Following World War II, the United States enjoyed unprecedented power and prestige. The wartime alliance with the Soviet Union quickly collapsed amid mutual suspicion and fear, however, resulting in the Cold War. Science was a significant political component in that ideological conflict. In the United States, inspired by Franklin D....
Since the early twentieth century, manufacturers of toxic products have attempted
to discredit research linking their product with disease. At the same time they have manufactured their own science designed to minimize risks associated with their products. Much of this activity has been conducted by or through corporate attorneys, endeavors...
This thesis explores the role of Quaker women in science in an attempt to arrive at some understanding of what motivated Quaker women in nineteenth century America to go into the sciences. George Fox founded the Society of Friends in the mid-seventeenth century in England and the Quaker theology centered...
From 1925 to 1930, Ernest H. Wiegand, a professor of Horticultural Products at Oregon State Agricultural College, developed an improved brining process for cherries. Brined cherries are used in the production of maraschino and glacé cherries, which already had a sizable market in the United States by the 1920s. This...
The publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, truly a synthesized work of natural history, coincided with the emergence of specialized disciplines in the 19th century. This thesis aims to explore the relationship between the specialization of knowledge, in the form of disciplinization, and the reception of new...
William James came of age at a time of great social and intellectual change in the United States. During this period, new professional identities proliferated, and a new culture of professionalization developed with important ramifications for conceptions of individual and social identity. Professionalization was also closely related to key intellectual...
Stepan Petrovich Krasheninnikov (1711 – 1755) was a successful early Russian naturalist whose professional and social destinies were linked to eighteenth-century Russia's nascent but growing naturalist tradition. During his own time Krasheninnikov bridged the gap that existed in Russia between a distinctly European scientific practice and a tradition of Russian...
In 1952, at the height of the McCarthy era, Franz Kallmann, a Jewish psychiatrist and eugenicist who fled the National Socialist regime in Germany, published a study, in which he claimed to have found a one hundred percent concordance rate for homosexuality among forty pairs of identical twins. From this...
Across from the Memorial Union on Oregon State University’s campus sits Milam Hall, the former site of the Department of Home Economics. The building is named for Ava Milam Clark, the dean of home economics for thirty-three years, from 1917 to 1950. I aim to understand Ava Milam’s early career...
This study examines the interactions between the scientific communities of the
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL) and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
(SLAC) in the discovery of the tau lepton by physicist Martin Perl between 1973-
1977. Perl became interested in searching for heavy leptons through positron-electron
collision experiments using the...