The central argument of this dissertation is that the early modern English state and its dependent empire were significantly shaped by contemporary science. It identifies a particular mode of natural knowledge production, rooted in the centralized management of empirical information, that was commonly practiced by elite medical practitioners and other men of science in the later seventeenth century. It then examines the ways in which those practices of information management became the foundation of other projects pursued by the same personnel—projects that have not heretofore been considered by historians to have much to do with medicine, or even science generally, and which were central to the formation of the modern English state: the Royal Society’s program to reform the practices of artisans, Samuel Pepys’s reorganization of the Royal Navy, and the establishment of new organs of state to centrally manage colonial development and coordinate the conduct of commerce in the English Atlantic empire.

Natural history is, and was, dependent upon the collection of specimens. In the nineteenth century, American naturalists and institutions of natural history cultivated and maintained extensive collection networks comprised of numerous collectors that provided objects of natural history for study. Effective networks were collaborative in nature, with naturalists such as Spencer Baird of the Smithsonian trading their time and expertise for specimens. The incorporation of Darwinian and Neo-Lamarckian evolutionary theory into natural history in the middle of the century led to dramatic changes in the relationship between naturalists and collectors, as naturalists sought to reconcile their observations within the new evolutionary context. This dissertation uses the careers of collectors Robert Kennicott, Frank Stephens, Edward W. Nelson, E.A. Goldman, and Edmund Heller as case studies in order to evaluate how the changes in the theoretical framework of late nineteenth century natural history led to advances in field practice by assessing how naturalists trained their collectors to meet new demands within the field. Research focused on the correspondence between naturalists and collectors, along with the field notes and applicable publications by collectors. I argue that the changes in natural history necessitated naturalists training their collectors in the basics of biogeography — the study of geographic distribution of organisms, and systematics — the study of the diversity of life — leading to a collaborative relationship in which collectors played an active role in the formation of new biological knowledge. The project concludes that the changes in natural history with regard to theory and practice gradually necessitated a more professional cadre of collectors. Collectors became active agents in the formation of biological knowledge, and instrumental in the formation of a truly systematic natural history. As a result, collectors became de facto field naturalists, the forerunners of the field biologists that dominated the practice of natural history in the early and middle twentieth century.

While the progress of science has been described by some as proceeding by a series of “crucial experiments,” I claim that an important factor in the development of many scientific fields is that of what I call “crucial resolutions” of outstanding anomalies. In contrast to crucial experiments, crucial resolutions are proposed to solve persistent anomalies or conflicting theoretical positions – often in advance of experimental confirmation. I illustrate this point using specific examples from the history of endocrinology. I claim this general structure of explanatory models can serve as a template for philosophical and historical investigations in other scientific fields.

“Farfetchings: on and in the sf mode” addresses two concerns: science fiction sf) as a way of thinking about the world and radical ecological ethics. The word “farfetching” refers to the skill of arriving at intuitive perceptions of moral entireties. Using metaphors rather than rational symbols, farfetching offers a way to investigate and express new forms of ecological ethics. Faced with global warming, a mass extinction event, and a forever war on terror, in “Farfetchings” I argue that humans need just such scaled-up intuitions — if not moral then ethical — to not only survive but thrive on this planet. With our powers having so far outgrown our ethics, humans now have the opportunity to pay close attention to our togetherness in the great collective that is our home； what I call the “sf mode” offers one way of focusing that attention, of imagining and designing alternatives to the world that is, alas, the case. In this dissertation, I am farfetching an impossible, unthinkable ecological ethics, seeking an intuitive grasp of ethical worlding, one that raises more questions than answers. My chapters here respond to some questions that seem both interesting and productive for this context, for example: What is a person? What is a thing? How can sf help humans think, work, and play our way out of this mess? How can we think beyond the restrictions of anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism? What ways of thinking about language, about agency, about knowledge and about history might be most fruitful for reinventing both sf and ecology? In trying — however obliquely — to “answer” these questions, I hope to offer my readers a few things, including a view of sf that emphasizes open futures and unpredictable outcomes, a set of tools for thinking beyond commonsense philosophical and critical traditions, and, last but definitely not least, a sense of wonder at the strange, impossible omniverse we all live in.

“Farfetchings: on and in the sf mode” addresses two concerns: science fiction sf) as a way of thinking about the world and radical ecological ethics. The word “farfetching” refers to the skill of arriving at intuitive perceptions of moral entireties. Using metaphors rather than rational symbols, farfetching offers a way to investigate and express new forms of ecological ethics. Faced with global warming, a mass extinction event, and a forever war on terror, in “Farfetchings” I argue that humans need just such scaled-up intuitions — if not moral then ethical — to not only survive but thrive on this planet. With our powers having so far outgrown our ethics, humans now have the opportunity to pay close attention to our togetherness in the great collective that is our home； what I call the “sf mode” offers one way of focusing that attention, of imagining and designing alternatives to the world that is, alas, the case. In this dissertation, I am farfetching an impossible, unthinkable ecological ethics, seeking an intuitive grasp of ethical worlding, one that raises more questions than answers. My chapters here respond to some questions that seem both interesting and productive for this context, for example: What is a person? What is a thing? How can sf help humans think, work, and play our way out of this mess? How can we think beyond the restrictions of anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism? What ways of thinking about language, about agency, about knowledge and about history might be most fruitful for reinventing both sf and ecology? In trying — however obliquely — to “answer” these questions, I hope to offer my readers a few things, including a view of sf that emphasizes open futures and unpredictable outcomes, a set of tools for thinking beyond commonsense philosophical and critical traditions, and, last but definitely not least, a sense of wonder at the strange, impossible omniverse we all live in.

This dissertation is a history of nuclear secrecy in the United States, from the Manhattan Project through the “War on Terror.” It covers nearly seven decades of the attempts made to control nuclear technology through the control of knowledge, and looks at the overall dynamics of American secrecy policies as they unfolded over the course of the latter-half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. The project examines how nuclear secrecy served as a focal point for competing ideas about the nature of science, technology, and governance, and was a vital site for understanding the ways in which the idea of knowledge as power has been articulated and re-articulated in the years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The chapters attempt to provide a broad framework for periodizing American nuclear secrecy as a non-monolithic, ever-shifting, and always controversial series of practices of information regulation. The dissertation breaks the history of nuclear secrecy into five primary parts. Part I traces the early history of nuclear secrecy from its emergence in the years just before World War II through its massive implementation during the wartime Manhattan Project, emphasizing that most scientific, administrative, and military participants believed that secrecy would be a strictly temporary condition. Part II covers the attempts to address the immediate postwar problem of what to do about nuclear secrecy, as the wartime project was brought into the realm of public discourse. Part III covers the efforts of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission AEC) to develop a coherent secrecy policy as it grappled with a fraught domestic and international political scene, and discusses the emergence of a Cold War model of secrecy. Part IV covers a series of major confrontations as the brittleness of the Cold War model became evident over the course of the 1970s, when new historical actors, threats, and public perceptions came to challenge the once-stable regime. Part V, the epilogue and conclusion, looks at the legacy of secrecy as it was viewed in the late Cold War, the immediate post-Cold War, and the beginning of the “War on Terror.”

Today, global industry continues to reconfigure the international division of labor, raising urgent questions about economic security, social justice and environmental sustainability. Although “globalization” and “the networked society” have become catchphrases in both academic scholarship and the popular press, analysts have tended to overlook the specific managerial practices behind the international flow of goods and services. This dissertation traces the history of “supply chain management” to its roots in systems of factory administration that developed in the United States during the early twentieth century. Combining the history of technology, labor history and business history, I document daily life in the factory office, and I examine the development of technical expertise in industrial procurement. Although historians have long recognized the development of mass production as a vital feature of twentieth-century U.S. history, most scholars have focused on the assembly line and shop workers. By emphasizing white-collar labor in the factory office, this dissertation integrates the history of technology with the history of management, reframing the traditional story of concentrated integration in terms of distributed networks and coordination. Several significant findings emerge. First, the Ford Motor Company depended on a vast network of outside suppliers throughout the run of the Model T. This assertion runs counter to established wisdom concerning Ford, but it is supported by recent empirical studies in business history and my own detailed accounts of the working lives of the companys purchasing agents. Second, the U.S. Commerce Department actively promoted a set of managerial techniques designed to encourage mass production. In the case of supply chains, the “visible hand” of mid-level management did not replace the invisible hand of the market without the helping hand of the federal government. Third and finally, robust industrial procurement systems enabled manufacturers like Ford to capture significant external economies, including opportunities for collaborative, inter-firm innovation. Together, the strands of my argument help reframe the history of the American auto industry to the present day, raising important questions about the history of corporate industry and demonstrating that the American system of mass production was as much a political as a technological achievement.

Throughout the 20th century, the automobile became the great American machine, a technological object that became inseparable from every level of American life and culture from the cycles of the national economy to the passions of teen dating, from the travails of labor struggles to the travels of “soccer moms.” Yet, the automobile brought with it multiple dimensions of risk: crashes mangled bodies, tailpipes spewed toxic exhausts, and engines “guzzled” increasingly limited fuel resources. During the 1960s and 1970s, the United States Federal government created institutions—primarily the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration within the Department of Transportation and the Office of Mobile Source Pollution Control in the Environmental Protection Agency—to regulate the automobile industry around three concerns, namely crash safety, fuel efficiency, and control of emissions. This dissertation examines the growth of state institutions to regulate these three concerns during the 1960s and 1970s through the 1980s when the state came under fire from new political forces and governmental bureaucracies experienced large cutbacks in budgets and staff. While most previous studies of regulation have focused either on biographies of regulatory visionaries a.k.a. policy entrepreneurs) or on legislative histories, this dissertation examines how the federal government built bureaucratic organizations and administrative capacity to regulate and force change in the automobile through performance standards. Employees of these agencies helped shape automobile design by creating routine regulatory procedures that intervened in the longstanding traditions of automobile design. Only by examining these micro-practices of governmental power, I argue, can we understand how regulatory regimes have truly influenced their intended objects. My dissertation examines how these institutions developed, learned, and evolved, with an eye to how these transformations shaped technological change in the automobile industry. By examining the mundane world of federal test procedures, scientific studies, agency meetings, and administrative hearings, I will show how low-level bureaucrats formed new networks between government and industry, established the state of the art in automobile technology, and forced innovation in automobile design.

Using historical sources comprised of earthquake stories of multiple genres—personal anecdotes, prayers, sermons, natural histories, philosophical treatises, poems—as well as texts about modern scientific theories, this project demonstrates how unpredictable and incompletely understood phenomena like earthquakes both expose and challenge the boundaries of knowledge. The process of European expansion to the Americas in the early modern period provides some geographical and temporal structure to the broad scope of this project, which discusses stories that come from across the globe and cover the period from roughly the eighth century BCE to the present. Special attention is paid to scientific or natural philosophical views of earthquakes, and to religious and mythological stories about the phenomenon, in order to show how a fuller understanding of earthquakes requires expanding beyond traditional limits of knowledge. So far, no individual explanation for why the earth shakes—whether ancient or modern, religious or scientific—has proven to be complete. Until such time as we have complete knowledge—if that time ever comes—a diversity of perspectives can help us to frame our understanding of earthquakes and their impact on human history.

This dissertation examines the relationship between Polybius Histories and the culture of the sciences in Hellenistic Greece. The period often is identified with noteworthy advances in scientific thought, not only in the extension of rational culture to broader and more diverse areas of inquiry, but also in the formalization of practices within and among fields of research. Historical writing may also be situated in this context, especially in light of comparable efforts to define and formalize study of the past as a more serious intellectual pursuit. With the great proliferation of historical texts at this time and especially the growth of concern for standards of historical method, the Hellenistic era is characterized by an increasingly stronger sense of historys status as a formal discipline. Polybius role in this set of developments is substantial； his writing is distinguished throughout by special concerns for methodology. In particular, it is the framework constituted by other forms of science, understood as a set of concrete models of description and analysis, which forms the basis for his approach. In this dissertation, I explain the practical and conceptual framework of contemporary science as a source of structure for this attempt to innovate in the historical field. My approach is based on three considerations, of which the first concerns factors internal to the historical field itself. Given the basic problems with knowledge of the past and especially the lack of clear standards for historical method, the historical field is typically characterized by dispute and rivalry among writers. As Polybius own interest in methodology is based on this largely routine set of concerns, his relationship with the sciences is to be understood primarily from the perspective of competition with existing sources of historical authority. Consideration of the Histories in relation to contemporary historical production thus reveals an effort to specialize study of the past on the basis of more stringent principles of historical reconstruction. Polybius approach is not arbitrary, but is based on formal approaches to inquiry employed elsewhere in the sciences, which, I argue, provide the basis for innovation in the historical field mainly due to the special cultural authority of such practices. Given the progress of Hellenistic science, technical adjustments in Polybius writing are to be understood in relation to current trends in the development of rational culture—the second main concern here. This detail not only clarifies the basis of Polybius critical engagement with the historical tradition, but also qualifies the relationship between history and the sciences in ancient Greece, a subject of controversy at least since Aristotle. The final part of my argument examines the consequences of this relationship for the production and organization of historical knowledge. Even as affiliations with the sciences provide the basis for a more serious approach to history e.g., as opposed to accounts of the past appearing in myth or in aristocratic genealogies), the same affiliations introduce constraints for historical representation as well. Thus the practices and concepts relating history to the sciences are not merely formal, but constitute a productive influence on constructions of historical perception. Overall, this project aims to provide a framework, formed on the model of Polybius Histories, for clarifying the relationship between the pragmatics of disciplinary development in the historical field and the organization of historical understanding more generally. The dissertation is divided into four chapters. In the first chapter, I provide an overview of ancient science by considering specific conditions governing the development of Classical and Hellenistic intellectual culture. Following modern theoretical approaches to the sociology of scientific knowledge, I examine the formation of certain research programs in this context as the expression of specific forms of social authority in intellectual culture. Chapter 2 examines Polybius concern for history as a source of technical instruction for the statesman. This aspect of his writing, denoted by the controversial expression pragmatike historia, reveals an effort to subject study of the past to concepts of knowledge and explanation employed in the practical sciences, which thus provide the model for a more useful account of political and military affairs. In Chapter 3, I extend a similar approach to Polybius concept of universal history. In the final chapter, I examine Polybius approach to the study of historical causes, most notably in his accounts of the various wars described in the Histories. This aspect of his writing is based on deliberate attempts to adapt methods of explanation in the natural sciences. In particular, I consider how use of that model extends the discourse on the origins of wars beyond conventional frames of concern in practical political contexts. Abstract shortened by UMI.)