New Perspectives on the Historiography of Biology
The Handbook of the Historiography of Biology is intended to foster a conversation about the historiographic traditions that have informed the history of biology. Explicit historiographical reflections by leading scholars in the history of biology will hi
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Abstract
The Handbook of the Historiography of Biology is intended to foster a conversation about the historiographic traditions that have informed the history of biology. Explicit historiographical reflections by leading scholars in the history of biology will highlight important trends and innovations in the continuous stream of original research that has created this field. This will make it easier for new scholars to join the field and make their own original contributions. The German-born American historian Fritz Stern pronounced that “the historian must serve two masters – the past and the present,” and reminded us that “perhaps no one has changed the course of history as much as the historians” (Stern 1973). In his classic book, What Is History? the English historian E.H. Carr was even more blunt: “Study the historian before you study the facts” (Carr 1962), he admonished. Clearly, history never stands on its own. It is always constructed, filtered, placed within the context of what those who came before believed and wrote. With time, history becomes a palimpsest. To understand how successive generations have remembered the past, one must drill down, layer by layer. As a study of the science of history, historiography attempts to understand how historians work, how they frame their questions, how they use sources, and how historical scholarship reflects its different contexts. If history is a sign of its times, M. R. Dietrich (*) History and Philosophy of Science Department, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] M. E. Borrello Program in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN, USA e-mail: [email protected] O. Harman Graduate Program in Science Technology and Society, Bar-Ilan University, Tel Aviv, Israel © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. Dietrich et al. (eds.), Handbook of the Historiography of Biology, Historiography of Science 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74456-8_3-1
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historiography is like a geological expedition, allowing us to reconstruct the landscape and set of circumstances that helped produce its fossils. Historiographic analysis is valuable because as historians create their narratives describing the past, they are in dialog not only with their sources but with other historians, other historical narratives, wider social, cultural, and political changes, as well as shifting scholarly standards and methodologies (Christie 1990; Nyhart 2016). Every historian should be aware of the place of her narrative in its historiographic lineages, but those historiographic traditions are articulated and analyzed less frequently on their own terms. Still, some areas of history have extensive historiographic literatures. In 2020, the Blackwell Companion series, to provide just one example, has 72 volumes related to American history alone. While one of them is devoted to the history of American Science (Montgomery and Largent 2015) and Blackwell als
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