Disease landscapes beyond the “Spanish flu” pandemic: temporal patterns, re-centered narratives (1889-1970s)

Notes on Contributors

The Spanish flu appeared at the end of the First World War and spread around the world in three waves: spring-summer in 1918, which was mild; autumn fatal wave, in the same year; and winter wave in 1919, which also had great consequences. From the United States of America, as the cradle of its origin, the Spanish flu spread to all the inhabited continents, and it did not bypass Serbia either. Research on the Spanish flu, as the deadliest and most widespread pandemic in the human history, was mostly based on statistical researches. The development of the geographic information systems and spatial analyses has enabled the implementation of the information of location in existing researches, allowing the identification of the spatial patterns of infectious diseases. The subject of this paper is the spatial patterns of the share of deaths from the Spanish flu in the total population in Valjevo Srez (in Western Serbia), at the settlement level, and their determination by the geographical characteristics of the studied area-the average altitude and the distance of the settlement from the center of the Srez. This paper adopted hot spot analysis, based on Gi* statistic, and the results indicated pronounced spatial disparities (spatial grouping of values), for all the studied parameters. The conclusions derived from the studying of historical spatial patterns of infectious diseases and mortality can be applied as a platform for defining measures in the case of an epidemic outbreak with similar characteristics.

The historical epidemiology of global disease challenges

History of Science and Philosophy of Science. Introductory Remarks. This article introduces two special issues of the journal History of Science Reports (Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte) with contributions on the relationships of history and philosophy of science since the seventeenth century. The introduction begins with a brief reminder of Thomas Kuhn's provocative discussion of the relationship in the 1970s, placing it in the context of the debate of the period over whether the foundation of university departments for History and Philosophy of Science in the United States had led to a mere “marriage of convenience” or something more. Following this the paper briefly outlines the transformative impact of the “practical turn” in both philosophy and history of science since the 1990s, and contends that the relationship of history and philosophy of science has nonetheless become increasingly distant over time. This is due in large part to the professionalisation of history of science and to the recent turn to cultural approaches in that field; both trends have led to the adoption of strictly historicist rather than analytical perspectives on knowledge. General historians, too, are paying more attention to the increasing impact of science and technology, but have at most instrumental use for philosophical perspectives. Thus, the distinct possibility arises that the debate between historical and analytical approaches in philosophy of science is becoming a conversation within one discipline rather than a dialogue between two disciplines: what was once a „marriage of convenience”︁ could end in respectful separation or amicable divorce. The article concludes with brief summaries of the articles published in the two special issues, indicating their relations to specific aspects of the broader topic at hand.

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 881 series, it pays virtually no attention to technological change or to the technical characteristics of the pipeline systems themselves. And while it does offer likely the best available answer to “how” the pipeline systems were put in place, useful supplements remain Richard W. Hooley, Financing the Natural Gas Industry: The Role of Life Insurance Investment Policies, and M. Elizabeth Sanders, The Regulation of Natural Gas: Policy and Politics, 1938—1978. If this study has a truly serious deficiency, it is not really Castaneda’s doing: it is one shared by a good deal of business history as currently practiced in this country. It is history sanitized nearly to the point of misrepresentation. A story that reeks of high-stakes chicanery, conflicts of interests, double-dealing, insider trading, and influence peddling is told in the cooly rational tone of an Alfred Chandler, rather than in the venomous but perspicacious voice of a MatthewJosephson. If anything marks the triumph ofAmerican corporatism, it is simply that this story, told the way Josephson would have told it, now likely would be legally actionable as well as academically unfashionable. Edward W. Constant II Dr. Constant teaches history oftechnology at Carnegie Mellon University and was raised in Houston. Osiris, 2d ser., vol. 7: Science after ’40. Edited by Arnold Thackray. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Pp. ix+307; illustrations, notes, index. $39.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper). How quickly science in the making for one generation of historians becomes the history ofscience for the next. When he arrived at Harvard in 1967, Arnold Thackray recalls in his preface to this cleverly titled collection, the original Scientific Revolution was still considered recent history (and SHOT apparently was still considered “scarcely more than a distant rumor”!). Nowadays, much of the history we are describing occurred in our own lifetimes, and historians of science are talking seriously about “writing history as it happens.” In an effort “to sample the exciting work now under way on very recent science” and to “provide the maps and compasses needed by those who wish to explore this last frontier for themselves” (p. viii), Thackray has gathered contributions from scholars studying various aspects of the modern scientific enterprise, including specialties (e.g., biochemistry and botany) and subjects (e.g., regulation and compensation) not covered in similar volumes. As Thackray readily acknowledges, the history of recent science lacks anything approaching a common interpretive framework. At best it shares a literature—written largely by social scientists, journalists, and practitioners—and a sense of the decisive importance of politics in the postwar world. Disappointingly, Thackray limited himself to a short 882 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGYAND CULTURE preface and so offers us no personal vision of how the history of science after ’40 should be conceptualized and written. James Capshew and Karen Rader’s introductory essay on Big Science provides a superb survey of the literature but also raises some important questions about Big Science as an organizing theme for postwar science. If Big Science must be read as a literary artifact of the postwar scientific community and its critics, as they argue, then we must look elsewhere to understand what gave that construction its meaning and influence. Obviously the Cold War, and the subsequent mobilization of science in the interests of national security on both sides of the “iron curtain,” offers one way of making sense of the postwar world, though at the risk of losing sight of those aspects of science not closely tied to defense priorities. Here Paul Forman follows up his pioneering studies of the militarization of postwar physics with a detailed account of Charles Townes’s invention of the maser. It can easily be misread, Forman points out, as old-fashioned intellectual biography—What did Townes know and when did he know it?—though in fact it is an exemplary study of what a single artifact can reveal about the larger culture and the integration of science and scientists into that culture. Roger Geiger capably surveys (depending on your politics, in a balanced or uncritical way) the various relationships between defense agencies and American universities, which he categorizes in terms of dependence, domination, distortion, and displacement. Ronald...

PREFACE

FOR MY GENERATION OF HISTORIANS, who went to graduate school from roughly 1962 to 1975 (and hence now for many of the graduate students we have trained), the big questions in Western or world history became strangely unfashionable. None is bigger than the question of what were the factors that made Western hegemony possible. Indeed, the very notion of Western hegemony, of the domination of much of the world by Western political or economic power from roughly 1800 to 1970, may be said to be so fraught with anger or guilt as to be almost untouchable. In the present climate, even posing the question Why the West? conjures up more embarrassment or hostility than awed curiosity. Just asking it suggests the possibility that the questioner approves of the course that human history took from roughly 1500 to 1900. Admitting that the West did achieve hegemony seems almost tantamount to endorsing the means and methods used to achieve it. Suspicious critics might even presume that a Eurocentric questioner would dwell on Western strengths while ignoring the injustices associated with conquest or imperialism. In addition, seldom do specialists in non-Western histories-the great Joseph Needham, as always, an exception-dwell on the question. Indeed, as the work of Roy Bin Wong shows, specialists in Chinese or African history delight in raising the stakes by showing the relative insignificance of differences between their area and period and a comparable time in the West.1 As a result of an embarrassment sprung from a multitude of sources-not least the rise of women's history-most historians with credentials in European or American history, or even the history of science and technology, have little to say about what is, arguably, the single most extraordinary phenomenon in global history. The silence in the history of science is particularly striking. Everyone who has thought about the question Why the West? acknowledges the singular importance of mechanical science, both as a mindset and in its application to manufacturing technology. Inventions from larger ships to the steam engine figure prominently in the histories of the Atlantic trade or the rise of Birmingham and Manchester. But most histories of technology now stop at that point and do not ask why those inventions occurred where and when they did. In addition, the history of science has been preoccupied with recovering the social, with situating science, and

In fall 1984, I had the good fortune to meet Sam Schweber when I arrived at Harvard University’s Department of History of Science as a visiting scholar with a postdoctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Having been trained first in physics, I remembered his name as the author of the formidably difficult (for me!) Introduction to Relativistic Quantum Field Theory, which I had closed as soon as I had opened it, as I immediately realized that the approach was too formal for my taste. Not yet familiar with his infinite generosity and attention to young scholars, I was really amazed that he asked me to work with him on an essay review of Andy Pickering’s book, Constructing Quarks.1 I remember that I told him right away that he would have made a good priest with his very humanist attitude toward people. This profoundly humanist aspect of Sam’s personality makes him very concerned about the future of the discipline of history of science as a community of scholars, and in this contribution in his honor I would like to briefly address one of the reasons which, I think, contributes to explain the actual predicament that historians of science face. I will not raise the obvious question of access to the job market and the possible overproduction of PhDs in the field. Instead, I want to discuss a tension inherent in the discipline of history of science, which, I think, lies at the heart of the recent debates about the state of the discipline. Probably more than any other kind of historians, historians of science are torn between several masters: scientists, philosophers, sociologists and general historians. Fifteen years ago, Paul Forman made a major contribution to the question of the intimate relation between historians of science and scientists, condemning the lack of intellectual autonomy of the former from the latter.2 But his call for “independence not transcendence for the historian of science” is still to be fulfilled when one sees the various pressures scientists put on historians of science who want to do more than simply contribute to the creation and celebration of the internal mythology of scientific disciplines. While Forman had a moral view of the need for independence, insisting that each individual had to stand up and fight for his or her autonomous judgment, I think that an institutional analysis provides a better way to identify mechanisms in which this autonomy could be grounded.

The subject of this study is a part of the scientific heritage of the Honored Professor of Moscow University, Iya Leonidovna Mayak (1922-2018), represented by her reviews on national and foreign monographs on Roman history, published in 1958-1999. The article deals with I.L. Mayak’s motives for writing the reviews, the methodological foundations of her analysis, her requirements for the source base and the historiographical rating of classical studies, their structure and the logic of presentation. It is noted that I.L. Mayak was opposed to dogmatism in the application of the theory of socio-economic formations as well as a hypercritical attitude to sources related to archaic Rome, the spread of which she considered to be the methodological consequence of Kantianism. It is shown that I.L. Mayak not only monitored the diffi cult process of rehabilitation of the ancient tradition as a source for studying the archaic Rome, but herself actively promoted this process, in particular by means of reviewing other people’s works. Th e study considers the requirements set out by I.L. Mayak for classical studies such as the need to provide a terminological analysis of sources data, to trace changes in the content of concepts over time, to show the possibility of various interpretations of the given facts. In the formulation of theoretical constructions I.L. Mayak considered essential to provide a concept against the background of the concepts introduced by predecessors, and if the problem was debatable, to indicate the view clearly and definitely. The analysis of reviews written by Iya Leonidovna allows us to conclude that they make it possible to expand our understanding of her academic views, especially on those problems of Roman history, which she did not directly examine in her monographs and articles, in particular, on the issue of preserving polis paradigm in the late Roma n Empire. Reviews by I.L. Mayak reflect her image memorable to many generations of historians: she was respectful to colleagues, however critical of their work, delicate in remarks, stringently academic in expressing her thoughts. The article shows the polemic sharpness and dialogic character of the reviews by I.L. Mayak.

Among the significant objects of research are the emergence of the discourse of the "St. Petersburg historical school" in the early Soviet period, the transformation of the system of scientific institutions and higher educational institutions of Petrograd-Leningrad associated with historical science, the evolution of the subject of historical research. The focus is also on the processes of termination of the historical-clerical and the emergence of historical-party science, the relationship of the historical community and government. The author offers the periodization of historical science in the early Soviet period. 
 The role of Petrograd/Leningrad University as the main center of historical science of the city is considered, the process of emergence and development of new "Soviet" scientific and educational centers is studied. The central element of research was prosopographic research, which made it possible to trace how the collective portrait of the corporation of historians changed. One of the directions of statistical calculations was the consideration of the dynamics and direction of political repression against historians who worked in Petrograd-Leningrad, about a third of them were subjected to repressions. Here, the most massive repressions hit the institutions of the Academy of Sciences, and, paradoxically, the new "ideological" Soviet institutions. Yet, prosopographic research shows that despite repressions and transformations, a high degree of continuity between different generations of historians was maintained in the institutions of Petrograd-Leningrad, and the main scientific schools formed in the pre-revolutionary period were also preserved. Reasonable assumption is put forward about the preservation of the traditions of professional crafts within the framework of Leningrad historical school, although subjected to significant deformation in the conditions of the totalitarian political regime.

The article reconstructs the contribution to historical science shaped by leading Ukrainian scholars and political thinkers during the period in question. Through applying Karl Mannheim’s vision of “real generations” of intellectuals, on the one hand, and his definitions of parameters of real contribution as well as role of specialisation in the framework of evaluation of this contribution, on the other hand, the author defines two generations of historians, successful in their scientific discourse. Having analysed a range of original works by Ukrainian emigrants of older generation (Hrushevskyi, Lypynskyi, Tomashivskyi, Doroshenko), as well as the representatives of the younger generation (Krupnyckyi, Kutshabskyi, Antonovych and Chyzevskyi), the author recreates the research heritage and vision of Ukrainian and European history in its internal dialectics that were formed by scholars in the interwar intellectual environment in Germany, Czechoslovakia and Austria. In addition to the identical conclusions of each author concerning the statements about the necessity and possibility to integrate the Ukrainian history into the global one, discussion of the Ukrainian question in isolation to the resolution of the Russian problem, and existence of common political language of both generations of intellectuals as emigrants in their host countries, the author formulates existing differences. The latter depends, first and foremost, on the different positions of scholars in foreign institutions: the older generation possessed the academic positions in the institutions created by emigrants; the younger – in state German, Czechoslovak or Austrian institutions. Second difference specified the specific character of intellectual concentration of the authors under discussion: speaking in terms of the understanding the experience of the failure of Ukrainian state in 1917-1920s, older scholars differed considerably from their younger colleagues, who predetermined the methodology and tasks of their research, corresponding to European countries. Third difference depends on the results of research: older researchers aimed to make contribution only to Ukrainian history; younger scholars conducted various retrospective journeys into the different aspects of medieval and new history of Germany, Poland, Austria and Czechoslovakia. All Ukrainian intellectuals, whose legacy is prioritized and studied in the article, were concentrated on the research of the phenomenon of Ukrainian history as historical and political reality. The divergence between two different generations of Ukrainian émigré scholars lied in different significance of their contribution into the Ukrainian historical science and absence of the contribution into the global science for older scholars, different arguments put forward by Ukrainian intellectuals to support their concepts, as well as in the surroundings and circumstances of their education and research work as scholars.

The Imperialist historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries approached American history only from the perspective of Anglo-Saxons. The Indians were denigrated and ignored as a significant factor in the history of the United States. This paper identifies and analyzes these biases. By the 1890's a new generation of historians was beginning to question the patriotic nationalism of George Bancroft and other nineteenth century writers. The diplomatic and social rapprochement between Great Britain and the United States, the scientific history being taught in German universities, and the impact of Darwinian theory combined not only to break Americans out of their relatively cultural parochialism but also influenced a group of historians who urged a broader and more impartial focus for historical investigation (Wright 1966:25-35). This Imperialist school asserted that Colonial-Revolutionary America could be understood solely within the context of the entire British empire. Only by viewing the colonies from the perspective of London, they maintained, could a complete and unbiased history of the colonial period be written. Adopting a Darwinian view of social change and stressing the significance of the physical environment, the Imperialists - most notably its leading figures, George L. Beers, Herbert L. Osgood, Charles M. Andrews and Lawrence H. Gipson - wrote multivolume histories of the evolutionary development of colonial institutions and society under the influence of largely impersonal forces. They rejected earlier views of the burden placed on the colonists by British imperialist administration. The oppression of the British empire, they contended, was not the root cause of the Revolution.

This paper explores issues around disciplinary belonging and academic identity. Historians of science learn to think and practise like historians in terms of research practice, but this paper shows that British historians of science do not think of themselves as belonging to the disciplinary community of historians. They may be confident that they do history, but they insist that there is a distinction between historians and historians of science. That distinction is marked by an exaggeration of their differences with general historians, and a strong emphasis on the social value of the contacts and friendships offered by the national and international disciplinary community. In this vision, university departments are no longer seen as the congenial, safe intellectual homes described by previous scholars but are potentially uncomfortable places where academics with different training, experiences and expectations must mix. The comparatively static structures of universities, despite burgeoning new sub-fields of study, make this case study applicable to a far wider range of disciplines.

This book introduces the methodological and philosophical problems with which modern history of science is concerned, offering a comprehensive and critical review through description and evaluation of significant historiographical viewpoints. Incorporating discussion of key problems in general historical writing, with examples drawn from a range of disciplines, this non-elementary introduction bridges the gap between general history and history of science. Following a review of the early development of the history of science, the theory of history as applied to science history is introduced, examining the basic problems which this generates, including problems of periodisation, ideological functions, and the conflict between diachronical and anachronical historiography. Finally, the book considers the critical use, and analysis, of historical sources, and the possibility of the experiemental reconstruction of history. Aimed primarily at students, the book's broad scope and integration of historical, philosophical and scientific matters will interest philosophers, sociologists and general historians, for whom there is no alternative introduction to the subject at this level.

This book introduces the methodological and philosophical problems with which modern history of science is concerned, offering a comprehensive and critical review through description and evaluation of significant historiographical viewpoints. Incorporating discussion of key problems in general historical writing, with examples drawn from a range of disciplines, this non-elementary introduction bridges the gap between general history and history of science. Following a review of the early development of the history of science, the theory of history as applied to science history is introduced, examining the basic problems which this generates, including problems of periodisation, ideological functions, and the conflict between diachronical and anachronical historiography. Finally, the book considers the critical use, and analysis, of historical sources, and the possibility of the experiemental reconstruction of history. Aimed primarily at students, the book's broad scope and integration of historical, philosophical and scientific matters will interest philosophers, sociologists and general historians, for whom there is no alternative introduction to the subject at this level.