Ether Wave Propaganda

Manifesto

Ether Wave Propaganda is a history of science blog that specializes in historiographical issues. It’s a niche blog aimed at people working in the academic disciplines of the History of Science and Science and Technology Studies. Those looking for general science blogs are welcome to follow along and comment, but may find some of the posts a little esoteric.  We do have a “primer” (formerly “hump-day history”) series designed to offer a sophisticated but accessible introduction to various historical topics.  The archive of primers can be found on the “Finding Aid” page.

The title of the blog is a reference to the 19th-century understanding of the transmission of electromagnetic energy (such as light) as taking place by means of waves traveling through a universally pervasive fluid called the “ether”. Ether also commonly refers to the sea of communication inhabiting overlapping radiowaves, or, more recently, the cyberspace of the internet. Propaganda is a play on the word propagation, which is what waves do, they propagate. But it also refers to the fact that the blog welcomes opinionated commentary about what future scholarship in the history of science should look like.

A major mission of this blog is to promote history for history’s sake.  This means many posts deal with questions of proper methodology and historiography-building with this goal in view.  It also means that addressing problems of synthesizing and retaining historical knowledge is taken as a key imperative, to which the blog contributes where possible in short-essay format.  The blog is critical of any overbearing influence exercised on historiography by the philosophy and sociology of science and cultural studies.  It seeks to develop a critical language concerning how these (and other) fields have augmented—and can best augment—the progress of historiography.  It also seeks to examine the ways other fields’ imperatives diverge from historiographical imperatives, and the ways in which those divergences can injure historians’ work or unduly narrow its scope.

This blog is also critical of attempts to engage with public thought prematurely, i.e. before a thorough understanding of the varieties of public ideas has been achieved, and without a specific understanding of how the topics we study relate to current ideas.  It is believed that only novel and pointed contributions to public discourses will elevate the profession in the public eye, and that blanket warnings against dogmatic views of science (or blanket advocacy for science) as grounded in the examples of historical incidents will mainly serve to heighten a professional sense of self-righteousness.  This trivializes the discipline’s possible contributions in the eyes of outsiders (it conveys the impression that we are only capable of offering “cogent reminders”), and is injurious to searching inquiry at home.

The position in the last two paragraphs is the “house” position, and was defined by Will Thomas.  Other regular and guest contributors need not abide by it.  Guest contributions, especially to our “primer” series, are welcomed.  Please contact Will by email (see below) if interested.

Contributors

Will Thomas is a post-doc historian at the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics.  He received his PhD in 2007 from Harvard University.  He specializes in 20th-century American and British history.  In addition to physics, he is interested in the histories of policy analysis (the subject of his forthcoming first book), economics, geophysics and other earth sciences, and has a wide interest in general history.  His views should, of course, not be taken to reflect the views of the History Center or AIP.  He may be contacted at wthomas in the domain of aip.org.

Christopher Donohue is a PhD student in the History Department at the University of Maryland with broad interests in the history of ideas.  He plans to write a dissertation on post-World War II theories of totalitarianism, and finished his master’s degree at Maryland with a thesis on the “American School” of antebellum American anthropology.

Jenny Ferng is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History, Theory, & Criticism of Architecture and Art program at MIT.  Her dissertation focuses on the intersections between architecture, the decorative arts, and geology during the 18th and 19th centuries in Britain and France. She currently resides in Paris. Lucky.