Historians, what are they good for? July 22, 2008

It’s been a good night, watching the Milwaukee Brewers and the St. Louis Cardinals on ESPN while sprawled out on the couch with the latest Isis, marinating in the humid nighttime heat of Washington, DC.  Too bad I’m out of beer.  The focus section of this issue asks the pointed question “What is the value of the history of science?”  Can we be of use outside of our own academic interests?  All in all, I’m underwhelmed, with the exception of Zuoyue Wang and Naomi Oreskes’ look at historians’ actual participation in public policy debates.  (Disclosure: Naomi is overseeing my Antarctica project that I’ve mentioned from time to time, but I really do think it’s the best of the lot).  I’m going to do a series of posts on this section, but, since none of the articles really captures my own view of the potential of our discipline, I thought I’d start by airing my perspective.

First off, I feel somewhat vindicated in my continual ragging on the case study approach, because the articles pretty uniformly take a view of history as relating to the “telling historical incident” rather than the analysis of historical traditions, which I think really narrows the potential contributions of the field (see my responses to the Locality versus Globality series on Galison’s Problems from the last Isis, and, of course, have a look at his original entries). 

My own perspective on this issue relates a lot to my understanding of how history inflects disciplines other than science, particularly creative disciplines which seem to encourage a sort of historical geekdom among participants.  Modern filmmakers, for example, know about and understand the French New Wave.  They of course know the technical bits: jump cuts, hand-held cameras, (more…)