Editors’ Introduction

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeSpecial section Second Look: John Burnham’s How Superstition Won and Science LostEditors’ IntroductionMatthew Lavine and Alexandra HuiMatthew Lavine Search for more articles by this author and Alexandra Hui Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWe are pleased to continue the “Second Look” feature in Isis, which was instituted in the early 1990s by then-Editor Ronald Numbers and revived by our predecessor H. Floris Cohen. For this issue, we have invited ten scholars to reconsider John Burnham’s 1987 book How Superstition Won and Science Lost—or, in some cases, to consider it for the first time.Burnham was a provocative figure. As Stephen Casper notes (with some equivocation), he was an “establishmentarian,” though not one content to let the profession or discipline that he wielded considerable influence over rest comfortably in one place. The difficulty of defining the role that Burnham played—was he a gadfly, an elitist, a provocateur, an institutionalist?—carries through to his work in How Superstition Won, which is described in the essays that follow as everything from a reactionary jeremiad to a disturbingly prescient account of the state of popular science in the present day. With this book, Burnham accomplished the impressive feat of codifying a field of inquiry, the history of science popularization, that almost immediately began to question its own basic assumptions and to reject, in particular, Burnham’s model of how scientific knowledge did, or at least should, diffuse to the lay public. And yet—a phrase that begins many of the sentences in the essays that follow—How Superstition Won has not faded into irrelevance.In previous Second Look sections that examined a single volume, the authors of the works under consideration have sometimes been offered the opportunity to respond. Since Burnham died in 2017, we asked his friend and colleague Stephen Casper to write a summary response to the other essays presented here. Beyond that specific request to Casper, we gave our contributors no charge other than to discuss the book and its larger implications for the history of science. Unsurprisingly—though, we feel, productively—the resulting essays quickly diffused into areas far removed from the specific subjects addressed in the book. Nicolas Rasmussen and Robert Proctor see in it the seeds of Burnham’s controversial service as an expert witness on behalf of the tobacco industry. Sigrid Schmalzer notes uncanny echoes of Burnham’s depiction of midcentury American notions of science in turn-of-the-millennium China. Hansun Hsiung finds in the resolutely American-oriented book an unexpected connection between popularization and globalization.None of our contributors offered unqualified praise for the book. None has adopted, except in highly evolved or attenuated forms, Burnham’s perspective on popularization. Yet we were enormously gratified by the enthusiastic and thoughtful responses of the scholars whom we asked to write for this section. The resulting works are critical, adulatory, bemused, and grudgingly impressed by the continued pull of Burnham’s ideas, often in the same essay. We offer them as contributions to a body of scholarship on science and the public that has not always followed the path that Burnham wished it to but that nevertheless felt his influence. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 110, Number 4December 2019 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/706478 © 2019 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: Isis Current Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences 2020, Isis 111, no.S1S1 (Jan 2021): 1–317.https://doi.org/10.1086/713361