Scientists, Business, and the State, 1890-1960

Scientists, Business, and the State, 1890-1960
Author: Patrick J. McGrath
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2003-01-14
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0807875287

In the late nineteenth century, scientists began allying themselves with America's corporate, political, and military elites. They did so not just to improve their professional standing and win more money for research, says Patrick McGrath, but for political reasons as well. They wanted to use their new institutional connections to effect a transformation of American political culture. They succeeded, but not in ways that all scientists envisioned or agreed upon. McGrath describes how, between 1890 and 1960, scientific, business, and political leaders together forged a new definition of American democracy in which science and technology were presented to the public as crucial ingredients of the nation's progress, prosperity, and political stability. But as scientists became more prominent, they provoked conflicts among themselves as well as with their institutional patrons over exactly how their expertise should be used. McGrath examines the bitter battles that erupted over the role scientists should play during the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War arms race, and the security and loyalty investigations of the 1950s. He finds that, by the end of the 1950s, scientists were regarded by the political and military elite not as partners but as subordinate technicians who were expected to supply weapons on demand for the Cold War state. Originally published 2001. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

DDT and the American Century

DDT and the American Century
Author: David Kinkela
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2011-11-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780807869307

Praised for its ability to kill insects effectively and cheaply and reviled as an ecological hazard, DDT continues to engender passion across the political spectrum as one of the world's most controversial chemical pesticides. In DDT and the American Century, David Kinkela chronicles the use of DDT around the world from 1941 to the present with a particular focus on the United States, which has played a critical role in encouraging the global use of the pesticide. Kinkela's study offers a unique approach to understanding both this contentious chemical and modern environmentalism in an international context.

American Labyrinth

American Labyrinth
Author: Raymond Haberski, Jr.
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2018-12-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501730223

Intellectual history has never been more relevant and more important to public life in the United States. In complicated and confounding times, people look for the principles that drive action and the foundations that support national ideals. American Labyrinth demonstrates the power of intellectual history to illuminate our public life and examine our ideological assumptions. This volume of essays brings together 19 influential intellectual historians to contribute original thoughts on topics of widespread interest. Raymond Haberski Jr. and Andrew Hartman asked a group of nimble, sharp scholars to respond to a simple question: How might the resources of intellectual history help shed light on contemporary issues with historical resonance? The answers—all rigorous, original, and challenging—are as eclectic in approach and temperament as the authors are different in their interests and methods. Taken together, the essays of American Labyrinth illustrate how intellectual historians, operating in many different registers at once and ranging from the theoretical to the political, can provide telling insights for understanding a public sphere fraught with conflict. In order to understand why people are ready to fight over cultural symbols and political positions we must have insight into how ideas organize, enliven, and define our lives. Ultimately, as Haberski and Hartman show in this volume, the best route through our contemporary American labyrinth is the path that traces our practical and lived ideas.

Sharing Knowledge, Shaping Europe

Sharing Knowledge, Shaping Europe
Author: John Krige
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2016-07-22
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0262034778

How America used its technological leadership in the 1950s and the 1960s to foster European collaboration and curb nuclear proliferation, with varying degrees of success. In the 1950s and the 1960s, U.S. administrations were determined to prevent Western European countries from developing independent national nuclear weapons programs. To do so, the United States attempted to use its technological pre-eminence as a tool of “soft power” to steer Western European technological choices toward the peaceful uses of the atom and of space, encouraging options that fostered collaboration, promoted nonproliferation, and defused challenges to U.S. technological superiority. In Sharing Knowledge, Shaping Europe, John Krige describes these efforts and the varying degrees of success they achieved. Krige explains that the pursuit of scientific and technological leadership, galvanized by America's Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, was also used for techno-political collaboration with major allies. He examines a series of multinational arrangements involving shared technological platforms and aimed at curbing nuclear proliferation, and he describes the roles of the Department of State, the Atomic Energy Commission, and NASA. To their dismay, these agencies discovered that the use of technology as an instrument of soft power was seriously circumscribed, by internal divisions within successive administrations and by external opposition from European countries. It was successful, Krige argues, only when technological leadership was embedded in a web of supportive “harder” power structures.

Pills, Power, and Policy

Pills, Power, and Policy
Author: Dominique A. Tobbell
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2012
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0520271149

"Tobbell analyzes the political and economic history of the alignment of the pharmaceutical industry, academic institutions and their faculty and organized medicine. This book is essential reading for policymakers and their staff as well as persons who study the history of health policy and those who contribute to it through medical research, advocacy and journalism. " -Daniel Fox, author of The Convergence of Science and Governance: Research, Health Policy, and American States "Dominique Tobbell’s vivid, balanced and probing account of pharmaceutical politics is a significant, needed analysis of the relationships between the pharmaceutical industry, university researchers, the medical profession and government in the Cold War period. More than this, Pills, Power, and Policy shows why it continues to be difficult to agree in the United States on the relative roles of corporate enterprise, government regulation, technological innovation, freedom to prescribe, and consumer marketing and protection, all played out against the rising costs of health care. Timely and thought-provoking."--Rosemary A. Stevens. DeWitt Wallace Distinguished Scholar, Department of Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medical College "A superb and compelling account of the creation of one of America’s most reviled entities: Big Pharma. With clarity and subtlety, Pills, Power, and Policy weaves together the political, economic, and the medical to reveal the entangled history behind our modern pharmaceutical predicament."--Andrea Tone, Ph.D., Professor of History & Canada Research Chair in the Social History of Medicine, McGill University “Pills, Power and Policy provides an outstanding description and analysis of the evolution of drug policy. It is an extremely important contribution to our understanding of the political, scientific, and economic nature of pharmaceutical regulation." -Daniel S. Greenberg, Washington journalist and author of Science, Money and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion

Cancer, Radiation Therapy, and the Market

Cancer, Radiation Therapy, and the Market
Author: Barbara Bridgman Perkins
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2017-08-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351978136

Cancer, Radiation Therapy, and the Market shows how the radiation therapy specialty in the United States (later called radiation oncology) co-evolved with its device industry throughout the twentieth-century. Academic engineers and physicians acquired financing to develop increasingly powerful radiation devices, initiated companies to manufacture the devices competitively and designed hospital and freestanding procedure units to utilize them. In the process they incorporated market strategies into medical organization and practice. This provocative inquiry concludes that public health policy needs to re-evaluate market-driven high-tech medicine and build evidence-based health care systems.

International Organizations and Global Development

International Organizations and Global Development
Author: Nicholas Ferns
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2024-05-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 3111280357

The third issue of the Yearbook on the History of Global Development aims at collecting contributions about the role of international organiszations in shaping the global system of development throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. International organizations - both intergovernmental and NGOs - have played a crucial role, shaping the global system of development by setting agendas, mobilizing people, and framing ideas and practices regarding development on local, national, regional, and global scales.

Pop Goes the Decade

Pop Goes the Decade
Author: Martin Kich
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2020-01-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN:

Analyzing complex social and political issues through their manifestations in popular culture, this book provides readers a strong foundational knowledge of the 1960s as a decade. 1969 went out in a way that could never have been imagined in 1960. While the president at the end of the decade had been vice president at the start, the intervening years permanently changed American culture. Pop Goes the Decade: The Sixties explores the cultural and social framework of the 1960s, addressing film, television, sports, technology, media/advertising, fashion, art, and more. Entries are presented in encyclopedic fashion, organized into such categories as controversies in pop culture, game changers, technology, and the decade's legacy. A timeline highlights significant cultural moments, while an introduction and a conclusion place those moments within the contexts of preceding and subsequent decades. Attention to the decade's most prominent influencers allows readers to understand the movements with which these figures are associated, and discussion of controversies and social change enables readers to gain a stronger understanding of evolving American social values.

Empty Pleasures

Empty Pleasures
Author: Carolyn de la Peña
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2010-09-27
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0807879673

Sugar substitutes have been a part of American life since saccharin was introduced at the 1893 World's Fair. In Empty Pleasures, the first history of artificial sweeteners in the United States, Carolyn de la Pena blends popular culture with business and women's history, examining the invention, production, marketing, regulation, and consumption of sugar substitutes such as saccharin, Sucaryl, NutraSweet, and Splenda. She describes how saccharin, an accidental laboratory by-product, was transformed from a perceived adulterant into a healthy ingredient. As food producers and pharmaceutical companies worked together to create diet products, savvy women's magazine writers and editors promoted artificially sweetened foods as ideal, modern weight-loss aids, and early diet-plan entrepreneurs built menus and fortunes around pleasurable dieting made possible by artificial sweeteners. NutraSweet, Splenda, and their predecessors have enjoyed enormous success by promising that Americans, especially women, can "have their cake and eat it too," but Empty Pleasures argues that these "sweet cheats" have fostered troubling and unsustainable eating habits and that the promises of artificial sweeteners are ultimately too good to be true.

American Prometheus

American Prometheus
Author: Kai Bird
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 786
Release: 2007-12-18
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307424731

THE INSPIRATION FOR THE MAJOR MOTION PICTURE OPPENHEIMER • "A riveting account of one of history’s most essential and paradoxical figures.”—Christopher Nolan #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • The definitive biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the iconic figures of the twentieth century, a brilliant physicist who led the effort to build the atomic bomb for his country in a time of war, and who later found himself confronting the moral consequences of scientific progress. In this magisterial, acclaimed biography twenty-five years in the making, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin capture Oppenheimer’s life and times, from his early career to his central role in the Cold War. This is biography and history at its finest, riveting and deeply informative. “A masterful account of Oppenheimer’s rise and fall, set in the context of the turbulent decades of America’s own transformation. It is a tour de force.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review “A work of voluminous scholarship and lucid insight, unifying its multifaceted portrait with a keen grasp of Oppenheimer’s essential nature.... It succeeds in deeply fathoming his most damaging, self-contradictory behavior.” —The New York Times