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.
Eric Hintz explores the history of independent inventors, their complex relationship with corporate America, and their resurgence in the late 20th and 21st centuries.
Lucas Richert discusses the theory and practice of psychiatry in the 1960s and 1970s, exploring the ways that radical psychiatry and the counterculture changed the discipline.
Teasel Muir-Harmony discusses the political history of Project Apollo and the domestic and foreign policy considerations that went into trying to land a human on the Moon by the end of the 1960s.
Neeraja Sankaran provides a novel approach to the history of the development of medical virology by comparing the history of two groups of medically important viruses: bacteriophages and sarcoma agents.
Rachel Walker discusses race and science in early America, using archival images pertaining to phrenology and physiognomy to discuss the ways these techniques were used to prop up existing social hierarchies, and also to subvert them.
Listen to historian Alberto Martínez as he discusses the ways in which the visionary discoveries of Giordano Bruno were unfairly discredited and excised from history in a centuries-long campaign against the heterodox philosopher and cosmologist.
Courtney Thompson and Alicia Puglionesi discuss their books on the history of phrenology and psychical science in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.
Watch Peter Galison as he discusses his latest film with esteemed colleagues Lorraine Daston and Simon Schaffer, and then answers questions about the film from friends of the Consortium.
Abraham Gibson explores the history of the Southern United States through its feral animal populations, providing us with an understanding of how domestication and the wild have informed each other over the last four hundred years.
Bert Hansen guides us through his donated collection of images of medical treatments and technologies found in nineteenth century mass media publications.
Join us as we speak to historian Wendy Gonaver about her research on the history of the Eastern Lunatic Asylum in Williamsburg, Virginia and the practice of psychiatry in the pre- and post-Civil War American South.
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.
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Discussions with authors, often with several readers, with links to additional resources
Join historian Melanie Kiechle as she delves into the history of health and sensory perception in 19th century urban environments.
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