This dissertation examines how the modern dinosaur—fully mounted, freestanding assemblages of vertebrate fossils such as we are accustomed to seeing at the natural history museum—came into being during the late 19th and early 20th century, focusing especially on the United States. But it is not just, or even primarily a history of vertebrate paleontology. Rather, I use dinosaurs as an opportunity to explore how science was embedded in broader changes that were happening at the time. In particular, I am interested in tracing how the culture of modern capitalism—the ideals, norms, and practices that governed matters of value and exchange—manifested itself in the way fossils were collected, studied, and put on display. During the second half of the 19th century, America experienced an extended period of remarkable economic growth. By the eve of WWI, it had emerged as the world’s largest producer of goods and services. At the same time, paleontologists were unearthing the fossil remains of marvelous creatures the likes of which no one had ever dreamed in the American west. The discovery of dinosaurs like Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, and Triceratops prompted the nation’s wealthy elite to begin cultivating an intense interest in vertebrate paleontology. In part, this is because dinosaurs meshed well with a conventional narrative that celebrated American exceptionalism. Dinosaurs from the United States were widely heralded as having been larger, fiercer, and more abundant than their European counterparts. Not only that, but their origins in the deep past meant that dinosaurs were associated with evolutionary theory, including the conventional notion that struggle was at the root of progress. Finally, it did not hurt that America’s best fossils hailed from places like Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah. This is precisely where most of the raw materials consumed by factories could also be found. As they coalesced into a coherent social class, American capitalists began to patronize a number of elite cultural institutions. Just as Gilded Age entrepreneurs invested considerable resources in the acquisition of artworks, so too did they invest in natural history. However, whereas the acquisition of artworks functioned as a display of refined aesthetic sensibilities, the collection of natural history specimens primarily represented another form of social distinction, one that combined epistemic virtues like objectivity with older notions of good stewardship and civic munificence. Capitalists who had grown rich off of the exploitation of America’s natural resources turned to dinosaur paleontology as a form of cultural resource extraction. / History of Science

Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia universalis (1650) was one of the largest and most widely circulated works of music theory in the seventeenth century. Although his reputation has waned over the centuries, Kircher was a leading intellectual figure of his day, authoring dozens of treatises on a multitude of topics and corresponding with scholars from around the world. Kircher’s central place within the world of learning resulted in a unique perspective on music theory and musical practice within the seventeenth century. The present study investigates a number of topics from Kircher’s music treatise and provides context from within the intellectual discourse of the time. The first chapter explores the seventeenth-century conception of encyclopedias, as well as the possible meanings associated with an encyclopedia musica, a novel term Kircher uses in his preface to describe Musurgia. Kircher’s attempt to describe all that was known about music, from highly speculative theories to the most utilitarian compositional tools, results in a complex blend of philosophical and practical elements. The middle chapters disentangle a few strands from this web of ideas, tracing the development of Pythagorean traditions and speculative music theory, as well as changing attitudes regarding empirical and occult methodologies in the early modern period. The final chapter concerns Kircher’s central goal for Musurgia, an algorithmic method based on the ars combinatoria and the emerging mathematical field of combinatorics that would allow anyone to compose musical settings, including the setting of texts in any poetic meter and in any language. Kircher’s arca musurgica—a device that contained tables to generate music—was in effect a distillation of the rules of harmony and counterpoint in the seventeenth century. Its underlying syntax of standard four-part progressions stands at the juncture between old and new ideologies of music theory and composition. / Music

This dissertation joins the history of science and medicine with environmental history to explore the language of health in environmental politics. Today, in government policy briefs and mission statements of environmental non-profits, newspaper editorials and activist journals, claims about the health of the planet and its human and non-human inhabitants abound. Yet despite this rhetorical ubiquity, modern environmental politics are ideologically and organizationally fractured along the themes of whose health is at stake and how that health should be protected. This dissertation traces how these competing conceptions of health came to structure the landscape of American environmental politics. Beginning in the early 1950s, an expanding network of environmental activists began to think in terms of protecting the health of the planet and its inhabitants from the unprecedented hazards of nuclear energy and chemical proliferation. They did this by appropriating models and metaphors of health developed by postwar ecologists, philosophers, epidemiologists and nuclear physicians. Through this process of appropriation, scientists and philosophers were likewise drawn into environmental activism. Through five case studies, this dissertation traces the collaborations between scientists, environmental activists, philosophers, and medical doctors which enabled a broad range of articulations of health: the health of the wild, the health of the environment, the health of the planet, and the health of humans within the environment. Each case study attends to the intersection of political thought and practice, and explores how science and environmental activism were in constant dialogue in the postwar period. Drawing on archival materials and extensive oral history interviews, this dissertation demonstrates the centrality of health to American environmental politics from the end of World War Two until the present day. / History of Science

The concept of time in physics underwent significant changes in the decades following World War II. This dissertation considers several ways in which American physicists grappled with these changes, analyzing the extent to which philosophical methods and questions played a role in physicists' engagement with time. Two lines of questioning run through the dissertation. The first asks about the professional identities of postwar American physicists in relation to philosophy, as exemplified by their engagement with the concept of time. The second analyzes the heterogeneous nature of time in physics, and the range of presuppositions and assumptions that have constituted this "fundamental" physical concept. The first chapter looks to the development of atomic clocks and atomic time standards from 1948-1958, and the ways in which new timekeeping technologies placed concepts such as “clock”, “second,” and “measure of time” in a state of flux. The second chapter looks to the experimental discovery of CP violation by particle physicists in the early 1960s, raising questions about nature of time understood as the variable “t” in the equations of quantum mechanics. The third chapter considers attempts to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity in the late 1960s, which prompted physicists to question the “existence” of time in relation to the universe as a whole. In each episode considered, physicists engaged with the concept of time in a variety of ways, revealing a multiplicity of relationships between physics, philosophy, and time. Further, in each case physicists brought a unique set of assumptions to their concepts of time, revealing the variety ways in which fundamental conceptsfunctioned and changed in late twentieth century physics. The result is a heterogeneous picture of the practice of physics, as well as one of physics’ most basic concepts. / History of Science

Between 1813 and 1825 the Boston Manufacturing Company built a textile factory in Waltham, Massachusetts. Their factory is known for many important firsts in American industry, including the first commercially viable power loom, one of the first vertically integrated factories, and one of the first join stock financed manufacturing concerns. This successful factory became the direct model for the large textile mills built along the Merrimack River and elsewhere, iconic locations of American post-colonial industrialization. This dissertation looks at the early development and success of the Boston Manufacturing Company from a geographical perspective. It argues that in order build a successful factory, the company, its managers, and its workers, had to transform their "place": a notion that I investigate from an economic-geographical and anthropological point of view, moving from site, to landscape, to geographic networks. On these grounds, I show how the logic of the factory's development was both embedded in and shaping the emerging structures surrounding it, and how, in turn, the company’s later move to Lowell as one of the iconic industrial sites depended on its having successfully learned the business of "place-making" in its foundational Waltham decade. / History of Science

Beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, three American astronomical observatories in Arizona and Hawai'i were transformed from scientific research facilities into mountains of controversy. This dissertation examines the histories of conflict between Native, environmentalist, and astronomy communities over telescope construction at Kitt Peak, Mauna Kea, and Mt. Graham from the mid-1970s to the present. I situate each history of conflict within shifting social, cultural, political, and environmental tensions by drawing upon narrative as a category of analysis. Astronomers, environmentalist groups, and the Native communities of the Tohono O'odham Nation, the San Carlos Apaches, and Native Hawaiians deployed competing cultural constructions of the mountains--as an ideal observing site, a "pristine" ecosystem, or a spiritual temple--and these narratives played a pivotal role in the making of contested landscapes in postwar American astronomy. / History of Science

I argue in my dissertation that Robert John Thornton's (1768?-1837) Temple of Flora (folio 1799-1807, quarto 1812), also entitled "The Universal Empire of Love," represents personified botanical flowers of the British Empire in a colonial microcosm where anthropomorphic plants are allegorized as Europe's others. This book was a collectible item with plates issued in a series of subscriptions, which were always bound in different combinations so that no two copies were ever the same--a book that depicts a metamorphic view of nature through a series of alterations made to the individual plates, which reflects the diversity of exotic and familiar territories in the world and the mysteries within it. Thornton chose plants, flower symbolism, and landscape backgrounds "with scenery appropriated to their subject," to encapsulate the universe as a series of botanical scenes of exotic and familiar territories of Britain's past and present, and this botanical world includes four continents of the world symbolically represented as women through the relationship between image and text, the diversity of people and naturalia within these territories, and the passage of historical and chronological time. TheTemple of Flora is a textual space that involves strategies of possessing and knowing nature through the collection and conquest of plants that represent the colonial inhabitants of the British Empire ensconced in their territories and collected by wealthy Britons as a miniature colonial and exotic world bound between two covers. / History of Science

The new Government of India did not introduce legislation for `native' lunacy in colonial India as a measure of social control after the uprisings of 1857-8; discussions about Indian insanes had already occurred in 1856, following asylum and pauper reform in Victorian England. With the 1858 Lunacy Acts, native lunatic asylums occupied an unsteady position between judicial and medical branches of this government. British officers were too constrained by their inexperience of asylums and of India to be effective superintendents and impose a coherent psychiatry within. They relied on their subordinate staff who were recruited from the communities that surrounded each asylum. Alongside staff and patients, the asylums were populated by tea sellers, local visitors, janitors, cooks and holy men, all of whom presented alternate and complementary ideas about the treatment and care of Indian insanes. By 1912, these asylums had been transformed into archetypal colonial institutions, strict with psychiatric doctrine and filled with Western-trained Indian doctors who entertained no alternate belief systems in these colonial spaces. How did these fluid and heterogeneous spaces become the archetypes of colonial power? / History of Science

It is well known that American botanist Asa Gray's 1859 paper on the floristic similarities between Japan and the United States was among the earliest applications of Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory in plant geography. Commonly known as Gray's "disjunction thesis," Gray's diagnosis of that previously inexplicable pattern not only provoked his famous debate with Louis Agassiz but also secured his role as the foremost advocate of Darwin and Darwinism in the United States. Making use of previously unknown archival materials, this dissertation examines the making of Gray's disjunction thesis and its relation to his collecting networks. I first point out that, as far back as the 1840s, Gray had identified remarkable "analogies" between the flora of East Asia and that of North America. By analyzing Gray and his contemporaries' "free and liberal exchange of specimens," I argue that Gray at the time was convinced that "a particular plan" existed in nature, and he considered that the floristic similarities between Japan and eastern North America manifested this plan. In the 1850s, when Gray applied himself to enumerating collections brought back by professional collectors supported by the subscription system and appointed in governmental surveying expeditions, his view of nature was then replaced by one that regarded the flora as merely "a catalogue of species." I argue that it was by undertaking the manual labor of cataloging species and by charging subscription fees for catalogued species that Gray established his status as a metropolitan botanist and as the "mint" that produced species as a currency for transactions in botanical communities. Finally, I examine the Gray-Darwin correspondence in the 1850s and the expedition that brought Gray's collector to Japan. I argue that Gray's thesis cannot be considered Darwinian as historians of science have long understood the term, and that its conception was part of the United States' scientific imperialism in East Asia. In light of recent studies focusing on the history of field sciences, this dissertation urges that a close examination of a biogeographical discovery like Gray's thesis is impossible without considering the institutional, cultural, and material aspects that tie the closets of naturalists to the field destinations of collectors. / History of Science

This dissertation is a social and cultural history of chemical industrialists and their role in the development of both science and capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It focuses on the case of Germany, where many chemists became some the most powerful industrial leaders during this period. Since the late nineteenth century, chemistry in Germany constituted a cosmos radiating from the large industrial sites, of which the academic discipline was just the tip of the iceberg. The chemical Industry supported a formidable scientific research system, and industrial chemists rose to the highest social circles, from which they exerted unique forms of activism. In particular, science philanthropy provided chemical industrialists with a point of entry to elite German society. Their status as scientists, combined with their manufacturing social backgrounds, led to an inclination towards supporting scientific research through direct participation and political lobbying, with less emphasis on the financial donations common in American philanthropy. Crucially, this support extended beyond chemistry, to other applied sciences and even apparently non-industrial pursuits such as astronomy. In these other fields, they sought to replicate the industrial support system that existed in chemistry, while opening the opportunity to participate directly in their amateur scientific interests. I contend that these non-financial forms of support for science played an important role during the radical changes in twentieth-century Germany, including war, hyperinflation, extreme economic cycles, and the increasing political polarization of the Weimar era. / History of Science