Scientific Authority & Twentieth-century America

Scientific Authority & Twentieth-century America PDF Author: Ronald G. Walters
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801853906
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
In Scientific Authority and Twentieth-Century America Ronald G. Walters brings together a distinguished group of contributors to reflect - often critically - on scientific and medical claims to moral, social, and political authority.

Scientific Authority & Twentieth-century America

Scientific Authority & Twentieth-century America PDF Author: Ronald G. Walters
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801853906
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
In Scientific Authority and Twentieth-Century America Ronald G. Walters brings together a distinguished group of contributors to reflect - often critically - on scientific and medical claims to moral, social, and political authority.

The Rise of the Public Authority

The Rise of the Public Authority PDF Author: Gail Radford
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022603769X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
In the late nineteenth century, public officials throughout the United States began to experiment with new methods of managing their local economies and meeting the infrastructure needs of a newly urban, industrial nation. Stymied by legal and financial barriers, they created a new class of quasi-public agencies called public authorities. Today these entities operate at all levels of government, and range from tiny operations like the Springfield Parking Authority in Massachusetts, which runs thirteen parking lots and garages, to mammoth enterprises like the Tennessee Valley Authority, with nearly twelve billion dollars in revenues each year. In The Rise of the Public Authority, Gail Radford recounts the history of these inscrutable agencies, examining how and why they were established, the varied forms they have taken, and how these pervasive but elusive mechanisms have molded our economy and politics over the past hundred years.

Science under Fire

Science under Fire PDF Author: Andrew Jewett
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674247086
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Americans have long been suspicious of experts and elites. This new history explains why so many have believed that science has the power to corrupt American culture. Americans today are often skeptical of scientific authority. Many conservatives dismiss climate change and Darwinism as liberal fictions, arguing that “tenured radicals” have coopted the sciences and other disciplines. Some progressives, especially in the universities, worry that science’s celebration of objectivity and neutrality masks its attachment to Eurocentric and patriarchal values. As we grapple with the implications of climate change and revolutions in fields from biotechnology to robotics to computing, it is crucial to understand how scientific authority functions—and where it has run up against political and cultural barriers. Science under Fire reconstructs a century of battles over the cultural implications of science in the United States. Andrew Jewett reveals a persistent current of criticism which maintains that scientists have injected faulty social philosophies into the nation’s bloodstream under the cover of neutrality. This charge of corruption has taken many forms and appeared among critics with a wide range of social, political, and theological views, but common to all is the argument that an ideologically compromised science has produced an array of social ills. Jewett shows that this suspicion of science has been a major force in American politics and culture by tracking its development, varied expressions, and potent consequences since the 1920s. Looking at today’s battles over science, Jewett argues that citizens and leaders must steer a course between, on the one hand, the naïve image of science as a pristine, value-neutral form of knowledge, and, on the other, the assumption that scientists’ claims are merely ideologies masquerading as truths.

Twentieth Century Practice

Twentieth Century Practice PDF Author: Thomas Lathrop Stedman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 756

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Book Description


A Government Out of Sight

A Government Out of Sight PDF Author: Brian Balogh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521820979
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
A Government Out of Sight revises our understanding of the ways in which Americans turned to the national government throughout the nineteenth century.

The Brute Fact

The Brute Fact PDF Author: James Robert Mendelsohn
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description


Twentieth Century Practice

Twentieth Century Practice PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 874

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Book Description


Twentieth Century Practice

Twentieth Century Practice PDF Author: Thomas Lathrop Stedman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Medicine
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


A Government Out of Sight

A Government Out of Sight PDF Author: Brian Balogh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139478141
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1

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Book Description
While it is obvious that America's state and local governments were consistently active during the nineteenth century, a period dominated by laissez-faire, political historians of twentieth-century America have assumed that the national government did very little during this period. A Government Out of Sight challenges this premise, chronicling the ways in which the national government intervened powerfully in the lives of nineteenth-century Americans through the law, subsidies, and the use of third parties (including state and local governments), while avoiding bureaucracy. Americans have always turned to the national government - especially for economic development and expansion - and in the nineteenth century even those who argued for a small, nonintrusive central government demanded that the national government expand its authority to meet the nation's challenges. In revising our understanding of the ways in which Americans turned to the national government throughout this period, this study fundamentally alters our perspective on American political development in the twentieth century, shedding light on contemporary debates between progressives and conservatives about the proper size of government and government programs and subsidies that even today remain 'out of sight'.

Science at the Bar

Science at the Bar PDF Author: Sheila Jasanoff
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674039122
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Issues spawned by the headlong pace of developments in science and technology fill the courts. How should we deal with frozen embryos and leaky implants, dangerous chemicals, DNA fingerprints, and genetically engineered animals? The realm of the law, to which beleaguered people look for answers, is sometimes at a loss—constrained by its own assumptions and practices, Sheila Jasanoff suggests. This book exposes American law’s long-standing involvement in constructing, propagating, and perpetuating a variety of myths about science and technology. Science at the Bar is the first book to examine in detail how two powerful American institutions—both seekers after truth—interact with each other. Looking at cases involving product liability, medical malpractice, toxic torts, genetic engineering, and life and death, Jasanoff argues that the courts do not simply depend on scientific findings for guidance—they actually influence the production of science and technology at many different levels. Research is conducted and interpreted to answer legal questions. Experts are selected to be credible on the witness stand. Products are redesigned to reduce the risk of lawsuits. At the same time the courts emerge here as democratizing agents in disputes over the control and deployment of new technologies, advancing and sustaining a public dialogue about the limits of expertise. Jasanoff shows how positivistic views of science and the law often prevent courts from realizing their full potential as centers for a progressive critique of science and technology. With its lucid analysis of both scientific and legal modes of reasoning, and its recommendations for scholars and policymakers, this book will be an indispensable resource for anyone who hopes to understand the changing configurations of science, technology, and the law in our litigious society.