Scientific History: Experiments in History and Politics from the Bolshevik Revolution to the End of the Cold War
Elena Aronova
Abstract
The book recovers the intertwined histories of the sciences and the humanities within the Russian/Soviet scientific landscape, from the crises-ridden decades leading to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 to the ruptures of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Using the history of Russia and the Soviet Union as the anchoring point, the book reconnects the disciplinary histories of the sciences and those of the humanities while capturing some of the key moments in the history of socialist political imaginaries over the course of the twentieth century where one would least expect i ... More
The book recovers the intertwined histories of the sciences and the humanities within the Russian/Soviet scientific landscape, from the crises-ridden decades leading to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 to the ruptures of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Using the history of Russia and the Soviet Union as the anchoring point, the book reconnects the disciplinary histories of the sciences and those of the humanities while capturing some of the key moments in the history of socialist political imaginaries over the course of the twentieth century where one would least expect it: in the debates about scientific history. The book contributes to most recent scholarship in the history of science, which began situating programs of today’s “big” and “deep” history within the longer trajectory of similar efforts in the past, by demonstrating that the history of the history of science itself is instructive for today’s repositioning of academic history. The book examines different disciplinary contexts in which historians and natural scientists interacted, the techniques that enacted such interaction, and the political uses to which these programs were put. The submerged histories traced in the book reveal complicated relationships between history and science that were diverse, ambiguous, and, at times, surprisingly productive.
Keywords:
scientific history,
history of science,
Russia as method,
Annales school,
historiography,
Big History
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2021 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226761381 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: September 2021 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226761411.001.0001 |
