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Varieties of Popular Science and the Transformations of Public Knowledge: Some Historical ReflectionsAuthor(s): By Andreas W. DaumSource: Isis, Vol. 100, No. 2 (June 2009), pp. 319-332Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/599550 .

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Varieties of Popular Science and theTransformations of Public

Knowledge

Some Historical Reflections

By Andreas W. Daum*

ABSTRACT

This essay suggests that we should understand the varieties of “popular science” as partof a larger phenomenon: the changing set of processes, practices, and actors that generateand transform public knowledge across time, space, and cultures. With such a reconcep-tualization we can both de-essentialize and historicize the idea of “popularization,” free itfrom normative notions, and move beyond existing imbalances in scholarship. The historyof public knowledge might thus find a central place in many fundamental narratives of themodern world. More specifically, the essay proposes that we pay more attention to formsof knowledge outside the realm of “science,” embrace the richness, traffic, and transfer ofpublic knowledge on a transnational scale as well as in comparative perspective, andrethink conventional forms of periodization.

T HE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF POPULAR SCIENCE seems to be one of the rare casesin which a young research field has been more haunted by its methodological problems

than convinced of its strengths, more concerned about its empirical gaps than forthcomingabout the results it has generated, and more doubtful about its positioning in historiog-raphy at large than adventurous in exploring where to situate itself.1 This paradoxical

* Department of History, State University of New York at Buffalo, 570 Park Hall, Buffalo, New York 14260;[email protected].

I would like to thank Jim Bono, Bernard Lightman, Ralph O’Connor, Jim Secord, and Jon Topham, as wellas Justin Donhauser, Kate Doran, and the audience at the University of Erfurt, Germany, where I presented aversion of this essay in October 2008, for providing valuable feedback and suggestions.

1 See Steven Shapin, “Science and the Public,” in Companion to the History of Modern Science, ed. R. C. Olbyet al. (London/New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 990–1007; Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumfrey, “SeparateSpheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularization and Science in Popular Culture,”History of Science, 1994, 32:237–267; Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, “A Genealogy of the Increasing Gapbetween Science and the Public,” Public Understanding of Science, 2001, 10:99–113; and the short summary

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situation has a lot to do with the indisputable problem of defining the actual object ofinquiry. The terms “popular science” and “popularization” quickly turn out to be prob-lematic as—in Max Weber’s terminology—ideal types that would serve as universalcategories open enough to structure empirical observations without equating the languageof historians with the language of their sources. Undoubtedly, these terms are of limiteduse if we test their logic: Is popular science only science popularized or something moreand different? What does “popular” mean? Can we still speak of “science” if “scientific”knowledge transforms into something very different—with respect to its reach, validity,and interpretation—once it is being consumed as a public good?

Today, older trickle-down or two-stage models that attempted to capture what happenswhen science is being popularized are passe—and rightly so.2 These models understandpopular science as the result of forms of communication through which specializedknowledge produced on a higher level—that is, within the realm of research-orientedscience—is translated to a largely passive audience. Popular science thus represents a kindof science “lite,” derivative at best, if not the illegitimate brainchild of true knowledgedragging its audience down the slippery slope toward trivialization. Criticism of thismodel has been endlessly varied, almost becoming a mantra; but in itself it offers no usefulalternatives. This is rather ironic, since hardly any historians—if any at all—in the lastthirty years or so have actually subscribed to the two-stage model.3

It might be time to take a more optimistic stance, without repeating the tropes ofemphatic promises that so many new research fields have used since historians saidgood-bye to the “noble dream” of finding the truth by reading the right sources correctly.4

Specifically, I want to suggest, first, that we appreciate the new wealth of historical studieson popular science—but also acknowledge some of the persistent sociological anddiscursive imbalances that mark the field in which these studies situate themselves. Thisshort review may help to analyze the historical varieties of popular science more vigor-ously and introduce more comparative questions to the field. Second, I would like topropose some heuristic categories that can be applied within local, regional, and nationalcontexts, as well as to questions about transcultural communication, all of which wouldmake it easier to design strategies for placing what is so insufficiently called “popularscience” into broader frameworks. With the aim of de-essentializing and historicizing“popular science” in mind, my third suggestion is that we might understand forms ofpopular science as specific variations of a much larger phenomenon—that is, as transfor-mations of public knowledge across time, space, and cultures. Ultimately, then, thehistoriography of popular science would become the nucleus, and perhaps even thetrendsetter, of a broader and more interdisciplinary endeavor.

by Bruce V. Lewenstein, “Popularization,” in The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science, ed. JohnL. Heilbron (Oxford/New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 667–668.

2 Stephen Hilgartner, “The Dominant View of Popularization: Conceptual Problems, Political Uses,” SocialStudies of Science, 1990, 20:519–539. For the diametrically opposite concept of “expository science,” whichassumes a “sort of continuum of methods and practices utilized both within research and far beyond, for purposesof conveying science-based information,” see Terry Shinn and Richard Whitley, eds., Expository Science: Formsand Functions of Popularisation (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985), p. viii.

3 The sweeping critique of the two-stage model tends to overlook, however, that popularizing activitiesthroughout history have often construed rhetorically a gap between expert knowledge and popular knowledge tomake the opposite argument—i.e., to present popular knowledge as something positive and necessary.

4 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession(Cambridge/New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988).

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IMBALANCES AND NEW PERSPECTIVES

It is both easy and necessary to identify the wide gaps in our understanding of thehistorical varieties of popular science. We know considerably more about these today,however, than half a generation ago. There are new surveys concentrating on individualcountries and original monographic studies, in addition to a plethora of articles and someessay collections that cover a wide array of themes, media, and actors.5 We know moreabout the many individuals and loosely formed groups that have popularized science,especially about female writers and other authors left aside by a whiggish historiographyof science.6 Scholars have identified a variety of sites in which knowledge has been madepublic—from bourgeois family homes and pubs to natural history associations, fromworld’s fairs to television screens.7 The history of print media, book production, andreading has been conceptualized as a prime field for studying both the intellectualdynamics of popular science and the material practices that enable these pursuits.8 The

5 For exemplary studies that focus on national settings see, for England, David E. Allen, The Naturalist inBritain: A Social History, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994); Roger Cooter, The CulturalMeaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984); Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain(Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1998); and James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publica-tion, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: Univ. ChicagoPress, 2000). For France: Bruno Beguet, ed., La science pour tous: Sur la vulgarisation scientifique en Francede 1850 a 1914 (Paris: Bibliotheque du Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, 1990); and Daniel Raichvargand Jean Jacques, Savants et ignorants: Une histoire de la vulgarisation des sciences (Paris: Seuil, 1991). ForGermany: Alfred Kelly, The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwinism in Germany, 1860–1914(Chapel Hill: Univ. North Carolina Press, 1981); and Andreas W. Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19.Jahrhundert: Burgerliche Kultur, naturwissenschaftliche Bildung und die deutsche Offentlichkeit, 1848–1914,2nd ed. (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2002). For the United States: Annette M. Woodlief, “Science in Popular Culture,”in Handbook of American Popular Culture, ed. M. Thomas Inge, Vol. 3 (Westport, Conn./London: Greenwood,1981), pp. 429–458; and John C. Burnham, How Superstition Won and Science Lost: Popularizing Science andHealth in the United States (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1987). For some recent essay collectionssee Bernard Lightman, ed., Victorian Science in Context (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1997); Aileen Fyfe andLightman, eds., Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences (Chicago: Univ. ChicagoPress, 2007); and Carsten Kretschmann, ed., Wissenspopularisierung: Konzepte der Wissensverbreitung imWandel (Berlin: Akademie, 2003). Many relevant articles can be found in N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C.Spary, eds., Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996).

6 Catherine Benedic, “Le monde des vulgarisateurs,” in La science pour tous, ed. Beguet, pp. 30–40;“Dictionnaire des principaux vulgarisateurs,” ibid., pp. 41–49; Barbara T. Gates and Ann B. Shteir, eds., NaturalEloquence: Women Reinscribe Science (Madison: Univ. Wisconsin Press, 1997); Shteir, Cultivating Women,Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760 to 1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ.Press, 1996); Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert, pp. 377–458, 473–518; and BernardLightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: Univ. ChicagoPress, 2007).

7 See Fyfe and Lightman, eds., Science in the Marketplace (cit. n. 5); Sally G. Kohlstedt, “From LearnedSociety to Public Museum: The Boston Society of Natural History,” in The Organization of Knowledge inModern America, 1860–1920, ed. Alexandra Olsen and John Voss (Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins Univ.Press, 1979), pp. 386–406; Anne Secord, “Science in the Pub: Artisan Botanists in Early Nineteenth-CenturyLancashire,” Hist. Sci., 1994, 32:269–315; and, with a focus on the intersection of bourgeois family life andscientific imagination, Deborah R. Coen, Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life(Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2007). On science in twentieth-century (visual) media see Gregg Mitman, ReelNature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999); and MarcelC. LaFollette, Science on the Air: Popularizers and Personalities on Radio and Early Television (Chicago: Univ.Chicago Press, 2008).

8 Jim Secord’s Victorian Sensation (cit. n. 5) stands out as a landmark study. For the British context see alsoGeoffrey Cantor et al., Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004); Louise Henson, Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-CenturyMedia (Aldershot/Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004); James Mussell, Science, Time, and Space in the LateNineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Movable Types (Aldershot/Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2007); and JonathanR. Topham, “Publishing ‘Popular Science’ in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in Science in the Marketplace,

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metaphorical and visual dimensions of knowledge production have become a serioustheme among historians.9 Furthermore, the complex relationship between popular scienceand religion, which defies older black-and-white conflict paradigms, enjoys increasingattention.10 More generally, there is a tendency to understand forms of popularization asmultidimensional processes of communication among a plurality of knowledge producers,audiences, and public sites, with each of these ideal type factors assuming reciprocal andchanging roles that may overlap.

In spite of the increase in the number of studies, however, the field at large ischaracterized by remarkable imbalances, and some of these have tended to harden overtime. Imbalances in a given field of research may be loosely defined as forms ofasymmetry between the emphasis on some topics and the neglect of others, as well as thedisproportionate ways in which recognition is given to certain results at the expense ofothers. Such imbalances always reflect the intellectual dynamics in a given field. Thehistoriography of popular science can only profit by promoting more heterodoxy andmicrohistories, by appreciating a greater diversity of approaches, and by exploringneglected avenues of investigation.11 Yet existing imbalances tend to fuel thematic andmethodological path dependencies that strengthen the inclination to become self-referential in those areas that we know most about already. I would like to point out threesuch imbalances:

● the thematic emphasis on science—especially the natural sciences (and what is beingcalled the “natural world”)—and the scientific community, an emphasis that oftenfails to appreciate the variety of sources of public knowledge and the communicativedynamics in other fields of popular culture;

● the reliance on secondary literature written in English, coupled with a dominant focuson historical developments in Britain as a kind of lead sector, a focus that neglectsexisting research on the non-English-speaking world and misses multiple opportu-nities for comparisons with other linguistic and cultural settings;

● the chronological focus on the nineteenth century, which has not sought to distin-guish more precisely how the goals, rhetoric, and practices of popular science

ed. Fyfe and Lightman, pp. 135–168. More generally, see Robert Darnton, “History of Reading,” in NewPerspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke, 2nd ed. (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press,2001), pp. 157–186.

9 See James J. Bono, “Science, Discourse, and Literature: The Role/Rule of Metaphor in Science,” inLiterature and Science: Theory and Practice, ed. Stuart Peterfreund (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1990),pp. 59–89; Robert M. Young, Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge/New York:Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985); Caroline A. Jones, Peter Louis Galison, and Amy E. Slaton, eds., PicturingScience, Producing Art (New York: Routledge, 1998); Bernard Lightman, “The Visual Theology of VictorianPopularizers of Science: From Reverent Eye to Chemical Retina,” Isis, 2000, 91:651–680; Anke te Heesen, TheWorld in a Box: The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press,2002); Anne Secord, “Botany on a Plate: Pleasure and the Power of Pictures in Promoting Early Nineteenth-Century Scientific Knowledge,” Isis, 2002, 93:28–57; “Science and Visual Culture” [Focus section], ibid., 2006,97:75–132; Ann B. Shteir and Lightman, eds., Figuring It Out: Science, Gender, and Visual Culture (Hanover,N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2006); and Bernd Huppauf and Peter Weingart, eds., Science Images andPopular Images of the Sciences (New York: Routledge, 2007).

10 John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge/New York: Cam-bridge Univ. Press, 1991); Peter J. Bowler, Reconciling Science and Religion: The Debate in Early Twentieth-Century Britain (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2001); David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., WhenScience and Christianity Meet (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2003); and Aileen Fyfe, Science and Salvation:Evangelical Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2004).

11 On the role of microhistory in the history of science see Paula Findlen, “The Two Cultures of Scholarship?”Isis, 2005, 96:230–237.

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changed during that century as well as on their way into the “Age of Extremes” andtoday’s knowledge society.12

As for the first imbalance: so far, most studies of popular science have been written byhistorians of science and are addressed to historians of science. They mostly deal with therelationship between the sciences—meaning the natural sciences as they emerged in thenineteenth century—and the public, and they focus on how public discourses embracedthe “natural world.” In their remarkable effort to question the supposedly unavoidableepistemological barriers between practitioners of science and the general public, recentstudies often tend to perpetuate the very notion of a scientific community—as if itsmembers were not, at the same time, always members of multiple communities.

I think that the focus on the sciences and on explaining the configurations of knowledgeabout the natural world has become too exclusive. The natural sciences and natural historyare not by definition the only fields to study if we are interested in finding out howsocieties generated and publicized knowledge to make meaningful statements about theirworld. Even if we were to relate the history of popularization primarily to the developmentof professional science, which is by no means the only possible reference point, it seemsto me that the focus on the natural sciences and the natural world captures only onesegment of a much larger fabric of popular knowledge. In fact, it fails to take fully intoaccount what many societies after 1800 were striving for: to understand Wissenschaft andWissenschaftlichkeit—that is, scholarship, knowledge production, and the moral ethosattached to both—as modes of coping with the world rather than just vehicles forestablishing specific sectors of research.13

Historians of science have so far been much more at ease when referring to popularmedicine and technology than when looking at the humanities, the social sciences, andother sectors of popular culture. However, the popularization of theories of politicaleconomy in the early nineteenth century has just as much a place in our field as the spreadof Darwin’s evolutionary theory. The popularization of psychoanalysis allows us to studyhow a scientific vocabulary captured the popular imagination across the globe; so too didthe embrace and redefinition of management theories and standards of efficiency designedin the United States in the twentieth century. The rise of music journalism in the earlynineteenth century and of archaeological digs in the Mediterranean world later also offerample opportunities to study how societies began to construe boundaries between, but alsotranscended, the dichotomy of professional cultures on the one hand and so-called amateuror lay practices on the other.14

12 Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Pantheon, 1994).13 In contrast to the use of the term “science” in the English-speaking world, “Wissenschaft” has not been

limited to the natural sciences in the German context; see Andreas W. Daum, “Wissenschaft and Knowledge,”in Germany, 1800–1870, ed. Jonathan Sperber (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004), pp. 137–161.

14 On theories of political economy in the early nineteenth century see Noel W. Thompson, The People’sScience: The Popular Political Economy of Exploitation and Crisis, 1816–34 (Cambridge/New York: Cam-bridge Univ. Press, 1984). On the spread of Darwin’s theory see Thomas F. Glick, ed., The ComparativeReception of Darwinism: With a New Preface (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1988); and Eve-Marie Engels, ed.,Die Rezeption von Evolutionstheorien im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995). On thepopularization of psychoanalysis see Joy Damousi and Mariano Ben Plotkin, eds., The Transnational Uncon-scious: Essays in the History of Psychoanalysis and Transnationalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).On the international reception of economic models coined in the United States see Richard Kuisel, Seducing theFrench: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1993); and Mary Nolan, Visions ofModernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (Oxford/New York: Oxford Univ. Press,1994). On the rise of music journalism see Celia Applegate, Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Men-delssohn’s Revival of the St. Matthew Passion (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 2005). On the role of

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Jean-Marc Drouin and Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent argued not long ago that evennatural history, which seems to have been self-evidently popular during the nineteenthcentury, was deliberately construed and promoted as a field of popular interest.15 Accept-ing this observation, and following its insight as a methodological trajectory, wouldencourage de-essentializing our understanding of specific fields of knowledge that seem-ingly shift from being regarded as scientific to becoming popular (or the reverse). Instead,we could use case studies from various fields to examine in more general terms how andwhy societies at given periods have promoted the idea of public participation in knowl-edge and have defined certain practices of knowledge as popular. Such an approach wouldgreatly help to clarify why, indeed, specific fields—for example, botany in the lateeighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—enjoyed more popularity than others.

A second imbalance that deserves a closer look is the dominant role that historicalstudies on popular science written in English, and especially those focused on VictorianBritain, have played in framing our discussions. Historians of Victorian science haveadvanced with enormous sophistication in exploring the topography of popular science.However, it is problematic to narrow the geographical focus, continue to neglect thehistory of popular science in other parts of the world, and thus to look at Britain, even ifunintentionally, as a model case or norm. Provocatively speaking of a “British parochi-alism,” James Secord has recently deplored the lack of recognition among British histo-rians of science, even of works dealing with developments in the United States.16 This gapis more dramatic—and widening—if we include Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe,Latin America, Australia, and Asia. Obviously, the British case—like any other nationalsetting—is anything but representative of others, and the assumption that “Britain led theworld” in the nineteenth century is worth discussion.17 Britain’s overall development inthe nineteenth and twentieth centuries is characterized by a number of particularities thatdistinguish this case significantly from others—such as those of newer nation-states likeFrance, Italy, Germany, India, and China or older empires like Russia. These particular-ities have had an immediate impact on the role of science in society, even if we name onlythe relatively early and continuous expansion of forms of civil public spheres, thebypassing of a radical revolution in 1848, the dynamics of both imperialism and decolo-nization, the relative constraints on the state in interfering with university education, andthe lack of radical regime changes (of the sort that took place in 1789, 1871, 1911, 1917,1933, 1945, 1947, and 1949 in the other countries cited).

One need not subscribe entirely to the postcolonial studies project of “provincializingEurope” to find Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call for a “gesture of inversion” to be a usefulmethodological device.18 How was science popularized in settings that seem blank or grayon our map? Why did others—whether in British India or the People’s Republic ofChina—make knowledge public and create ways of participating in this knowledge? Andhow can we break out of the boundaries of nation-states as seemingly coherent entities and

archaeology see Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany,1750–1970 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1996).

15 Jean-Marc Drouin and Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, “Nature for the People,” in Cultures of NaturalHistory, ed. Jardine et al. (cit. n. 5), pp. 408–425.

16 James A. Secord, “Knowledge in Transit,” Isis, 2004, 95:654–672, on p. 669.17 Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman, “Science in the Marketplace: An Introduction,” in Science in the

Marketplace, ed. Fyfe and Lightman (cit. n. 5), pp. 1–19, on p. 9.18 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton,

N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000); and Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaksfor ‘Indian’ Pasts?” Representations, 1992, 37:1–26, on p. 8.

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overcome hierarchies based on a dichotomy between (imperial) centers and (colonial)peripheries?

In Leviathan and the Air-Pump, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer brilliantly alertedhistorians and sociologists of science to the creation of audiences and public sites forexperiments arranged to validate specific forms of scientific thinking and to make claimsfor authority in seventeenth-century England. Comparable but distinct observations havebeen made for other European countries. They invite us to test in a transcultural com-parison the complex linkages between performance, public appeal, and the reach of whatcontemporaries perceived as legitimate knowledge.19 Such comparison is now possible inmany areas—for example, we might compare the claims to authority made by healers,magicians, and midwives in Costa Rica in the nineteenth century with trends in popularmedicine in Central Europe. We can ask how efforts to popularize science in India “withinthe compelling demands of colonialism,” yet mediated through local brokers in Bengaland elsewhere, unfolded in comparison to efforts in Lancashire and London.20 It ispossible to draw connections between natural history associations in Victorian Britain andthose in nineteenth-century German states, which were grappling with the nature of civilsociety. Likewise, Spain’s much discussed backwardness with respect to the developmentof professional science during the nineteenth century and the dominance of Catholicismthere invite comparisons with Italy, Poland, and Ireland. The Spanish example, in partic-ular, demonstrates that these factors did not exclude activities in service of what may becalled popular science.21

Such comparisons must necessarily remain rudimentary as long as we lack sufficientempirical data; and, as with all comparisons, we cannot operate within a static grid ofparameters. Even more, it is important to find out how notions of “popularity” and“knowledge” have been developed in distinct ways in various cultures and how thesecultures have been linked with one another.22 By 1909 Ernst Haeckel’s Natural History ofCreation could be read in twenty-five languages across the world. This “gospel ofevolutionary theory” served as a catalyst for public discussions about fundamental ques-tions of life in the workers’ movement in Argentina no less than among intellectuals in

19 See Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the ExperimentalLife (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985); Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric,Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,1992); Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820 (Cam-bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992); and Helmar Schramm, ed., Spektakulare Experimente: Praktiken derEvidenzproduktion im 17. Jahrhundert (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2006).

20 Steven Paul Palmer, From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism: Doctors, Healers, and Public Power inCosta Rica, 1800–1940 (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2003); and Narender K. Sehgal, Satpal Sangwan, andSubodh Mahanti, eds., Uncharted Terrains: Essays on Science Popularisation in Pre-Independence India (NewDelhi: Vigyan Prasar, 2000), p. 4.

21 Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert (cit. n. 5), pp. 85–191, 210–225; and FaidraPapanelopoulou, Agustı Nieto-Galan, and Enrique Perdiguero, eds., Popularizing Science and Technology in theEuropean Periphery, 1800–2000 (Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming). See also Marta Petrusewicz, “The Mod-ernization of the European Periphery: Ireland, Poland, and the Two Sicilies, 1820–1870: Parallel and Connected,Distinct and Comparable,” in Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective, ed. DeborahCohen and Maura O’Connor (New York/London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 145–163.

22 See Susan Sheets-Pyenson, “Popular Science Periodicals in Paris and London: The Emergence of a LowScientific Culture, 1820–1875,” Annals of Science, 1985, 42:549–572; Angela Schwarz, Der Schlussel zurmodernen Welt: Wissenschaftspopularisierung in Gro�britannien und Deutschland im Ubergang zur Moderne(ca. 1870–1914) (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1999); Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Anne Rasmussen, eds., La sciencepopulaire dans la presse et l’edition XIXe et XXe siecles (Paris: CNRS, 1997); and Joachim Schummer,Bensaude-Vincent, and Brigitte Van Tiggelen, eds., The Public Image of Chemistry (Singapore/Hackensack,N.J.: World Scientific, 2007).

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Austria and in Poland, a country in which about 30 percent of all popular sciencepublications at the time were translations.23 Works by John Tyndall and Camille Flam-marion had similar effects. Do we want to fall behind the popularizers we study in ourability to reach out to audiences beyond national boundaries? Shouldn’t the leadinghistory of science journals do more to solicit reviews of work published in languages otherthan English? Shouldn’t we, as individuals organizing conference panels and puttingtogether essay collections, do more to include scholars whose work is in other languages?And why not do more to design projects that involve different countries and capitalize onthe use of English as our global language?

Comparisons can be made across time, too. This perspective leads to the third imbal-ance I noted above: that between the dominant focus on the nineteenth century and theastonishingly small number of studies on the history of popular science in the twentiethcentury. The nineteenth century is presumably the only historical period for which we canspeak with some coherence about popular science as a practice, an intellectual construct,a rhetorical strategy, and an economic endeavor, all at the same time. Yet the nineteenthcentury is not a coherent entity either. For Britain, one may argue that the 1820s and 1830sare a period of dense transformation, especially with regard to the expansion of a broadprint market and related reading habits. In the cases of France and Germany, therevolution of 1848 provides an important symbolic hinge.24

Moreover, how do we overcome the conventional divide between the so-called earlymodern and modern periods? How do we explain the many commonalities betweencommunicative and economic practices that aimed to make knowledge public in differentcountries during the decades between the publication of the French Encyclopedie and thatof the Bridgewater Treatises, in which enlightenment became a “business” but alsoremained, for many, a road to salvation?25 And do the final decades of the nineteenthcentury not mark more than the end of the massive takeoff of popular science? From thelate nineteenth century on, many countries in the Northern Hemisphere strove to popu-larize knowledge while one attack after another was being launched on positivism and thebelief in objectivity. Popularization, albeit in new forms, intensified as the modernphysical sciences emerged, state bureaucracies expanded, and “big science” began to takeshape, which also meant that aggressive forms of public advocacy for science were beingdeveloped.26 These societies expanded on the popularization of science, yet under radi-

23 Dora Barrancos, La escena iluminada: Ciencias para trabajadores, 1890–1930 (Buenos Aires: Plus Ultra,1996); Werner Michler, Darwinismus und Literatur: Naturwissenschaftliche und literarische Intelligenz inOsterreich, 1859–1914 (Vienna/Cologne: Bohlau, 1999); and Leszek Zasztowt, Popularyzacja nauki w Kro-lestwie Polskim 1864–1905 (Warsaw: Zakład Narodowy, 1989), p. 269. The quotation is from Eduard vonHartmann (“Evangelium der Descendenztheorie”), Deutsche Rundschau, 1875, 4:17.

24 Topham, “Publishing ‘Popular Science’ in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain” (cit. n. 8); and Andreas W.Daum, “Science, Politics, and Religion: Humboldtian Thinking and the Transformations of Civil Society inGermany, 1830–1870,” in Science and Civil Society, ed. Tom Broman and Lynn Nyhart (Osiris, 17) (Chicago:Univ. Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 107–140.

25 Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopedie, 1775–1800(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1979); and Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France(New York: Norton, 1995). See also Thomas Broman, “The Habermasian Public Sphere and ‘Science in theEnlightenment,’” Hist. Sci., 1998, 36:123–149.

26 On politics and science referring to one another as resources see Mitchell G. Ash, “Wissenschaft und Politikals Ressourcen fureinander,” in Wissenschaften und Wissenschaftspolitik—Bestandaufnahmen zu Formationen,Bruchen und Kontinuitaten im Deutschland des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Rudiger vom Bruch and Brigitte Kaderas(Stuttgart: Steiner, 2002), pp. 32–51; and Detlev J. K. Peukert, “The Genesis of the ‘Final Solution’ from theSpirit of Science,” in Reevaluating the Third Reich, ed. Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan (New York: Holmes& Meier, 1993), pp. 234–252.

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cally changing circumstances and with new aims: consumer society grew enormously,state interference in private life was increasingly legitimized through reference to “sci-entific” insights, and some countries went through periods of authoritarian rule (as in Italy,Spain, Hungary, and Japan) or almost totalitarian dictatorship (as in Germany and theSoviet Union).

We know far too little about the transformations of popular science between 1890 andthe advent of the age of television in the 1950s. How were new sites of public knowledgedesigned in an age of extreme political, ideological, and economic polarization? What roledid popular science play for Fascist Italy and in 1930s Japan, a country that had made hugemodernization efforts in a dynamic communication with “Western” science during theMeiji Restoration? How did Nazi Germany use popular “science” as a resource tolegitimize its discriminatory and ultimately genocidal policies? How did public knowl-edge figure in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries that feverishly attempted tomake a great leap forward into modernity? These countries embraced science and tech-nology as the very foundation of their design for a future society and a socialist modernity.Recent studies allow us, for example, to examine how archaeology and engineering werepromoted as areas of public knowledge in the People’s Republic of China and in socialistEast Germany to forge their respective national identities.27

It is quite a stretch to go from eighteenth-century soirees of Parisian intellectualsdiscussing astronomical observations or nineteenth-century itinerant lecturers preachingthe gospels of natural history to Nazi promoters of eugenics. Construing straightforwardlines of continuity—for example, from Haeckel (or Darwin, for that matter) to Hitler—isunsatisfactory.28 But we need to explore more vigorously, as cumbersome as it is, whatkind of “science” Goebbels and Lysenko wanted to make popular and how potentialanswers to that question figure into the much longer history of popular science. In the longrun, we need to ask what role popular science played—and what purposes it hasserved—in the ugly narratives of the twentieth century.29

SOME HEURISTIC CATEGORIES AND THE MANY NARRATIVES OF PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE

Marc Bloch once reminded historians that the “charm” of history is not diminished bymethodological inquiry but that the “day of precision” is “slow in coming.”30 We mighttry to enhance our methodological inquiry—and thus highlight potential questions forfurther research—by testing some common heuristic categories that are freed from

27 Morris Low, ed., Building a Modern Japan: Science, Technology, and Medicine in the Meiji Era andBeyond (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); James T. Andrews, Science for the Masses: The BolshevikState, Public Science, and the Popular Imagination in Soviet Russia, 1917–1934 (College Station: Texas A&MUniv. Press, 2003); Robert Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999);Sigrid Schmalzer, The People’s Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China(Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2008); and Dolores L. Augustine, Red Prometheus: Engineering and Dictator-ship in East Germany, 1945–1990 (Cambridge, Mass./London: MIT Press, 2007).

28 Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: With a New Introduction (New Brunswick,N.J.: Transaction, 2004); and Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, andRacism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

29 Charles S. Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the ModernEra,” American Historical Review, 2000, 165:807–831. Two new grand syntheses emphasize the ambiguousnotions of Europe’s history in the twentieth century: Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s TwentiethCentury (New York: Vintage, 2000); and Bernard Wasserstein, Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europein Our Time (Oxford/New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007).

30 Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. Peter Putnam (New York: Vintage, 1953), pp. 8, 157.

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normative notions and applicable across time, space, and cultures; these may facilitatecommunication with other historians as well as with scholars from other disciplines.31

Transformation over Time and Causality

What kinds of continuities and discontinuities can be identified in the history of popularscience? Do we not need to reconsider some of the rise-and-fall narratives of popularscience? There is a tendency at times to reproduce the Habermasian, negative teleology ofa public sphere degenerating with the breakthrough of capitalist mass society.32 Ulti-mately, possible explanations hinge on what causal factors we focus on and how we relatethese to what is being called popular science. Improvements in print technology and theexpansion of a reading public might explain the rapid increase in popular readingmaterials, as in Britain after about 1830; but these do not necessarily explain why and howpopularity was rhetorically construed in either earlier or later periods. In general, we havenot yet examined closely enough how popular science narratives relate to politicalnarratives. For example, there are considerable continuities in the personnel, intellectualconcepts, and practices devoted to popularizing science from imperial Russia to the newSoviet Union, across the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Regime changes may explain alot—as in the case of Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933 and the ensuing establishment ofa racial state in Germany—but they do not explain everything.33

Actors and Agency

In recent years we have significantly broadened our understanding of “who the guys were”that popularized science. A whole world of forgotten and seemingly obscure but enor-mously influential popularizers has thus come to life.34 Broadening the array of actors—including women and nonpractitioners of science, Evangelical pastors and Jesuits, Dar-winists and anti-Darwinists—has helped to show how diverse the interests behindpopularization efforts were. This new view has contributed to the questioning of conven-tional narratives, such as the one that cast science popularization as a secular, antireligiousweapon. Still, we do not know enough about knowledge producers outside the so-calledscientific community, and we know very little about hidden individuals and groups suchas itinerant lecturers and translators, the often forgotten hinges of transcultural commu-nication. In a broader sense, the issue of agency deserves more attention. Who wanted tocreate—or grant—the power to participate in public knowledge? For whom? And to whatends? What mechanisms of exclusion—for example, along the lines of gender, race,ethnicity, or religion—were inscribed in the rhetoric of popularization, which oftenappeared to be all-inclusive?

31 The following categories are different in nature from those that may be derived primarily from sciencestudies and the sociology of science; see, e.g., the suggestions in Robert E. Kohler, “A Generalist’s Vision,” Isis,2005, 96:224–229.

32 Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category ofBourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). Fordiscussion of the Habermasian model see Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).

33 Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London(Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1989); Andrews, Science for the Masses (cit. n. 27); and Michael Burleigh andWolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945 (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge Univ.Press, 1991).

34 Lewis Pyenson, “‘Who the Guys Were’: Prosopography in the History of Science,” Hist. Sci., 1977,15:155–188. See in particular Lightman’s groundbreaking study Victorian Popularizers of Science (cit. n. 6).

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Practices, Markets, and Consumption

Knowledge becomes public through actors seeking publicity and articulating the desire toframe particular knowledge as a public commodity. Older explanatory models—the mostfamous of which is, again, Jurgen Habermas’s idea of Offentlichkeit—have emphasizedthe role of “public sphere(s)” as arenas of public dealings with knowledge. A moredynamic approach would be to look more consciously for the processes, actors, and ideasthat have aimed at allowing parts of society to participate in knowledge (while excludingothers)—without assuming that these processes led necessarily to the development ofseemingly distinct public spheres, as opposed to seemingly “private” ones. Moreover,recent studies have argued convincingly that “knowledge in transit” is best understood asa set of practices that take place in a public “marketplace.”35 They are generated by a widevariety of actors, pursue various interests, and rely on the development of new technol-ogies. These practices compete with other cultural offerings for the attention of varyingbut also overlapping audiences and make use of all available media. If generalized beyondthe case of Victorian Britain and the natural sciences, this approach might well help us tounderstand very different periods and distinct cultural settings.

Presentation and Performance

Agents and practices of popular science have often blended genres. They have blurred thelines between fictional and nonfictional accounts, science and literature, textual presen-tation and the display of visual images. In endless variations, public presentations havepoeticized science, made knowledge tangible, and enchanted audiences. Furthermore,practices aimed at making knowledge public have been part of the tendency of all socialaction and interaction to assume the character of a performance, an act staged for anaudience, as Erving Goffman has shown in his now-classic studies. The transformationsof popular science might be a particularly good place to study how knowledge was stagedand how audiences applauded, rejected, or recreated such performances—from anatomicaltheaters in the seventeenth century and nineteenth-century panoramas to the lobbyingactivities of today’s advocacy groups that dramatize scientific advice in their appeal tolarge audiences.36

I would even argue that presentations of public knowledge have generated a series ofperformative acts that belong essentially to the much larger tendency of the modern ageto stage public life. This tendency to spectacularize reality as a way of coping with it hasintensified since the late eighteenth century. It has led from mass rallies celebrating theFrench nation and the theatricalization of bourgeois consumer culture in department stores

35 J. Secord, “Knowledge in Transit” (cit. n. 16); and Fyfe and Lightman, eds., Science in the Marketplace (cit.n. 5).

36 See Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone,1998); Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Christine Blondel, eds., Science and Spectacle in the EuropeanEnlightenment (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); Helmar Schramm, Ludger Schwarte, and Jan Lazardzig, eds.,Kunstkammer—Laboratorium—Buhne: Schauplatze des Wissens im 17. Jahrhundert (Berlin/New York: DeGruyter, 2003); Simon Schaffer, “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century,” Hist. Sci.,1983, 21:1–43; Ralph O’Connor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856(Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2007); and Fred Nadis, Wonder Shows: Performing Science, Magic, andReligion in America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2005). Easy access to Goffman’s writings isprovided by Charles Lemert and Ann Branaman, eds., The Goffman Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell,1997); and A. Paul Hare and Herbert H. Blumberg, Dramaturgical Analysis of Social Interaction (New York:Praeger, 1988). Stephen Hilgartner, Science on Stage: Expert Advice as Public Drama (Stanford, Calif.: StanfordUniv. Press, 2000), relies explicitly on Goffman.

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at the fin de siecle to Fascist spectacles and the staging of international politics during theCold War.37 Showing fossils and mammoth bones to mid-nineteenth-century audiencesremains something different from putting American color televisions sets on display at anexhibit in Moscow in 1959. Still, these acts are comparable in their desire to dramatize thevalue of science and technology for the purpose of convincing audiences to believe in thepower of knowledge producers and consumers alike.

Authority and Meaning

How and to what extent did publicity change the meaning of knowledge? Any analysis ofpublic knowledge will need to ask which purpose what knowledge serves, what it meansin a given society, and how it is being interpreted. Enthusiastic beekeepers who metregularly at the evening entertainments of a local natural history association in Germanyaround 1800 might have been, at first glance, pursuing only private interests. But oftenthey were also cultivating a form of knowledge meant to promote patriotism or liberatethem from state restrictions. We enter less charming territory if we ask what ideologicalaims Stalinist organizations pursued when they organized public lectures for workers. Inany case, we need to continue asking who claimed what authority for which knowl-edge—of whatever reach—and how this knowledge was used for purposes other thansimply enlightening mankind. The rise of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, initially theaffair of small groups claiming access to esoteric knowledge, to become a significant partof today’s “alternative” (or mainstream) public culture illustrates such transformations.38

Communication and Transfer across Borders

The migration of popular science on a transnational and transcultural scale is, so far, verylittle explored.39 There is plenty of evidence to suggest that comparable desires for publicknowledge developed in different cultural settings and that popular science became atransnational commodity already in the nineteenth century. The actors on this stage wereoften operating out of local and regional contexts—a fact that encourages us to lookbeyond national frameworks. Here was a zinc manufacturer in Illinois who helped foundthe Open Court, a prominent U.S.-based journal devoted to reconciling science andreligion (and translating Haeckel into English), there a Sabbath school in Massachusettsbuying the works of the Scottish theologian and astronomer Thomas Dick; RajendralalMitra helped introduce photography to Bengal, and Edward Sylvester Morse, the multi-

37 See, among others, George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and MassMovements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press,1991); Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marche: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920 (Prince-ton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981); Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture inFin-de-Siecle Paris (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1998); Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle:The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1997); and, with a focus onperformance, theatricality, and the politics of visibility in international relations, Andreas W. Daum, Kennedy inBerlin, trans. Dona Geyer (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008).

38 Helmut Zander, Anthroposophie in Deutschland: Theosophische Weltanschauung und gesellschaftlichePraxis 1884–1945, 2 vols. (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007).

39 There are now myriads of writings—some more empirical, some more theoretical—articulating the desireto introduce more transnational and global angles to historiography at large and to situate national narrative inworld history. One place to start is the recent discussion about U.S. history. See Thomas Bender, ed., RethinkingAmerican History in a Global Age (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 2002); and Bender, A Nation amongNations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2006).

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talented scholar from Maine, popularized Darwin’s evolutionary theory in Japan duringhis short stint as a professor of zoology in Tokyo.40

The traffic of ideas, people, and goods in the service of popularizing knowledge hashardly ever formed a circle or a continuum. Instead, public knowledge has often traveledbetween unequal destinations, beset by lost baggage, missed arrival times, and disap-pointed expectations. It was rejected or reinterpreted by the crowds waiting at the gate andturned into something hardly thought of at its moment of departure. What was popular inone context could become unpopular in another. Forms of transcultural communication inpopular science—as in the sciences at large—have always remained dynamic processes oftransformation in transit.41

FROM SCIENCE TO KNOWLEDGE

If we use existing asymmetries in our field as starting points from which to develop morecomparative and transnational perspectives, the public character of science remains oneimportant, but not the only, explanandum. The issues at stake will then no longer beframed exclusively within the historiography of science; they will become, as well, partof a history of knowledge that ties in with “general” history and other disciplines. If, aspart of this reconceptualization, we frame our heuristic categories in more general terms,the varieties of popular science become variations of a much broader theme, particularlyof how public knowledge has been generated and transformed over time and in differentcultures. Accordingly, public knowledge may then best be described as a changing set ofmaterial, cultural, and intellectual practices and presentations—and the consumptionthereof—aimed at creating and communicating knowledge as a commodity in publicenterprises that are defined by mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, generate market-like situations, and respond to and themselves articulate cultural, social, and politicalpreferences. Public knowledge in this understanding is no coherent entity; it becomes initself part of the larger fabric of practices and oral, written, or visual presentations thatsocieties develop to make meaningful statements about themselves and the natural andcultural worlds they find themselves in—all of which may change over time.

Attaching ourselves to the term “popular” would mean continuing to operate with thewell-known doubts about the appropriateness of the older concept of popularization.Speaking of knowledge in “popular culture” may seem to be an elegant way out of alldilemmas. But popular culture as a concept would need to be reconsidered if it is notmeant to reproduce older notions that operated with rather rigid dichotomies of folk versuselite cultures and oppositional versus hegemonic discourses.42

40 For the Open Court and a more systematic treatment of these issues, with various other examples, seeAndreas W. Daum, “‘The Next Great Task of Civilization’: International Exchange in Popular Science: TheGerman–American Case, 1850–1900,” in The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politicsfrom the 1840s to the First World War, ed. Martin H. Geyer and Johannes Paulmann (Oxford: Oxford Univ.Press, 2001), pp. 280–314. For the other cases mentioned see William J. Astore, Observing God: Thomas Dick,Evangelicalism, and Popular Science in Victorian Britain and America (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp.171–235, esp. p. 179; Amitabha Ghosh, “Popularisation of Science in Bengal: The Pioneering Role of RajendralMitra,” in Uncharted Terrains, ed. Sehgal et al. (cit. n. 20), pp. 67–75, esp. p. 71; and Masao Watanabe, Scienceand Cultural Exchange in Modern History: Japan and the West (Tokyo: Hokusen-Sha, 1997), p. 203.

41 On these processes in the sciences generally see David N. Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place:Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 135–187.

42 See William H. Sewell, Jr., “The Concept(s) of Culture,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions inthe Study of Society and Culture, ed. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: Univ. California Press,1999), pp. 35–61; Morag Shiach, Discourse on Popular Culture: Class, Gender, and History in Cultural

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There are many different narratives of the modern world in which transformations ofpublic knowledge play a key role. Some of them—such as those of the construction ofexpert knowledge and the “scientificization” of everyday life since the late nineteenthcentury—fall almost naturally into the realm of historians of science. Others might havean even broader appeal to scholars across the disciplines: the transformations of civilsociety; the rise of the interventionist state and of consumer society at large; the ambig-uous process of “secularization,” which included the revival of new forms of religiosity;the theatricalization of public life since the eighteenth century; the modernization effortson the part of ambitious nation-states; the story of twentieth-century dictatorships thatpropagated racial theories and implemented technological fantasies—to name only someprominent narratives.

Against this background, we might have good reason to be more optimistic about thereach of insights that historical studies of popular science generate. Dealing with trans-formations of public knowledge over time creates a common ground for historians withvarious interests and ultimately constitutes a platform for interdisciplinary collaboration.However insufficient this endeavor will remain in the foreseeable future, it can help usunderstand better how the project of modernity has oscillated between its emphaticpromise to enhance rationality and its destructive potential.

Analysis, 1730 to the Present (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1989); Dominic Strinati, An Introductionto Theories of Popular Culture, 2nd ed. (London/New York: Routledge, 2004); and John Storey, ed., CulturalTheory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 3rd ed. (Harlow/New York: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2006).

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