Wang on the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), Pt. 1 August 6, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in 20th-Century-Science Historiography, EWP Book Club.Tags: Allan Needell, Rachel Carson, Richard Nixon, William Newman, Zuoyue Wang
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Though a visible and important office in American policy history, and though, historically, it has been much discussed, PSAC has garnered surprisingly little analysis by historians. Thus Zuoyue Wang’s In Sputnik’s Shadow: The President’s Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Rutgers UP, 2008) automatically constitutes a valuable contribution to the historiography.
PSAC’s predecessor body, the Science Advisory Committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization, was established in 1951 during the Korean War. Although comprised of highly respected members of the scientific community, that committee was a marginal body, and it was replaced by PSAC following the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite and reconsideration of American government’s management of its scientific and technological resources. PSAC’s chair served as the science adviser to the President until 1973 when Richard Nixon dissolved PSAC. In 1976 Gerald Ford established a new organization, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Though its exact structure and function have varied from administration to administration, that body still exists, and its director (currently John Holdren) serves as Assistant to the President for Science and Technology. Wang’s book covers this whole history, with the OSTP period as an epilogue.
In my own experience, the further one gets from World War II, the more convoluted and confusing the terrain becomes, the less helpful the historiography becomes, the more difficult it becomes to write good, coherent history. Wang’s book flips this on its head. 
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The 20th-Century Problem: Needell and Biography November 2, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in 20th-Century-Science Historiography.Tags: Allan Needell, Lloyd Berkner
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In the history of science, the 20th century is unique in terms of the sheer scale, social importance, and intellectual diversity of the scientific enterprise, and the closeness of its relationship to the development and design of technology. This can create some intimidating historiographical challenges.
For example, as National Air and Space Museum historian Allan Needell observes in his 2000 book, Science, Cold War, and the American State: Lloyd V. Berkner and the Balance of Professional Ideals, “the Cold War relationships among scientists, politicians, the expanding national security bureaucracy, and advocates of more broadly based technocratic initiatives are extraordinarily complex” (3). It sounds obvious enough, but it resonates with me—I think it’s that “extraordinarily” that speaks to the sense of confusion following the sobering encounter with the archive, particularly a major one, such as the US National Archives here in College Park, Maryland. Having seen reams of committee minutes, reports, and correspondence documenting the (often painfully mundane) organizational details of a seemingly endless stream of institutions and initiatives, I know that the question inevitably arises: “What in the hell am I going to do with all this?”
Figuring out what is to be done demands a set of historiographical tools capable of analyzing scientific and engineering work in general ways: it can be extremely limiting to concentrate on singular narratives of significance (say, the history of DNA or elementary particle theory), because it would ignore entire categories of important work that can only be fruitfully analyzed in terms of the evolution of research programs or other general trends, instead of great breakthroughs. It can feel like—indeed, it is—a real accomplishment to reassemble even a single strand of narrative from the archival morass. But faced with the insignificance of any individual narrative, it can be depressing to consider the fact that hundreds of similar narratives are playing out at the same time.
A key strategy is to take hold of certain life preservers that pop out of the depths of the archival record, such as familiar players. (more…)
Ether Wave Propaganda 