The Origins of Natural Science in America: The Essays of George Brown Goode ed. by Sally G. Kohlstedt

Abstract

954 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Project (Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Hanford) to reveal the coercive administration of the project and local resistance to it. With his “alternative history [of] the Manhattan Engineering District” (p. 252), Hales reevaluates the myth of the origin of atomic power by telling the story from the viewpoint of its effect on local residents, produc­ tion workers, and the immediate environment. The second essay, “Priesthood and Power,” by Steven Marx of California Polytechnic State University, is a sobering revelation on the meaning of “power” and who controls it. Marx lays bare the public relations packaging of a nuclear power project. Both essays zero in on the relationship between history, geography, and culture. Two other essays in Mapping American Culture implicitly address technology and culture. Timothy Davis of the University of Texas at Austin surveys the influence landscape photography has had on the image making of place. Richard Keller Simon of California Polytech­ nic deals with the major icon of consumer culture, the shopping mall, and how it can represent a modern version of an earlier, less technologically sophisticated, artificial construct, the garden. Also in the collection is a grouping of essays by Don Scheese of Santa Clara University, Kinereth Meyer of Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and Kath­ leen R. Wallace of the University of Minnesota. They explore lan­ guage, literature, and the meaning of place in American culture through Henry David Thoreau’s Journal, William Carlos Williams’s long poem Paterson, and midwestern women’s autobiographies, re­ spectively. Some readers may take issue with Wallace’s suggestion that the “official” Minnesota culture, including the radio stories of Garri­ son Keillor, is, in the editor’s words, “subtly racist and sexist” (p. 14). All the essays derive from shorter papers presented at the 1990 meeting of the California American Studies Association in San Luis Obispo, a conference entitled “Place in American Culture.” In select­ ing these interdisciplinary essays, the editors emphasize “the place of place” in American studies, a recently neglected area of inquiry that is enjoying a resurgence in part because of the quincentennial of Columbus’s “discovery” of America as a place. Joel Hodson Dr. Hodson is presently Fulbright lecturer and associate professor of American studies at Dokuz Eylul University in Izmir, Turkey. He is a former editor of American Studies International and the author of U.S. History since World War 11 (Washington, D.C., 1992). The Origins ofNatural Science in America: The Essays ofGeorge Brown Goode. Edited by Sally G. Kohlstedt. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institu­ tion Press, 1991. Pp. xi + 411; illustrations, notes, index. $45.00. From 1878 until his untimely death, George Brown Goode (1851 — 96) headed the United States National Museum of the Smithsonian Institution. Selected by the institution’s secretary Spencer Fullerton TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 955 Baird, Goode established the public dimension of the “nation’s attic” and defined its mission for collections, learning, and enjoyment. Baird chose wisely. Goode, an ichthyologist, was a capable naturalist, a gifted administrator, and, as this volume shows, a skilled and prolific writer. This collection of five essays prepared by Goode from 1886 to 1890 will refresh educators of all sorts who endure the verbiage of career bureaucrats. Goode, for example, could open with an ancient Oriental saying and then recast its meaning into an entire address on museums of the future. Historians and others interested in museum studies will also enjoy Goode’s discussions of early natural history and institutions of science and learning. In a 1988 publication, editor Sally Gregory Kohlstedt penned a memorable phrase when she described 19th-century college museums as “symbols and mechanisms for education.” Goode, himself a prod­ uct of college museums at Wesleyan University (the Orange Judd Hall of Natural Science) and Harvard University (Louis Agassiz’s Museum ofComparative Zoology), understood the use ofboth the symbol and the mechanism. In a beautiful image, free of any intellectual arrogance, he pictured the best museum as a “house full of ideas.” Goode’s essays are filled with ideas that have guided the development of museums in the United States. His analysis of the history of science is perhaps overly simple, but to his credit Goode...