Perspectives is an ever-growing library of podcasts, videos, and essays on the history of science, technology and medicine, along with resources for further learning and opportunities to engage in ongoing conversations.
Perspectives provides discussions with leading scholars, interviews with recent authors, and archival highlights from the exceptional collections of Consortium member institutions.
Listen to historian Audra Wolfe as she examines how science was defined and used as a tool of cultural diplomacy and international relations during the Cold War.
Listen to historian Susan Lindee as she discusses how the military establishment transformed science and technology, interrogates why the victims of technologies of war are often left out of our historical accounts, and questions whether growing defense budgets are in society's best interests.
Scholars Dean Jamison and Abdo Yazbeck discuss the creation and impact of the World Bank's World Development Report 1993: Investing in Health, an influential document in the history of global health that they helped to create. They discuss and answer questions about the economization of health, the creation of the DALY measure, and the benefits and downsides of the World Bank's role in international health policy.
Jonson Miller explores the development of the Virginia Military Institute and the engineering profession in the Antebellum United States. Miller delves into the ways in which VMI was a node in the struggle for political representation among lower- and middle-class white men, while explicitly excluding women and black men from its egalitarian mission.
Follow along with Professor Mary Fissell as she discusses her research on Aristotle's Masterpiece, a late 17th century English sex and midwifery manual.
Scholars Deirdre Cooper Owens and Lynn Roberts discuss how slavery and the history of reproductive medicine intersect, the impact of medical racism on Black birthing people, and recent efforts to address racial inequalities in maternal mortality and morbidity.
Join the Presidents of the History of Science Society, the Society for the History of Technology, and the American Association for the History of Medicine as they discuss the current and future roles of the three most important organizations in our field. Jan Golinski (HSS), Tom Misa (SHOT), and Keith Wailoo (AAHM) discuss how their organizations are faring, how they are changing, and how we can participate in, benefit from, and help to shape them.
Listen to this series of perspectives on the COVID-19 pandemic from renowned scholars in the humanities and social sciences. There are currently twelve episodes in the series, looking at COVID-19 and its historical antecedents from diverse viewpoints and in places such as India, Brazil, China, Iran, South Africa, and the United States.
Beginning with an in-depth look at Johannes Stradanus's Nova Reperta, explore the interplay between invention, social change, and economic development from the Renaissance to today.
Joseph Martin tells the story of how solid state physics challenged and redefined some of the core ideals of American physics, and in the process played an essential role in sustaining the prestige physics enjoyed in Cold War American society.
Cameron Strang takes American scientific thought and discoveries away from the learned societies, museums, and teaching halls of the Northeast and puts the production of knowledge about the natural world in the context of competing empires and an expanding republic in the Gulf South.
Phrenology was the most popular mental science of the Victorian age. From American senators to Indian social reformers, this new mental science found supporters around the globe.
Dóra Vargha uses a series of polio epidemics in communist Hungary to understand the response to a global public health emergency in the midst of the Cold War.
In this podcast episode, we discuss the history of how biblical notions of race influenced European understandings of Africa.
In Bone Rooms, Samuel Redman explores the history of human remains collecting. The collection and display of bodily remains became central to debates about ethics, repatriation, and scientific authority that continue today.
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