Pseudo Science And Society In Nineteenth Century America

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Pseudo-Science and Society in 19th-Century America

Author : Arthur Wrobel
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
ISBN 13 : 0813186757
Total Pages : 275 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (131 download)

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Book Synopsis Pseudo-Science and Society in 19th-Century America by : Arthur Wrobel

Download or read book Pseudo-Science and Society in 19th-Century America written by Arthur Wrobel and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Progressive nineteenth-century Americans believed firmly that human perfection could be achieved with the aid of modern science. To many, the science of that turbulent age appeared to offer bright new answers to life's age-old questions. Such a climate, not surprisingly, fostered the growth of what we now view as "pseudo-sciences"—disciplines delicately balancing a dubious inductive methodology with moral and spiritual concerns, disseminated with a combination of aggressive entrepreneurship and sheer entertainment. Such "sciences" as mesmerism, spiritualism, homoeopathy, hydropathy, and phrenology were warmly received not only by the uninformed and credulous but also by the respectable and educated. Rationalistic, egalitarian, and utilitarian, they struck familiar and reassuring chords in American ears and gave credence to the message of reformers that health and happiness are accessible to all. As the contributors to this volume show, the diffusion and practice of these pseudo-sciences intertwined with all the major medical, cultural, religious, and philosophical revolutions in nineteenth-century America. Hydropathy and particularly homoeopathy, for example, enjoyed sufficient respectability for a time to challenge orthodox medicine. The claims of mesmerists and spiritualists appeared to offer hope for a new moral social order. Daring flights of pseudo-scientific thought even ventured into such areas as art and human sexuality. And all the pseudo-sciences resonated with the communitarian and women's rights movements. This important exploration of the major nineteenth-century pseudo-sciences provides fresh perspectives on the American society of that era and on the history of the orthodox sciences, a number of which grew out of the fertile soil plowed by the pseudo-scientists.

Science, Pseudo-Science and Society

Author : Marsha Hanen
Publisher : Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN 13 : 0889207933
Total Pages : 314 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (892 download)

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Book Synopsis Science, Pseudo-Science and Society by : Marsha Hanen

Download or read book Science, Pseudo-Science and Society written by Marsha Hanen and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume collects the papers presented at a conference on “Science, Pseudo–science and Society,” sponsored by the Calgary Institute for the Humanities and held at the University of Calgary, May 10–12, 1979. More than many such collections, this one preserves some trace of the intellectual excitement which surrounded this gathering of scholars. A primary inspiration for the symposium on “Science, Pseudoscience, and Society” was a growing awareness of the crucial role the study of pseudo–science plays in the areas of contemporary scholarship which are concerned with the nature of science and its relationship to broader social issues. This volume is organized around three major questions concerning the relationships among science, pseudo–science, and society. The papers in the first section address the question of whether it is possible to draw a sharp demarcation between science and pseudo–science and what the criteria of that demarcation might be. The papers in the second section, recognizing the historical importance of various of the pseudo–sciences, consider their impact—positive or negative—on the development of the sciences themselves. The papers in the third section deal with the question of the relationship between the sciences and pseudo–sciences, on the one hand, and social factors on the other.

Science in Nineteenth-Century America

Author : Nathan Reingold
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226709477
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (267 download)

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Book Synopsis Science in Nineteenth-Century America by : Nathan Reingold

Download or read book Science in Nineteenth-Century America written by Nathan Reingold and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1985-06-15 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining well-chosen correspondence of scientists with historical commentary, Reingold brings to life the developing American scientific community of the nineteenth century. "The reader catches glimpses of William Maclure mixing science and social reform, of Joseph Henry struggling to make a place for research at the Smithsonian Institution, of Gray and Dana corresponding with Darwin, of Newcomb and Michelson planning experiments on the speed of light."—John C. Greene, Science

Hawthorne's Mad Scientists

Author : Taylor Stoehr
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780208016522
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (165 download)

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Book Synopsis Hawthorne's Mad Scientists by : Taylor Stoehr

Download or read book Hawthorne's Mad Scientists written by Taylor Stoehr and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Crania Americana

Author : Samuel George Morton
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 40 pages
Book Rating : 4.B/5 (1 download)

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Book Synopsis Crania Americana by : Samuel George Morton

Download or read book Crania Americana written by Samuel George Morton and published by . This book was released on 1840 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Pseudo-science and Society in Nineteenth-century America

Author : Arthur Wrobel
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 262 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Pseudo-science and Society in Nineteenth-century America by : Arthur Wrobel

Download or read book Pseudo-science and Society in Nineteenth-century America written by Arthur Wrobel and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 19th century was the golden age of many things, and pseudo-science was one of them. Nowhere was this more obviously the case than in America. If he shopped around, a 19th-century American could consult a psychographer or a hydropath or a magnetizer(in 1843, there were supposed to be more than 200 magnetizers - practitioners of mesmerism -in Boston alone). As soon as he had taken off his water girdle, he was free to put on his Heidelberg Electric Belt, and perhaps smoke an electric cigarette. He could read pamphlets explaining why husbands and wives ought to have sex once every two years, on a sunny day in August or September, between 11 A.M. and noon. These are only a few of the topics touched on in ''Pseudo-Science and Society in 19th-Century America,'' a new collection of essays edited by Arthur Wrobel, a professor of American literature at the University of Kentucky. Mr. Wrobel and his fellow contributors trace the impact of most of the major pseudo-sciences of the period, and some of the minor ones; they look at them in the light of other 19th-century cultural developments, and try to set them in a specifically American context. Only one of the essays deals with an individual pseudo-scientist - Taylor Stoehr's absorbing account of Robert H. Collyer, a lecturer of the 1830's and 40's whose specialties included phrenology, mesmerism and painless dentistry (fairly painless, thanks to a combination of mesmerism, alcohol and opium). In due course, Collyer concocted a hybrid science of his own called phrenomagnetism, which enabled him to detect a whole host of ''organs'' in the brain that orthodox phrenology had somehow missed - organs of Sarcasm, Love of Pets, Desire for Seeing Ancient Places and other specialized propensities. His final inspiration, which plainly owed something to the advent of photography, was psychography, a system of transferring mental images by bouncing them off a bowl of molasses.

On the Fringe

Author : Michael D. Gordin
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0197555780
Total Pages : 122 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (975 download)

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Book Synopsis On the Fringe by : Michael D. Gordin

Download or read book On the Fringe written by Michael D. Gordin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyone has heard of the term "pseudoscience", typically used to describe something that looks like science, but is somehow false, misleading, or unproven. Many would be able to agree on a list of things that fall under its umbrella-- astrology, phrenology, UFOlogy, creationism, and eugenics might come to mind. But defining what makes these fields "pseudo" is a far more complex issue. It has proved impossible to come up with a simple criterion that enables us to differentiate pseudoscience from genuine science. Given the virulence of contemporary disputes over the denial of climate change and anti-vaccination movements--both of which display allegations of "pseudoscience" on all sides-- there is a clear need to better understand issues of scientific demarcation. On the Fringe explores the philosophical and historical attempts to address this problem of demarcation. This book argues that by understanding doctrines that are often seen as antithetical to science, we can learn a great deal about how science operated in the past and does today. This exploration raises several questions: How does a doctrine become demonized as pseudoscientific? Who has the authority to make these pronouncements? How is the status of science shaped by political or cultural contexts? How does pseudoscience differ from scientific fraud? Michael D. Gordin both answers these questions and guides readers along a bewildering array of marginalized doctrines, looking at parapsychology (ESP), Lysenkoism, scientific racism, and alchemy, among others, to better understand the struggle to define what science is and is not, and how the controversies have shifted over the centuries. On the Fringe provides a historical tour through many of these fringe fields in order to provide tools to think deeply about scientific controversies both in the past and in our present.

Fugitive Science

Author : Britt Rusert
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1479805726
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (798 download)

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Book Synopsis Fugitive Science by : Britt Rusert

Download or read book Fugitive Science written by Britt Rusert and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2017-04-18 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Honorable Mention, 2019 MLA Prize for a First Book Sole Finalist Mention for the 2018 Lora Romero First Book Prize, presented by the American Studies Association Exposes the influential work of a group of black artists to confront and refute scientific racism. Traversing the archives of early African American literature, performance, and visual culture, Britt Rusert uncovers the dynamic experiments of a group of black writers, artists, and performers. Fugitive Science chronicles a little-known story about race and science in America. While the history of scientific racism in the nineteenth century has been well-documented, there was also a counter-movement of African Americans who worked to refute its claims. Far from rejecting science, these figures were careful readers of antebellum science who linked diverse fields—from astronomy to physiology—to both on-the-ground activism and more speculative forms of knowledge creation. Routinely excluded from institutions of scientific learning and training, they transformed cultural spaces like the page, the stage, the parlor, and even the pulpit into laboratories of knowledge and experimentation. From the recovery of neglected figures like Robert Benjamin Lewis, Hosea Easton, and Sarah Mapps Douglass, to new accounts of Martin Delany, Henry Box Brown, and Frederick Douglass, Fugitive Science makes natural science central to how we understand the origins and development of African American literature and culture. This distinct and pioneering book will spark interest from anyone wishing to learn more on race and society.

The Myth of Race

Author : Robert Wald Sussman
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674745302
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (747 download)

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Book Synopsis The Myth of Race by : Robert Wald Sussman

Download or read book The Myth of Race written by Robert Wald Sussman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-06 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although eugenics is now widely discredited, some groups and individuals claim a new scientific basis for old racist assumptions. Pondering the continuing influence of racist research and thought, despite all evidence to the contrary, Robert Sussman explains why—when it comes to race—too many people still mistake bigotry for science.

Nineteenth-century American Science

Author : George H. Daniels
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 298 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (97 download)

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Book Synopsis Nineteenth-century American Science by : George H. Daniels

Download or read book Nineteenth-century American Science written by George H. Daniels and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Beauty and the Brain

Author : Rachel E. Walker
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226822567
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (268 download)

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Book Synopsis Beauty and the Brain by : Rachel E. Walker

Download or read book Beauty and the Brain written by Rachel E. Walker and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-11-23 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the history of phrenology and physiognomy, Beauty and the Brain proposes a bold new way of understanding the connection between science, politics, and popular culture in early America. Between the 1770s and the 1860s, people all across the globe relied on physiognomy and phrenology to evaluate human worth. These once-popular but now discredited disciplines were based on a deceptively simple premise: that facial features or skull shape could reveal a person’s intelligence, character, and personality. In the United States, these were culturally ubiquitous sciences that both elite thinkers and ordinary people used to understand human nature. While the modern world dismisses phrenology and physiognomy as silly and debunked disciplines, Beauty and the Brain shows why they must be taken seriously: they were the intellectual tools that a diverse group of Americans used to debate questions of race, gender, and social justice. While prominent intellectuals and political thinkers invoked these sciences to justify hierarchy, marginalized people and progressive activists deployed them for their own political aims, creatively interpreting human minds and bodies as they fought for racial justice and gender equality. Ultimately, though, physiognomy and phrenology were as dangerous as they were popular. In addition to validating the idea that external beauty was a sign of internal worth, these disciplines often appealed to the very people who were damaged by their prejudicial doctrines. In taking physiognomy and phrenology seriously, Beauty and the Brain recovers a vibrant—if largely forgotten—cultural and intellectual universe, showing how popular sciences shaped some of the greatest political debates of the American past.

The Utopian Alternative

Author : Carl Guarneri
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780801481970
Total Pages : 548 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (819 download)

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Book Synopsis The Utopian Alternative by : Carl Guarneri

Download or read book The Utopian Alternative written by Carl Guarneri and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The utopian socialism of Charles Fourier spread throughout Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, but it was in the United States that it generated the most intense excitement. In this rich and engaging narrative, Carl J. Guarneri traces the American Fourierist movement from its roots in the religious, social, and economic upheavals of the 1830s, through its bold communal experiments of the 1840s, to its lingering twilight after the Civil War.

Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718–1868

Author : Caryn Cossé Bell
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 0807153451
Total Pages : 367 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718–1868 by : Caryn Cossé Bell

Download or read book Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718–1868 written by Caryn Cossé Bell and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1997-02-01 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the Federal occupation of New Orleans in 1862, Afro-Creole leaders in that city, along with their white allies, seized upon the ideals of the American and French Revolutions and images of revolutionary events in the French Caribbean and demanded Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. Their republican idealism produced the postwar South's most progressive vision of the future. Caryn Cossé Bell, in her impressive, sweeping study, traces the eighteenth-century origins of this Afro-Creole political and intellectual heritage, its evolution in antebellum New Orleans, and its impact on the Civil War and Reconstruction.

The Electric Corset and Other Victorian Miracles

Author : Jeremy Agnew
Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 1476683832
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (766 download)

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Book Synopsis The Electric Corset and Other Victorian Miracles by : Jeremy Agnew

Download or read book The Electric Corset and Other Victorian Miracles written by Jeremy Agnew and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2021-10-18 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through the Victorian and Edwardian eras, various health movements emerged in the transition to the modern age of scientific medicine. Strange medical devices and quack cures were pushed, often using crude remedies based on simplistic beliefs and the placebo effect. Currently, some of these treatments appear absurd, even cruel. Because some were properly used as appropriate therapies, it is difficult to label them altogether as bogus. This book takes a thorough look at unconventional medical gadgets, as well as the strange devices and therapies used by both fringe and legitimate healers, and places them in the perspective of modern medicine. The author argues that quackery should not be defined by the ineffectiveness of a therapy, but rather be based on the fraudulent intent of the people who pushed dishonest and deceptive remedies.

The Heavens on Earth

Author : David Aubin
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 082239250X
Total Pages : 400 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (223 download)

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Book Synopsis The Heavens on Earth by : David Aubin

Download or read book The Heavens on Earth written by David Aubin and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-26 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Heavens on Earth explores the place of the observatory in nineteenth-century science and culture. Astronomy was a core pursuit for observatories, but usually not the only one. It belonged to a larger group of “observatory sciences” that also included geodesy, meteorology, geomagnetism, and even parts of physics and statistics. These pursuits coexisted in the nineteenth-century observatory; this collection surveys them as a coherent whole. Broadening the focus beyond the solitary astronomer at his telescope, it illuminates the observatory’s importance to technological, military, political, and colonial undertakings, as well as in advancing and popularizing the mathematical, physical, and cosmological sciences. The contributors examine “observatory techniques” developed and used not only in connection with observatories but also by instrument makers in their workshops, navy officers on ships, civil engineers in the field, and many others. These techniques included the calibration and coordination of precision instruments for making observations and taking measurements; methods of data acquisition and tabulation; and the production of maps, drawings, and photographs, as well as numerical, textual, and visual representations of the heavens and the earth. They also encompassed the social management of personnel within observatories, the coordination of international scientific collaborations, and interactions with dignitaries and the public. The state observatory occupied a particularly privileged place in the life of the city. With their imposing architecture and ancient traditions, state observatories served representative purposes for their patrons, whether as symbols of a monarch’s enlightened power, a nation’s industrial and scientific excellence, or republican progressive values. Focusing on observatory techniques in settings from Berlin, London, Paris, and Rome to Australia, Russia, Thailand, and the United States, The Heavens on Earth is a major contribution to the history of science. Contributors: David Aubin, Charlotte Bigg, Guy Boistel, Theresa Levitt, Massimo Mazzotti, Ole Molvig, Simon Schaffer, Martina Schiavon , H. Otto Sibum, Richard Staley, John Tresch, Simon Werrett, Sven Widmalm

The Female Economy

Author : Wendy Gamber
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 9780252066016
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (66 download)

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Book Synopsis The Female Economy by : Wendy Gamber

Download or read book The Female Economy written by Wendy Gamber and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Female Economy explores that lost world of women's dominance, showing how independent, often ambitious businesswomen and the sometimes imperious consumers they served gradually vanished from the scene as custom production gave way to a largely unskilled modern garment industry controlled by men. Wendy Gamber helps overturn the portrait of wage-earning women as docile souls who would find fulfillment only in marriage and motherhood.

National Manhood

Author : Dana D. Nelson
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822382148
Total Pages : 362 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (223 download)

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Book Synopsis National Manhood by : Dana D. Nelson

Download or read book National Manhood written by Dana D. Nelson and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1998-10-14 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Manhood explores the relationship between gender, race, and nation by tracing developing ideals of citizenship in the United States from the Revolutionary War through the 1850s. Through an extensive reading of literary and historical documents, Dana D. Nelson analyzes the social and political articulation of a civic identity centered around the white male and points to a cultural moment in which the theoretical consolidation of white manhood worked to ground, and perhaps even found, the nation. Using political, scientific, medical, personal, and literary texts ranging from the Federalist papers to the ethnographic work associated with the Lewis and Clark expedition to the medical lectures of early gynecologists, Nelson explores the referential power of white manhood, how and under what conditions it came to stand for the nation, and how it came to be a fraternal articulation of a representative and civic identity in the United States. In examining early exemplary models of national manhood and by tracing its cultural generalization, National Manhood reveals not only how an impossible ideal has helped to form racist and sexist practices, but also how this ideal has simultaneously privileged and oppressed white men, who, in measuring themselves against it, are able to disavow their part in those oppressions. Historically broad and theoretically informed, National Manhood reaches across disciplines to engage those studying early national culture, race and gender issues, and American history, literature, and culture.