Abstract

The twentieth century enjoys a firm grip on our profession. Well over half the research articles published in this journal since 2000 devote significant attention to the period between the 1890s and the 1990s. Similar trends prevail in other leading publications. But this outpouring of scholarship alone does not create a collective sense of how historians of science should confront the twentieth century as an epoch. The synthetic reflection that established the scientific revolution as a historiographical category and lent the nineteenth century a sense of cohesion remains to be undertaken for the twentieth. A panoramic outlook on more recent historical eras is a pressing necessity. Publishing trends suggest that we will confront future methodological questions and navigate our evolving professional identity largely on twentieth-century turf. What, then, defines twentieth-century science? In some ways, this question is naive, even trivial: it surprises no one that the currents of history disdain our thin calendrical embankments. But centuries, decades, and other conventional durations often prove useful for collating practices that shared a family resemblance and naming periods about which we might claim that continuity prevailed over discontinuity. Can the twentieth century offer such utility? The books under review can each be read as an attempt to use the twentieth century in that way and, in so doing, to claim it for a particular vision of how the history of science should be done.