Varieties of Popular Science and The Transformations of Public Knowledge: Some Historical Reflections

Varieties of Popular Science and the Transformations of Public Knowledge: Some Historical Reflections
Author(s): By Andreas W. Daum

Source: Isis, Vol. 100, No. 2 (June 2009), pp. 319-332
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society
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Varieties of Popular Science and the

Transformations of Public
Knowledge
Some Historical Reflections
By Andreas W. Daum*
ABSTRACT
This essay suggests that we should understand the varieties of “popular science” as part
of a larger phenomenon: the changing set of processes, practices, and actors that generate
and transform public knowledge across time, space, and cultures. With such a reconcep-
tualization we can both de-essentialize and historicize the idea of “popularization,” free it
from normative notions, and move beyond existing imbalances in scholarship. The history
of public knowledge might thus find a central place in many fundamental narratives of the
modern world. More specifically, the essay proposes that we pay more attention to forms
of knowledge outside the realm of “science,” embrace the richness, traffic, and transfer of
public knowledge on a transnational scale as well as in comparative perspective, and
rethink conventional forms of periodization.
T HE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF POPULAR SCIENCE seems to be one of the rare cases

in which a young research field has been more haunted by its methodological problems
than convinced of its strengths, more concerned about its empirical gaps than forthcoming
about the results it has generated, and more doubtful about its positioning in historiog-
raphy at large than adventurous in exploring where to situate itself.1 This paradoxical
* Department of History, State University of New York at Buffalo, 570 Park Hall, Buffalo, New York 14260;
adaum@buffalo.edu.
I would like to thank Jim Bono, Bernard Lightman, Ralph O’Connor, Jim Secord, and Jon Topham, as well
as Justin Donhauser, Kate Doran, and the audience at the University of Erfurt, Germany, where I presented a
version of this essay in October 2008, for providing valuable feedback and suggestions.
1 See Steven Shapin, “Science and the Public,” in Companion to the History of Modern Science, ed. R. C. Olby
et al. (London/New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 990 –1007; Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumfrey, “Separate
Spheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularization and Science in Popular Culture,”
History of Science, 1994, 32:237–267; Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, “A Genealogy of the Increasing Gap
between Science and the Public,” Public Understanding of Science, 2001, 10:99 –113; and the short summary
Isis, 2009, 100:319 –332

©2009 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.
0021-1753/2009/10002-0005$10.00
319

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situation has a lot to do with the indisputable problem of defining the actual object of
inquiry. The terms “popular science” and “popularization” quickly turn out to be prob-
lematic as—in Max Weber’s terminology—ideal types that would serve as universal
categories open enough to structure empirical observations without equating the language
of historians with the language of their sources. Undoubtedly, these terms are of limited
use if we test their logic: Is popular science only science popularized or something more
and different? What does “popular” mean? Can we still speak of “science” if “scientific”
knowledge transforms into something very different—with respect to its reach, validity,
and interpretation— once it is being consumed as a public good?
Today, older trickle-down or two-stage models that attempted to capture what happens
when science is being popularized are passé—and rightly so.2 These models understand
popular science as the result of forms of communication through which specialized
knowledge produced on a higher level—that is, within the realm of research-oriented
science—is translated to a largely passive audience. Popular science thus represents a kind
of science “lite,” derivative at best, if not the illegitimate brainchild of true knowledge
dragging its audience down the slippery slope toward trivialization. Criticism of this
model has been endlessly varied, almost becoming a mantra; but in itself it offers no useful
alternatives. This is rather ironic, since hardly any historians—if any at all—in the last
thirty years or so have actually subscribed to the two-stage model.3
It might be time to take a more optimistic stance, without repeating the tropes of
emphatic promises that so many new research fields have used since historians said
good-bye to the “noble dream” of finding the truth by reading the right sources correctly.4
Specifically, I want to suggest, first, that we appreciate the new wealth of historical studies
on popular science— but also acknowledge some of the persistent sociological and
discursive imbalances that mark the field in which these studies situate themselves. This
short review may help to analyze the historical varieties of popular science more vigor-
ously and introduce more comparative questions to the field. Second, I would like to
propose some heuristic categories that can be applied within local, regional, and national
contexts, as well as to questions about transcultural communication, all of which would
make it easier to design strategies for placing what is so insufficiently called “popular
science” into broader frameworks. With the aim of de-essentializing and historicizing
“popular science” in mind, my third suggestion is that we might understand forms of
popular science as specific variations of a much larger phenomenon—that is, as transfor-
mations of public knowledge across time, space, and cultures. Ultimately, then, the
historiography of popular science would become the nucleus, and perhaps even the
trendsetter, of a broader and more interdisciplinary endeavor.
by Bruce V. Lewenstein, “Popularization,” in The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science, ed. John
L. Heilbron (Oxford/New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 667– 668.
2 Stephen Hilgartner, “The Dominant View of Popularization: Conceptual Problems, Political Uses,” Social
Studies of Science, 1990, 20:519 –539. For the diametrically opposite concept of “expository science,” which
assumes a “sort of continuum of methods and practices utilized both within research and far beyond, for purposes
of conveying science-based information,” see Terry Shinn and Richard Whitley, eds., Expository Science: Forms
and Functions of Popularisation (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985), p. viii.
3 The sweeping critique of the two-stage model tends to overlook, however, that popularizing activities
throughout history have often construed rhetorically a gap between expert knowledge and popular knowledge to
make the opposite argument—i.e., to present popular knowledge as something positive and necessary.
4 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession
(Cambridge/New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988).

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IMBALANCES AND NEW PERSPECTIVES
It is both easy and necessary to identify the wide gaps in our understanding of the
historical varieties of popular science. We know considerably more about these today,
however, than half a generation ago. There are new surveys concentrating on individual
countries and original monographic studies, in addition to a plethora of articles and some
essay collections that cover a wide array of themes, media, and actors.5 We know more
about the many individuals and loosely formed groups that have popularized science,
especially about female writers and other authors left aside by a whiggish historiography
of science.6 Scholars have identified a variety of sites in which knowledge has been made
public—from bourgeois family homes and pubs to natural history associations, from
world’s fairs to television screens.7 The history of print media, book production, and
reading has been conceptualized as a prime field for studying both the intellectual
dynamics of popular science and the material practices that enable these pursuits.8 The
5 For exemplary studies that focus on national settings see, for England, David E. Allen, The Naturalist in
Britain: A Social History, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994); Roger Cooter, The Cultural
Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984); Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain
(Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1998); and James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publica-
tion, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: Univ. Chicago
Press, 2000). For France: Bruno Béguet, ed., La science pour tous: Sur la vulgarisation scientifique en France
de 1850 à 1914 (Paris: Bibliotheque du Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, 1990); and Daniel Raichvarg
and Jean Jacques, Savants et ignorants: Une histoire de la vulgarisation des sciences (Paris: Seuil, 1991). For
Germany: Alfred Kelly, The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwinism in Germany, 1860 –1914
(Chapel Hill: Univ. North Carolina Press, 1981); and Andreas W. Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19.
Jahrhundert: Bürgerliche Kultur, naturwissenschaftliche Bildung und die deutsche Öffentlichkeit, 1848 –1914,
2nd ed. (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2002). For the United States: Annette M. Woodlief, “Science in Popular Culture,”
in Handbook of American Popular Culture, ed. M. Thomas Inge, Vol. 3 (Westport, Conn./London: Greenwood,
1981), pp. 429 – 458; and John C. Burnham, How Superstition Won and Science Lost: Popularizing Science and
Health in the United States (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1987). For some recent essay collections
see Bernard Lightman, ed., Victorian Science in Context (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1997); Aileen Fyfe and
Lightman, eds., Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences (Chicago: Univ. Chicago
Press, 2007); and Carsten Kretschmann, ed., Wissenspopularisierung: Konzepte der Wissensverbreitung im
Wandel (Berlin: Akademie, 2003). Many relevant articles can be found in N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C.
Spary, eds., Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996).
6 Catherine Bénédic, “Le monde des vulgarisateurs,” in La science pour tous, ed. Béguet, pp. 30 – 40;
“Dictionnaire des principaux vulgarisateurs,” ibid., pp. 41– 49; Barbara T. Gates and Ann B. Shteir, eds., Natural
Eloquence: Women Reinscribe Science (Madison: Univ. Wisconsin Press, 1997); Shteir, Cultivating Women,
Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760 to 1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Press, 1996); Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert, pp. 377– 458, 473–518; and Bernard
Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: Univ. Chicago
Press, 2007).
7 See Fyfe and Lightman, eds., Science in the Marketplace (cit. n. 5); Sally G. Kohlstedt, “From Learned
Society to Public Museum: The Boston Society of Natural History,” in The Organization of Knowledge in
Modern America, 1860 –1920, ed. Alexandra Olsen and John Voss (Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Press, 1979), pp. 386 – 406; Anne Secord, “Science in the Pub: Artisan Botanists in Early Nineteenth-Century
Lancashire,” Hist. Sci., 1994, 32:269 –315; and, with a focus on the intersection of bourgeois family life and
scientific imagination, Deborah R. Coen, Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life
(Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2007). On science in twentieth-century (visual) media see Gregg Mitman, Reel
Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999); and Marcel
C. LaFollette, Science on the Air: Popularizers and Personalities on Radio and Early Television (Chicago: Univ.
Chicago Press, 2008).
8 Jim Secord’s Victorian Sensation (cit. n. 5) stands out as a landmark study. For the British context see also
Geoffrey Cantor et al., Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004); Louise Henson, Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century
Media (Aldershot/Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004); James Mussell, Science, Time, and Space in the Late
Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Movable Types (Aldershot/Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2007); and Jonathan
R. Topham, “Publishing ‘Popular Science’ in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in Science in the Marketplace,

322 FOCUS—ISIS, 100 : 2 (2009)
metaphorical and visual dimensions of knowledge production have become a serious

theme among historians.9 Furthermore, the complex relationship between popular science
and religion, which defies older black-and-white conflict paradigms, enjoys increasing
attention.10 More generally, there is a tendency to understand forms of popularization as
multidimensional processes of communication among a plurality of knowledge producers,
audiences, and public sites, with each of these ideal type factors assuming reciprocal and
changing roles that may overlap.
In spite of the increase in the number of studies, however, the field at large is
characterized by remarkable imbalances, and some of these have tended to harden over
time. Imbalances in a given field of research may be loosely defined as forms of
asymmetry between the emphasis on some topics and the neglect of others, as well as the
disproportionate ways in which recognition is given to certain results at the expense of
others. Such imbalances always reflect the intellectual dynamics in a given field. The
historiography of popular science can only profit by promoting more heterodoxy and
microhistories, by appreciating a greater diversity of approaches, and by exploring
neglected avenues of investigation.11 Yet existing imbalances tend to fuel thematic and
methodological path dependencies that strengthen the inclination to become self-
referential in those areas that we know most about already. I would like to point out three
such imbalances:
● the thematic emphasis on science— especially the natural sciences (and what is being
called the “natural world”)—and the scientific community, an emphasis that often
fails to appreciate the variety of sources of public knowledge and the communicative
dynamics in other fields of popular culture;
● the reliance on secondary literature written in English, coupled with a dominant focus
on historical developments in Britain as a kind of lead sector, a focus that neglects
existing research on the non-English-speaking world and misses multiple opportu-
nities for comparisons with other linguistic and cultural settings;
● the chronological focus on the nineteenth century, which has not sought to distin-
guish more precisely how the goals, rhetoric, and practices of popular science
ed. Fyfe and Lightman, pp. 135–168. More generally, see Robert Darnton, “History of Reading,” in New
Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke, 2nd ed. (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press,
2001), pp. 157–186.
9 See James J. Bono, “Science, Discourse, and Literature: The Role/Rule of Metaphor in Science,” in
Literature and Science: Theory and Practice, ed. Stuart Peterfreund (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1990),
pp. 59 – 89; Robert M. Young, Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge/New York:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985); Caroline A. Jones, Peter Louis Galison, and Amy E. Slaton, eds., Picturing
Science, Producing Art (New York: Routledge, 1998); Bernard Lightman, “The Visual Theology of Victorian
Popularizers of Science: From Reverent Eye to Chemical Retina,” Isis, 2000, 91:651– 680; Anke te Heesen, The
World in a Box: The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press,
2002); Anne Secord, “Botany on a Plate: Pleasure and the Power of Pictures in Promoting Early Nineteenth-
Century Scientific Knowledge,” Isis, 2002, 93:28 –57; “Science and Visual Culture” [Focus section], ibid., 2006,
97:75–132; Ann B. Shteir and Lightman, eds., Figuring It Out: Science, Gender, and Visual Culture (Hanover,
N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2006); and Bernd Hüppauf and Peter Weingart, eds., Science Images and
Popular Images of the Sciences (New York: Routledge, 2007).
10 John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge/New York: Cam-
bridge Univ. Press, 1991); Peter J. Bowler, Reconciling Science and Religion: The Debate in Early Twentieth-
Century Britain (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2001); David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., When
Science and Christianity Meet (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2003); and Aileen Fyfe, Science and Salvation:
Evangelical Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2004).
11 On the role of microhistory in the history of science see Paula Findlen, “The Two Cultures of Scholarship?”
Isis, 2005, 96:230 –237.

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changed during that century as well as on their way into the “Age of Extremes” and
today’s knowledge society.12
As for the first imbalance: so far, most studies of popular science have been written by
historians of science and are addressed to historians of science. They mostly deal with the
relationship between the sciences—meaning the natural sciences as they emerged in the
nineteenth century—and the public, and they focus on how public discourses embraced
the “natural world.” In their remarkable effort to question the supposedly unavoidable
epistemological barriers between practitioners of science and the general public, recent
studies often tend to perpetuate the very notion of a scientific community—as if its
members were not, at the same time, always members of multiple communities.
I think that the focus on the sciences and on explaining the configurations of knowledge
about the natural world has become too exclusive. The natural sciences and natural history
are not by definition the only fields to study if we are interested in finding out how
societies generated and publicized knowledge to make meaningful statements about their
world. Even if we were to relate the history of popularization primarily to the development
of professional science, which is by no means the only possible reference point, it seems
to me that the focus on the natural sciences and the natural world captures only one
segment of a much larger fabric of popular knowledge. In fact, it fails to take fully into
account what many societies after 1800 were striving for: to understand Wissenschaft and
Wissenschaftlichkeit—that is, scholarship, knowledge production, and the moral ethos
attached to both—as modes of coping with the world rather than just vehicles for
establishing specific sectors of research.13
Historians of science have so far been much more at ease when referring to popular
medicine and technology than when looking at the humanities, the social sciences, and
other sectors of popular culture. However, the popularization of theories of political
economy in the early nineteenth century has just as much a place in our field as the spread
of Darwin’s evolutionary theory. The popularization of psychoanalysis allows us to study
how a scientific vocabulary captured the popular imagination across the globe; so too did
the embrace and redefinition of management theories and standards of efficiency designed
in the United States in the twentieth century. The rise of music journalism in the early
nineteenth century and of archaeological digs in the Mediterranean world later also offer
ample opportunities to study how societies began to construe boundaries between, but also
transcended, the dichotomy of professional cultures on the one hand and so-called amateur
or lay practices on the other.14
12 Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914 –1991 (New York: Pantheon, 1994).
13 In contrast to the use of the term “science” in the English-speaking world, “Wissenschaft” has not been
limited to the natural sciences in the German context; see Andreas W. Daum, “Wissenschaft and Knowledge,”
in Germany, 1800 –1870, ed. Jonathan Sperber (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004), pp. 137–161.
14 On theories of political economy in the early nineteenth century see Noel W. Thompson, The People’s
Science: The Popular Political Economy of Exploitation and Crisis, 1816 –34 (Cambridge/New York: Cam-
bridge Univ. Press, 1984). On the spread of Darwin’s theory see Thomas F. Glick, ed., The Comparative
Reception of Darwinism: With a New Preface (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1988); and Eve-Marie Engels, ed.,
Die Rezeption von Evolutionstheorien im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995). On the
popularization of psychoanalysis see Joy Damousi and Mariano Ben Plotkin, eds., The Transnational Uncon-
scious: Essays in the History of Psychoanalysis and Transnationalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
On the international reception of economic models coined in the United States see Richard Kuisel, Seducing the
French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1993); and Mary Nolan, Visions of
Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (Oxford/New York: Oxford Univ. Press,
1994). On the rise of music journalism see Celia Applegate, Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Men-
delssohn’s Revival of the St. Matthew Passion (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 2005). On the role of

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Jean-Marc Drouin and Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent argued not long ago that even
natural history, which seems to have been self-evidently popular during the nineteenth
century, was deliberately construed and promoted as a field of popular interest.15 Accept-
ing this observation, and following its insight as a methodological trajectory, would
encourage de-essentializing our understanding of specific fields of knowledge that seem-
ingly shift from being regarded as scientific to becoming popular (or the reverse). Instead,
we could use case studies from various fields to examine in more general terms how and
why societies at given periods have promoted the idea of public participation in knowl-
edge and have defined certain practices of knowledge as popular. Such an approach would
greatly help to clarify why, indeed, specific fields—for example, botany in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries— enjoyed more popularity than others.
A second imbalance that deserves a closer look is the dominant role that historical
studies on popular science written in English, and especially those focused on Victorian
Britain, have played in framing our discussions. Historians of Victorian science have
advanced with enormous sophistication in exploring the topography of popular science.
However, it is problematic to narrow the geographical focus, continue to neglect the
history of popular science in other parts of the world, and thus to look at Britain, even if
unintentionally, as a model case or norm. Provocatively speaking of a “British parochi-
alism,” James Secord has recently deplored the lack of recognition among British histo-
rians of science, even of works dealing with developments in the United States.16 This gap
is more dramatic—and widening—if we include Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe,
Latin America, Australia, and Asia. Obviously, the British case—like any other national
setting—is anything but representative of others, and the assumption that “Britain led the
world” in the nineteenth century is worth discussion.17 Britain’s overall development in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is characterized by a number of particularities that
distinguish this case significantly from others—such as those of newer nation-states like
France, Italy, Germany, India, and China or older empires like Russia. These particular-
ities have had an immediate impact on the role of science in society, even if we name only
the relatively early and continuous expansion of forms of civil public spheres, the
bypassing of a radical revolution in 1848, the dynamics of both imperialism and decolo-
nization, the relative constraints on the state in interfering with university education, and
the lack of radical regime changes (of the sort that took place in 1789, 1871, 1911, 1917,
1933, 1945, 1947, and 1949 in the other countries cited).
One need not subscribe entirely to the postcolonial studies project of “provincializing
Europe” to find Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call for a “gesture of inversion” to be a useful
methodological device.18 How was science popularized in settings that seem blank or gray
on our map? Why did others—whether in British India or the People’s Republic of
China—make knowledge public and create ways of participating in this knowledge? And
how can we break out of the boundaries of nation-states as seemingly coherent entities and
archaeology see Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany,
1750 –1970 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1996).
15 Jean-Marc Drouin and Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, “Nature for the People,” in Cultures of Natural
History, ed. Jardine et al. (cit. n. 5), pp. 408 – 425.

16 James A. Secord, “Knowledge in Transit,” Isis, 2004, 95:654 – 672, on p. 669.
17 Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman, “Science in the Marketplace: An Introduction,” in Science in the
Marketplace, ed. Fyfe and Lightman (cit. n. 5), pp. 1–19, on p. 9.

18 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000); and Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks
for ‘Indian’ Pasts?” Representations, 1992, 37:1–26, on p. 8.

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overcome hierarchies based on a dichotomy between (imperial) centers and (colonial)
peripheries?
In Leviathan and the Air-Pump, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer brilliantly alerted
historians and sociologists of science to the creation of audiences and public sites for
experiments arranged to validate specific forms of scientific thinking and to make claims
for authority in seventeenth-century England. Comparable but distinct observations have
been made for other European countries. They invite us to test in a transcultural com-
parison the complex linkages between performance, public appeal, and the reach of what
contemporaries perceived as legitimate knowledge.19 Such comparison is now possible in
many areas—for example, we might compare the claims to authority made by healers,
magicians, and midwives in Costa Rica in the nineteenth century with trends in popular
medicine in Central Europe. We can ask how efforts to popularize science in India “within
the compelling demands of colonialism,” yet mediated through local brokers in Bengal
and elsewhere, unfolded in comparison to efforts in Lancashire and London.20 It is
possible to draw connections between natural history associations in Victorian Britain and
those in nineteenth-century German states, which were grappling with the nature of civil
society. Likewise, Spain’s much discussed backwardness with respect to the development
of professional science during the nineteenth century and the dominance of Catholicism
there invite comparisons with Italy, Poland, and Ireland. The Spanish example, in partic-
ular, demonstrates that these factors did not exclude activities in service of what may be
called popular science.21
Such comparisons must necessarily remain rudimentary as long as we lack sufficient
empirical data; and, as with all comparisons, we cannot operate within a static grid of
parameters. Even more, it is important to find out how notions of “popularity” and
“knowledge” have been developed in distinct ways in various cultures and how these
cultures have been linked with one another.22 By 1909 Ernst Haeckel’s Natural History of
Creation could be read in twenty-five languages across the world. This “gospel of
evolutionary theory” served as a catalyst for public discussions about fundamental ques-
tions of life in the workers’ movement in Argentina no less than among intellectuals in
19 See Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental
Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985); Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric,
Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660 –1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1992); Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760 –1820 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992); and Helmar Schramm, ed., Spektakuläre Experimente: Praktiken der
Evidenzproduktion im 17. Jahrhundert (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2006).
20 Steven Paul Palmer, From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism: Doctors, Healers, and Public Power in
Costa Rica, 1800 –1940 (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2003); and Narender K. Sehgal, Satpal Sangwan, and
Subodh Mahanti, eds., Uncharted Terrains: Essays on Science Popularisation in Pre-Independence India (New
Delhi: Vigyan Prasar, 2000), p. 4.
21 Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert (cit. n. 5), pp. 85–191, 210 –225; and Faidra
Papanelopoulou, Agustı́ Nieto-Galan, and Enrique Perdiguero, eds., Popularizing Science and Technology in the
European Periphery, 1800 –2000 (Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming). See also Marta Petrusewicz, “The Mod-
ernization of the European Periphery: Ireland, Poland, and the Two Sicilies, 1820 –1870: Parallel and Connected,
Distinct and Comparable,” in Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective, ed. Deborah
Cohen and Maura O’Connor (New York/London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 145–163.
22 See Susan Sheets-Pyenson, “Popular Science Periodicals in Paris and London: The Emergence of a Low
Scientific Culture, 1820 –1875,” Annals of Science, 1985, 42:549 –572; Angela Schwarz, Der Schlüssel zur
modernen Welt: Wissenschaftspopularisierung in Gro␤britannien und Deutschland im Übergang zur Moderne
(ca. 1870 –1914) (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1999); Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Anne Rasmussen, eds., La science
populaire dans la presse et l’édition XIXe et XXe siècles (Paris: CNRS, 1997); and Joachim Schummer,
Bensaude-Vincent, and Brigitte Van Tiggelen, eds., The Public Image of Chemistry (Singapore/Hackensack,
N.J.: World Scientific, 2007).

326 FOCUS—ISIS, 100 : 2 (2009)
Austria and in Poland, a country in which about 30 percent of all popular science
publications at the time were translations.23 Works by John Tyndall and Camille Flam-
marion had similar effects. Do we want to fall behind the popularizers we study in our
ability to reach out to audiences beyond national boundaries? Shouldn’t the leading
history of science journals do more to solicit reviews of work published in languages other
than English? Shouldn’t we, as individuals organizing conference panels and putting
together essay collections, do more to include scholars whose work is in other languages?
And why not do more to design projects that involve different countries and capitalize on
the use of English as our global language?
Comparisons can be made across time, too. This perspective leads to the third imbal-
ance I noted above: that between the dominant focus on the nineteenth century and the
astonishingly small number of studies on the history of popular science in the twentieth
century. The nineteenth century is presumably the only historical period for which we can
speak with some coherence about popular science as a practice, an intellectual construct,
a rhetorical strategy, and an economic endeavor, all at the same time. Yet the nineteenth
century is not a coherent entity either. For Britain, one may argue that the 1820s and 1830s
are a period of dense transformation, especially with regard to the expansion of a broad
print market and related reading habits. In the cases of France and Germany, the
revolution of 1848 provides an important symbolic hinge.24
Moreover, how do we overcome the conventional divide between the so-called early
modern and modern periods? How do we explain the many commonalities between
communicative and economic practices that aimed to make knowledge public in different
countries during the decades between the publication of the French Encyclopédie and that
of the Bridgewater Treatises, in which enlightenment became a “business” but also
remained, for many, a road to salvation?25 And do the final decades of the nineteenth
century not mark more than the end of the massive takeoff of popular science? From the
late nineteenth century on, many countries in the Northern Hemisphere strove to popu-
larize knowledge while one attack after another was being launched on positivism and the
belief in objectivity. Popularization, albeit in new forms, intensified as the modern
physical sciences emerged, state bureaucracies expanded, and “big science” began to take
shape, which also meant that aggressive forms of public advocacy for science were being
developed.26 These societies expanded on the popularization of science, yet under radi-
23 Dora Barrancos, La escena iluminada: Ciencias para trabajadores, 1890 –1930 (Buenos Aires: Plus Ultra,
1996); Werner Michler, Darwinismus und Literatur: Naturwissenschaftliche und literarische Intelligenz in
Österreich, 1859 –1914 (Vienna/Cologne: Böhlau, 1999); and Leszek Zasztowt, Popularyzacja nauki w Kró-
lestwie Polskim 1864 –1905 (Warsaw: Zakład Narodowy, 1989), p. 269. The quotation is from Eduard von
Hartmann (“Evangelium der Descendenztheorie”), Deutsche Rundschau, 1875, 4:17.
24 Topham, “Publishing ‘Popular Science’ in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain” (cit. n. 8); and Andreas W.
Daum, “Science, Politics, and Religion: Humboldtian Thinking and the Transformations of Civil Society in
Germany, 1830 –1870,” in Science and Civil Society, ed. Tom Broman and Lynn Nyhart (Osiris, 17) (Chicago:
Univ. Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 107–140.
25 Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1979); and Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France
(New York: Norton, 1995). See also Thomas Broman, “The Habermasian Public Sphere and ‘Science in the
Enlightenment,’” Hist. Sci., 1998, 36:123–149.
26 On politics and science referring to one another as resources see Mitchell G. Ash, “Wissenschaft und Politik
als Ressourcen füreinander,” in Wissenschaften und Wissenschaftspolitik—Bestandaufnahmen zu Formationen,

Brüchen und Kontinuitäten im Deutschland des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Rüdiger vom Bruch and Brigitte Kaderas
(Stuttgart: Steiner, 2002), pp. 32–51; and Detlev J. K. Peukert, “The Genesis of the ‘Final Solution’ from the
Spirit of Science,” in Reevaluating the Third Reich, ed. Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan (New York: Holmes
& Meier, 1993), pp. 234 –252.

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cally changing circumstances and with new aims: consumer society grew enormously,
state interference in private life was increasingly legitimized through reference to “sci-
entific” insights, and some countries went through periods of authoritarian rule (as in Italy,
Spain, Hungary, and Japan) or almost totalitarian dictatorship (as in Germany and the
Soviet Union).
We know far too little about the transformations of popular science between 1890 and
the advent of the age of television in the 1950s. How were new sites of public knowledge
designed in an age of extreme political, ideological, and economic polarization? What role
did popular science play for Fascist Italy and in 1930s Japan, a country that had made huge
modernization efforts in a dynamic communication with “Western” science during the
Meiji Restoration? How did Nazi Germany use popular “science” as a resource to
legitimize its discriminatory and ultimately genocidal policies? How did public knowl-
edge figure in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries that feverishly attempted to
make a great leap forward into modernity? These countries embraced science and tech-
nology as the very foundation of their design for a future society and a socialist modernity.
Recent studies allow us, for example, to examine how archaeology and engineering were
promoted as areas of public knowledge in the People’s Republic of China and in socialist
East Germany to forge their respective national identities.27
It is quite a stretch to go from eighteenth-century soirées of Parisian intellectuals
discussing astronomical observations or nineteenth-century itinerant lecturers preaching
the gospels of natural history to Nazi promoters of eugenics. Construing straightforward
lines of continuity—for example, from Haeckel (or Darwin, for that matter) to Hitler—is
unsatisfactory.28 But we need to explore more vigorously, as cumbersome as it is, what
kind of “science” Goebbels and Lysenko wanted to make popular and how potential
answers to that question figure into the much longer history of popular science. In the long
run, we need to ask what role popular science played—and what purposes it has
served—in the ugly narratives of the twentieth century.29
SOME HEURISTIC CATEGORIES AND THE MANY NARRATIVES OF PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE
Marc Bloch once reminded historians that the “charm” of history is not diminished by
methodological inquiry but that the “day of precision” is “slow in coming.”30 We might
try to enhance our methodological inquiry—and thus highlight potential questions for
further research— by testing some common heuristic categories that are freed from
27 Morris Low, ed., Building a Modern Japan: Science, Technology, and Medicine in the Meiji Era and
Beyond (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); James T. Andrews, Science for the Masses: The Bolshevik
State, Public Science, and the Popular Imagination in Soviet Russia, 1917–1934 (College Station: Texas A&M
Univ. Press, 2003); Robert Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999);
Sigrid Schmalzer, The People’s Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China
(Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2008); and Dolores L. Augustine, Red Prometheus: Engineering and Dictator-
ship in East Germany, 1945–1990 (Cambridge, Mass./London: MIT Press, 2007).
28 Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: With a New Introduction (New Brunswick,
N.J.: Transaction, 2004); and Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and
Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
29 Charles S. Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern
Era,” American Historical Review, 2000, 165:807– 831. Two new grand syntheses emphasize the ambiguous
notions of Europe’s history in the twentieth century: Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth
Century (New York: Vintage, 2000); and Bernard Wasserstein, Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe
in Our Time (Oxford/New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007).
30 Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. Peter Putnam (New York: Vintage, 1953), pp. 8, 157.

328 FOCUS—ISIS, 100 : 2 (2009)
normative notions and applicable across time, space, and cultures; these may facilitate
communication with other historians as well as with scholars from other disciplines.31
Transformation over Time and Causality

What kinds of continuities and discontinuities can be identified in the history of popular
science? Do we not need to reconsider some of the rise-and-fall narratives of popular
science? There is a tendency at times to reproduce the Habermasian, negative teleology of
a public sphere degenerating with the breakthrough of capitalist mass society.32 Ulti-
mately, possible explanations hinge on what causal factors we focus on and how we relate
these to what is being called popular science. Improvements in print technology and the
expansion of a reading public might explain the rapid increase in popular reading
materials, as in Britain after about 1830; but these do not necessarily explain why and how
popularity was rhetorically construed in either earlier or later periods. In general, we have
not yet examined closely enough how popular science narratives relate to political
narratives. For example, there are considerable continuities in the personnel, intellectual
concepts, and practices devoted to popularizing science from imperial Russia to the new
Soviet Union, across the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Regime changes may explain a
lot—as in the case of Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933 and the ensuing establishment of
a racial state in Germany— but they do not explain everything.33
Actors and Agency

In recent years we have significantly broadened our understanding of “who the guys were”
that popularized science. A whole world of forgotten and seemingly obscure but enor-
mously influential popularizers has thus come to life.34 Broadening the array of actors—
including women and nonpractitioners of science, Evangelical pastors and Jesuits, Dar-
winists and anti-Darwinists— has helped to show how diverse the interests behind
popularization efforts were. This new view has contributed to the questioning of conven-
tional narratives, such as the one that cast science popularization as a secular, antireligious
weapon. Still, we do not know enough about knowledge producers outside the so-called
scientific community, and we know very little about hidden individuals and groups such
as itinerant lecturers and translators, the often forgotten hinges of transcultural commu-
nication. In a broader sense, the issue of agency deserves more attention. Who wanted to
create— or grant—the power to participate in public knowledge? For whom? And to what
ends? What mechanisms of exclusion—for example, along the lines of gender, race,
ethnicity, or religion—were inscribed in the rhetoric of popularization, which often
appeared to be all-inclusive?
31 The following categories are different in nature from those that may be derived primarily from science
studies and the sociology of science; see, e.g., the suggestions in Robert E. Kohler, “A Generalist’s Vision,” Isis,
2005, 96:224 –229.
32 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of
Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). For
discussion of the Habermasian model see Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).
33 Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London
(Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1989); Andrews, Science for the Masses (cit. n. 27); and Michael Burleigh and
Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945 (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1991).
34 Lewis Pyenson, “‘Who the Guys Were’: Prosopography in the History of Science,” Hist. Sci., 1977,
15:155–188. See in particular Lightman’s groundbreaking study Victorian Popularizers of Science (cit. n. 6).

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Practices, Markets, and Consumption
Knowledge becomes public through actors seeking publicity and articulating the desire to
frame particular knowledge as a public commodity. Older explanatory models—the most
famous of which is, again, Jürgen Habermas’s idea of Öffentlichkeit— have emphasized
the role of “public sphere(s)” as arenas of public dealings with knowledge. A more
dynamic approach would be to look more consciously for the processes, actors, and ideas
that have aimed at allowing parts of society to participate in knowledge (while excluding
others)—without assuming that these processes led necessarily to the development of
seemingly distinct public spheres, as opposed to seemingly “private” ones. Moreover,
recent studies have argued convincingly that “knowledge in transit” is best understood as
a set of practices that take place in a public “marketplace.”35 They are generated by a wide
variety of actors, pursue various interests, and rely on the development of new technol-
ogies. These practices compete with other cultural offerings for the attention of varying
but also overlapping audiences and make use of all available media. If generalized beyond
the case of Victorian Britain and the natural sciences, this approach might well help us to
understand very different periods and distinct cultural settings.
Presentation and Performance

Agents and practices of popular science have often blended genres. They have blurred the
lines between fictional and nonfictional accounts, science and literature, textual presen-
tation and the display of visual images. In endless variations, public presentations have
poeticized science, made knowledge tangible, and enchanted audiences. Furthermore,
practices aimed at making knowledge public have been part of the tendency of all social
action and interaction to assume the character of a performance, an act staged for an
audience, as Erving Goffman has shown in his now-classic studies. The transformations
of popular science might be a particularly good place to study how knowledge was staged
and how audiences applauded, rejected, or recreated such performances—from anatomical
theaters in the seventeenth century and nineteenth-century panoramas to the lobbying
activities of today’s advocacy groups that dramatize scientific advice in their appeal to
large audiences.36
I would even argue that presentations of public knowledge have generated a series of
performative acts that belong essentially to the much larger tendency of the modern age
to stage public life. This tendency to spectacularize reality as a way of coping with it has
intensified since the late eighteenth century. It has led from mass rallies celebrating the
French nation and the theatricalization of bourgeois consumer culture in department stores
35 J. Secord, “Knowledge in Transit” (cit. n. 16); and Fyfe and Lightman, eds., Science in the Marketplace (cit.
n. 5).
36 See Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150 –1750 (New York: Zone,
1998); Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Christine Blondel, eds., Science and Spectacle in the European
Enlightenment (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); Helmar Schramm, Ludger Schwarte, and Jan Lazardzig, eds.,
Kunstkammer—Laboratorium—Bühne: Schauplätze des Wissens im 17. Jahrhundert (Berlin/New York: De
Gruyter, 2003); Simon Schaffer, “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century,” Hist. Sci.,
1983, 21:1– 43; Ralph O’Connor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856
(Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2007); and Fred Nadis, Wonder Shows: Performing Science, Magic, and
Religion in America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2005). Easy access to Goffman’s writings is
provided by Charles Lemert and Ann Branaman, eds., The Goffman Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell,
1997); and A. Paul Hare and Herbert H. Blumberg, Dramaturgical Analysis of Social Interaction (New York:
Praeger, 1988). Stephen Hilgartner, Science on Stage: Expert Advice as Public Drama (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
Univ. Press, 2000), relies explicitly on Goffman.

330 FOCUS—ISIS, 100 : 2 (2009)
at the fin de siècle to Fascist spectacles and the staging of international politics during the
Cold War.37 Showing fossils and mammoth bones to mid-nineteenth-century audiences
remains something different from putting American color televisions sets on display at an
exhibit in Moscow in 1959. Still, these acts are comparable in their desire to dramatize the
value of science and technology for the purpose of convincing audiences to believe in the
power of knowledge producers and consumers alike.
Authority and Meaning

How and to what extent did publicity change the meaning of knowledge? Any analysis of
public knowledge will need to ask which purpose what knowledge serves, what it means
in a given society, and how it is being interpreted. Enthusiastic beekeepers who met
regularly at the evening entertainments of a local natural history association in Germany
around 1800 might have been, at first glance, pursuing only private interests. But often
they were also cultivating a form of knowledge meant to promote patriotism or liberate
them from state restrictions. We enter less charming territory if we ask what ideological
aims Stalinist organizations pursued when they organized public lectures for workers. In
any case, we need to continue asking who claimed what authority for which knowl-
edge— of whatever reach—and how this knowledge was used for purposes other than
simply enlightening mankind. The rise of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, initially the
affair of small groups claiming access to esoteric knowledge, to become a significant part
of today’s “alternative” (or mainstream) public culture illustrates such transformations.38
Communication and Transfer across Borders

The migration of popular science on a transnational and transcultural scale is, so far, very
little explored.39 There is plenty of evidence to suggest that comparable desires for public
knowledge developed in different cultural settings and that popular science became a
transnational commodity already in the nineteenth century. The actors on this stage were
often operating out of local and regional contexts—a fact that encourages us to look
beyond national frameworks. Here was a zinc manufacturer in Illinois who helped found
the Open Court, a prominent U.S.-based journal devoted to reconciling science and
religion (and translating Haeckel into English), there a Sabbath school in Massachusetts
buying the works of the Scottish theologian and astronomer Thomas Dick; Rajendralal
Mitra helped introduce photography to Bengal, and Edward Sylvester Morse, the multi-
37 See, among others, George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass
Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press,
1991); Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869 –1920 (Prince-
ton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981); Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in
Fin-de-Siecle Paris (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1998); Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle:
The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1997); and, with a focus on
performance, theatricality, and the politics of visibility in international relations, Andreas W. Daum, Kennedy in
Berlin, trans. Dona Geyer (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008).
38 Helmut Zander, Anthroposophie in Deutschland: Theosophische Weltanschauung und gesellschaftliche
Praxis 1884 –1945, 2 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007).

39 There are now myriads of writings—some more empirical, some more theoretical—articulating the desire
to introduce more transnational and global angles to historiography at large and to situate national narrative in
world history. One place to start is the recent discussion about U.S. history. See Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking
American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 2002); and Bender, A Nation among
Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2006).

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talented scholar from Maine, popularized Darwin’s evolutionary theory in Japan during
his short stint as a professor of zoology in Tokyo.40
The traffic of ideas, people, and goods in the service of popularizing knowledge has
hardly ever formed a circle or a continuum. Instead, public knowledge has often traveled
between unequal destinations, beset by lost baggage, missed arrival times, and disap-
pointed expectations. It was rejected or reinterpreted by the crowds waiting at the gate and
turned into something hardly thought of at its moment of departure. What was popular in
one context could become unpopular in another. Forms of transcultural communication in
popular science—as in the sciences at large— have always remained dynamic processes of
transformation in transit.41
FROM SCIENCE TO KNOWLEDGE
If we use existing asymmetries in our field as starting points from which to develop more
comparative and transnational perspectives, the public character of science remains one
important, but not the only, explanandum. The issues at stake will then no longer be
framed exclusively within the historiography of science; they will become, as well, part
of a history of knowledge that ties in with “general” history and other disciplines. If, as
part of this reconceptualization, we frame our heuristic categories in more general terms,
the varieties of popular science become variations of a much broader theme, particularly
of how public knowledge has been generated and transformed over time and in different
cultures. Accordingly, public knowledge may then best be described as a changing set of
material, cultural, and intellectual practices and presentations—and the consumption
thereof—aimed at creating and communicating knowledge as a commodity in public
enterprises that are defined by mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, generate market-
like situations, and respond to and themselves articulate cultural, social, and political
preferences. Public knowledge in this understanding is no coherent entity; it becomes in
itself part of the larger fabric of practices and oral, written, or visual presentations that
societies develop to make meaningful statements about themselves and the natural and
cultural worlds they find themselves in—all of which may change over time.
Attaching ourselves to the term “popular” would mean continuing to operate with the
well-known doubts about the appropriateness of the older concept of popularization.
Speaking of knowledge in “popular culture” may seem to be an elegant way out of all
dilemmas. But popular culture as a concept would need to be reconsidered if it is not
meant to reproduce older notions that operated with rather rigid dichotomies of folk versus
elite cultures and oppositional versus hegemonic discourses.42
40 For the Open Court and a more systematic treatment of these issues, with various other examples, see
Andreas W. Daum, “‘The Next Great Task of Civilization’: International Exchange in Popular Science: The
German–American Case, 1850 –1900,” in The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics
from the 1840s to the First World War, ed. Martin H. Geyer and Johannes Paulmann (Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 2001), pp. 280 –314. For the other cases mentioned see William J. Astore, Observing God: Thomas Dick,
Evangelicalism, and Popular Science in Victorian Britain and America (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp.
171–235, esp. p. 179; Amitabha Ghosh, “Popularisation of Science in Bengal: The Pioneering Role of Rajendral
Mitra,” in Uncharted Terrains, ed. Sehgal et al. (cit. n. 20), pp. 67–75, esp. p. 71; and Masao Watanabe, Science
and Cultural Exchange in Modern History: Japan and the West (Tokyo: Hokusen-Sha, 1997), p. 203.
41 On these processes in the sciences generally see David N. Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place:
Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 135–187.
42 See William H. Sewell, Jr., “The Concept(s) of Culture,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in
the Study of Society and Culture, ed. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: Univ. California Press,
1999), pp. 35– 61; Morag Shiach, Discourse on Popular Culture: Class, Gender, and History in Cultural

332 FOCUS—ISIS, 100 : 2 (2009)
There are many different narratives of the modern world in which transformations of
public knowledge play a key role. Some of them—such as those of the construction of
expert knowledge and the “scientificization” of everyday life since the late nineteenth
century—fall almost naturally into the realm of historians of science. Others might have
an even broader appeal to scholars across the disciplines: the transformations of civil
society; the rise of the interventionist state and of consumer society at large; the ambig-
uous process of “secularization,” which included the revival of new forms of religiosity;
the theatricalization of public life since the eighteenth century; the modernization efforts
on the part of ambitious nation-states; the story of twentieth-century dictatorships that
propagated racial theories and implemented technological fantasies—to name only some
prominent narratives.
Against this background, we might have good reason to be more optimistic about the
reach of insights that historical studies of popular science generate. Dealing with trans-
formations of public knowledge over time creates a common ground for historians with
various interests and ultimately constitutes a platform for interdisciplinary collaboration.
However insufficient this endeavor will remain in the foreseeable future, it can help us
understand better how the project of modernity has oscillated between its emphatic
promise to enhance rationality and its destructive potential.
Analysis, 1730 to the Present (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1989); Dominic Strinati, An Introduction
to Theories of Popular Culture, 2nd ed. (London/New York: Routledge, 2004); and John Storey, ed., Cultural
Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 3rd ed. (Harlow/New York: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2006).


Varieties of Popular Science and The Transformations of Public Knowledge: Some Historical Reflections

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Varieties of Popular Science and the Transformations of Public Knowledge: Some Historical Reflections

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