern child.
(2006) Perez, Kimberly E.; Pandora, Katherine,
This dissertation examines the attitudes that scientists, educators, and nature-writers held toward fancy and imagination in nature-study and nature books for children around the turn of the century. In a period where science was professionalizing, scientists were respected for their authority on the natural world, and nature was increasingly valued as a source for rational knowledge, there were those who allowed for a fanciful and imaginative approach toward nature, especially for children. Some educators, nature-writers, and even scientists, argued that fancy and imagination were natural to the developmental process of children and were necessary in order to balance the overly rational view of nature that the modern world provided. This dissertation examines the debate over the roles of fancy and imagination that occurred in nature-study and educational journals. Most science supporters sought to control the direction of nature-study and devalue fancy and imagination in order to promote the values of science. However, amongst this group, there were those who advocated a more moderate approach toward nature-study that allowed for fancy and imagination in moderation. This dissertation explores this position through the work of Liberty Hyde Bailey, Dean of the College of Agriculture at Cornell. Bailey approached nature with a dual outlook; he valued scientific rationality, but in the case of nature-study he argued that "fact is not to be worshipped" because, he advocated, children should be encouraged to develop an artistic outlook on nature. This dissertation also examines the debate over the roles of fancy and imagination in nature books for children. Again, participants were divided; and again, some nature-writers advocated a balance between imaginative, fanciful stories and factual information. This dissertation explores this position through the work Mabel Osgood Wright, an author of nature field guides and narratives for children. Wright incorporated fanciful and imaginative elements into her stories by anthropomorphizing her animal characters, but she also maintained that the information presented was factual. Both Bailey and Wright were motivated in their stance on fancy and imagination to encourage children to form a sympathetic bond with nature so that they may, in turn, respect the natural world.
Open Access
FISH FACTS: DISCIPLINARY DEVELOPMENT OF ICHTHYOLOGY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE
(2019) Scearce, Carolyn; Pandora, Katherine; Hale, Piers; Magruder, Kerry; Weldon, Stephen; Hoagland, Bruce
This dissertation chronicles the disciplinary development of ichthyology through the work of three prominent nineteenth-century naturalists: Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), and Albert Günther (1830-1914). Cuvier argued that historical knowledge was necessary in order to understand the development of the natural sciences, and he devoted a significant portion of his career writing and lecturing on the development of these sciences. Cuvier’s zoological studies focused on vertebrates, and he wrote foundational works in comparative anatomy and paleontology. He applied techniques from comparative anatomy and paleontology to the study of fish. Toward the end of his career Cuvier began working on a catalog of fish with the assistance of Achille Valenciennes (1794-1865). Cuvier died before this work was finished and Valenciennes continued the 22-volume series. Günther’s work followed the methodologies promoted by Cuvier. Over the course of his career he produced a catalog of fish that described over 8000 species of fish. He also wrote the first English language textbook on ichthyology. Agassiz studied under Cuvier during the final six months of Cuvier’s life. Between the early-1830s and mid-1840s Agassiz studied fish fossils in the museums of Europe, describing over 1600 species of extinct fish. Agassiz’s study of fish paleontology influenced his interpretation of the fossil record and reinforced his belief that the geological evidence did not support evolutionary theory.
Open Access
Images of Place in American Spaceflight, 1958 - 1974
(2019) Reser, Anna; Pandora, Katherine; Moon, Suzanne; Soppelsa, Peter; Bailey, Robert; Weitekamp, Margaret
This project is a cultural history of images of place in the American space programs of the 1960s, focused on images of Kennedy Space Center (KSC), where the actual launches of rockets took place, and the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC), where mission planning and astronaut training, and eventually mission control, were located. I consider images of KSC and MSC both in terms of the information they contain about the cultural meaning of a NASA center and of such places, but also as representations of a larger cultural geography of spaceflight places. The idea of a NASA center was not a recognizable entity in the early 1960s. Kennedy Space Center, for example, was in some ways an outgrowth of Air Force and Army launch facilities on Cape Canaveral, from which it borrowed some of its physical facilities and operational practices. The Manned Spacecraft Center was very similar to the suburban corporate campuses that began to be built in the post war period, and the community that grew up around it followed the familiar pattern of middle class suburban developments elsewhere in the country. In the history of spaceflight buildings are prominent loci of activity and meaning –– but so also are tracts of land, wildlife refuges, turning basins, stadiums, freeways, archaeological sites, swamps, lakes, office parks, suburban neighborhoods, and swimming pools. In short, both the places where spaceflight activities take place, and the images that document and constitute those places matter. In the history of space exploration, both placemaking and imagemaking, two processes that are intimately intertwined, contribute to the making of larger cultural meanings about human spaceflight in the 1960s.
Open Access
Jean Antoine Nollet and experimental natural philosophy in eighteenth-century France /
(The University of Oklahoma., 1985) Maluf, Ramez Bahige,
Nollet saw his work as part of a collective process that pre-supposed standardization of instruments and procedures. He thus rejected anything that was controversial or that could not be settled in a cabinet de physique. He helped steer physics into the laboratory, keeping clear of controversies that engulfed much of French physics during the period of the introduction of Newtonian physics into the continent. Years later, as the cabinet de physique became more demanding and more precise Nollet's experiments appeared crude and his theories outdated.
Open Access
Making the Herball: John Gerard and the Fashioning of an Elizabethan Herbarist
(2011) Rickman, Melissa L.; Livesey, Steven||Reeds, Karen
John Gerard (1545-1612) would not be remembered except for the fact that he wrote the Elizabethan book on plants: The Herball or Generall History of Plantes. Gathered by John Gerarde of London Master of Chirurgerie (London: John Norton, 1597). Although there are few documentary records about this barber surgeon and supervisor of the gardens of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Gerard's Herball (1597) is itself a rich source of information about his activities and ambitions. Drawing on this material as well as the two catalogues Gerard published about his own garden of medicinal, indigenous, and exotic plants, I reconstruct five roles Gerard took on over the course of his life: surgeon, gardener, client, author, and herbarist. Applying the models of Renaissance self-fashioning and Renaissance scientist-courtier offered by Stephen J. Greenblatt and Mario Biagioli to this member of the minor gentry and London guild community allows us to see Gerard in a new light. I argue that he consciously and energetically shaped his career by finding a powerful patron and a place among the newly emerging community of early modern naturalists. This allows us to see the Herball (1597) in the context of his own expectations and the assumptions of Renaissance book culture and to give Gerard more credit for his accomplishment than previous historians have generally done.
Open Access
Of birds, guano, and man: William Vogt's "Road to Survival".
(2005) Mccormick, Maureen A.; Ogilvie, Marilyn B.,; Mitman, Gregg,
William Vogt's best-selling and influential neo-Malthusian text Road to Survival articulated the conservation sensibility of his day and was literally read around the world. Vogt (1902--1968) came to his conclusions about land-use and population control through ecological research, confirming that conservation approach of natural resources would come by managing human behavior, rather than by directing the behavior of non-human organisms. Human behavior had indeed crossed into the realm of the natural sciences in so far as conservation was concerned. Specifically, Vogt urged humans to adopt population control to circumscribe land use.
Open Access
Parasitic Worms in Early Modern Science and Medicine, 1650-1810
(2014-05) Grissom, Julie; Crowther, Kathleen; Livesey, Steven; Magruder, Kerry; Tracy, Sarah; Hirschfeld, Katherine
From antiquity, parasites, and especially worms, were thought to be responsible for human suffering and disease. However, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, worms became the subject of extensive scientific investigations and began to be implicated in a much wider array of diseases. The advent of widespread use of the compound microscope for scientific investigation in the mid-seventeenth century contributed to a flourishing of research into parasitic organisms, particularly worms, and their role in disease. Although historians of medicine have written about the history of parasitology, almost all of these studies begin with the formal establishment of parasitology as a scientific discipline in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The preceding two centuries of parasitological research, however, remain relatively unexamined. In this project, I argue that parasites, especially worms, were important explanatory mechanisms for a wide range of diseases during the early modern period. Thus, the neglect of early modern parasitology by historians of medicine means that we have missed a crucial aspect of medical theory in this period. This project contributes to our understanding of early modern ideas about disease and disease causation by challenging existing historiographical categories.