Prof. Katherine Pandora  ~  History of Science 5550
Spring 2004 ~ Tu 1:30 - 4:20
 

The Role of Science and Technology
          in the Making of the American West
 


 


 

The goal of this course is to familiarize students with classic and contemporary analyses of the role of science and technology in the making of the American West. We will take as our launching point historian Patricia Limerick' s observation that " in shaping the West' s past, present, and future, no factor is more interesting and consequential than the role of science."

Although our historiographic studies will emphasize intellectual and cultural history, issues of professionalization, the development of institutions, and political economy will also be featured. Topics will range from Lewis and Clark' s charting of the territory from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean, to the encounter of ethnologists with native tribes in the 19th century and the encounter of venture capitalists with the inhabitants of Silicon Valley in the 20th century, from the unearthing of the terrible lizards of the badlands to the creation of the terrible weapons that mark the Atomic West. Students will have the opportunity to produce either a research paper or an historiographic paper.
 

Texts

Allen, John Logan. Lewis and Clark and the Image of the American Northwest (Dover, 1992).

Goetzmann, William. Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (Texas State Historical Association, 1994).

Hevly, Bruce (ed.). The Atomic West (U of Washington, 2003).

Hinsley, Curtis. The Smithsonian and the American Indian: Making a Moral Anthropology in Victorian America (Smithsonian Institution Pr, 1994)

Kenney, Martin (ed.). Understanding Silicon Valley: The Anatomy of an Entrepreneurial Region (Stanford U Press, 2000).

Lanham, Url. The Bone Hunters: The Heroic Age of Paleontology in the American West (Dover, 1992).

Pyne, Stephen. How the Canyon Became Grand: A Short History (Penguin, 1999)

Solnit, Rebecca. River of Shadows: Eadward Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (Viking Press, 2003)

White, Richard. The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (Hill & Wang, 1996).

Worster, Donald. Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (Oxford U Press, 1992).

Wrobel, David. Many Wests: Place, Culture, & Regional Identity (Univ Pr of Kansas, 1997)