Dissertation

Sites of salvage: science history between the wars

Scheinfeldt, Tom

2003

Overview

During the 1920s and 1930s, science history achieved widespread cultural success, featuring prominently in universities, museums and international expositions throughout Britain, America and much of the rest of the world. Maintaining that the broad advance of interwar science history cannot be sufficiently understood without reference to its broader cultural context, it is the main contention of this thesis that both the extent and diversity of interest in science history can be more productively examined in light of a common cultural memory -- the memory of war. In the wake of the Great War science history stood as a site of salvage, allowing for both continuity with the past by proclaiming the cultural and historical universality of science and the possibility of a better future in its accepted positivity. Although like other aspects of the past science could be implicated in the failure of the pre-war order and in wartime atrocities, its history could still stand as a positive seat of cultural memory from which a post-war future might be built -- a lieu de memoire sympathetic to both reflection and reconciliation. In this the post-Great War rise of science history was essentially a post-Great War phenomenon. In the aftermath of war, science history emerged offering hope to a fractured and uncertain world.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Science history