Science, Technology, Medicine & War
HIS 350L--39679
Instructor: Perrin Selcer
Office: GAR 0.122
Email: [email protected]
Office Hours: M 1-2; W 12-1; F 10-11 or by app.
Spring 2011
M, W, 3:30 – 5:00
200 Calhoun Hall
Course Description
We tend to think of wars as pathological abnormalities, yet modern society could not have
developed without war. Modern nation states and medical, information and transportation
technologies, for example, are shaped by the exigencies of war. Warfare, of course, is
increasingly dependent on complex knowledge and technology. This seminar explores the ways
science and technology have affected the strategies, conduct and experience of war, and the key
role of war in the development of science and technology. The course will cover the long history
of technical knowledge and war, but will primarily focus on the 19th and 20th centuries, with a
bias first towards Europe and then the United States.
This is a Writing Flag seminar course built around carefully chosen readings. I will give very
brief “lectures” most days to provide a historical context for the next class’ readings. The
emphasis will be on discussions of the readings and on crafting well written, tightly argued, and
insightful responses to the texts. To improve our writing, we will be editing and responding to
each other’s work.
There are no prerequisites, but knowledge of modern American and European history will be
very helpful.
Grading Policies
Attendance is mandatory. Late assignments will be docked a letter grade per day unless you ask
for an extension well before the due date. Grades for the two longer assignments will be partially
based on completing the process (e.g. developing research questions, editing rough drafts).
Plus/minus grades will be assigned.
Students with disabilities may request appropriate academic accommodations from Services for
Students with Disabilities: 471-6259.
University policies on plagiarism and academic dishonesty will be enforced.
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Assignments
With a few exceptions noted on the syllabus, all readings are in the course packet available
at Abel’s Copies, 715 West 23rd St. #North.
25% of grade, class participation: Includes attendance, quality of contributions to discussions,
evidence of intellectual engagement, completion of in class writing exercises, and performance
on reading pop quizzes.
20 % of grade, weekly writing responses: Each week you will write a one page (maximum)
critical analysis of a major issue from that week’s readings and discussions. Weekly writing
responses are due on Mondays (responding to the previous week’s readings). You may miss two
writing responses without affecting your grade.
20% of grade, review essay 1: The first of two longer writing assignments intended to sharpen
your synthetic skill, this essay asks you to explore an important theme from the first half of the
course. Your review essay must incorporate at least five readings from the course and should be
7 pages in length.
25% of grade, review essay 2: This final assignment builds upon the skills developed in the first
review essay, but requires you to review at least six texts not assigned in the class and should be
10 pages. The texts could go into more depth on a subject covered in the course or be about one
of the myriad topics related to science, technology and war that the course does not touch upon.
10% of grade, presentation: The last three days of class, students will present their findings
from review essay 2 to the class. Feedback should be useful for refining the final draft of the
paper.
Alternative research paper (45% of grade): Instead of the two review essays, write one longer
piece of original historical research. If multiple students choose this option, we will organize a
research writing group. In any case, I will work with students individually to define research
questions and develop a research strategy.
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Unit One: Historical Framework
Week 1
Jan. 19: Introduction to the class: Rationality and war, scientific neutrality, and technological
enthusiasm/anxiety
In class reading: Franz Boas,’ “Scientists as Spies,” The Nation (20 Dec. 1919), 797.
Week 2
Jan. 24: Do Technologies Have Politics? And Why War?
Reading: Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Daedalus 109: 1 (Winter 1), 121-136;
Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, Why War (Paris: Institut International de Cooperation
Intellectuelle), 11-57.
Jan. 26: Nations and Colonies
Reading: Barry R. Posen, “Nationalism, the Mass Army, and Military Power,” International
Security18: 2 (Fall 1993), 80-124; Jared Diamond, “A Natural Experiment of History” and
“Collision at Cajamarca,” in Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York:
W. W. Norton & Co., 1997), 53-81.
Week 3
Jan. 31: Gunpowder Revolution
Bert Hall, “Gunpowder’s First Century, ca. 1325-1425,” in Weapons and Warfare in
Renaissance Europe: Gunpowder, Technology and Tactics,” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1997), 41-66; Patrick Malone, “The Arming of the Indians,” and “Proficiency
with Firearms: A Cultural Comparison,” The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics
among the New England Indians (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 53-86.
Feb. 2: Industrialization of War
William McNeill, “Intensified Military-Industrial Interaction, 1884-1917,” in The Pursuit of
Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1982), 262-306 (posted on Blackboard); David Mindell, “Introduction: A Strange Sort of
Warfare,” and “Life in the Artificial World,” in War, Technology, and Experience aboard the
USS Monitory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 1-10, 61-70.
Unit Two: War and Medicine; Men and Machines
Week 4
Feb. 7: Roger Cooter, “War and Modern Medicine,” in W. Bynum and R. Porter, eds.,
Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine (London: Routledge, 1993), 1536-1573;
Alexis Carrel, “Science has Perfected the Art of Killing—Why Not of Saving?” Surgery,
Gynecology, & Obstetrics 20 (1915), 710-11 (posted on blackboard).
Feb. 9: Women at War: Nurses, Sanitation, and Hospital Reform
Florence Nightingale, “A Contribution to the Sanitary History of the British Army during the
Late War with Russia,” (London: John Parker and Son, 1859), 16pp; “The Civil War, Efficiency,
and the Sanitary Impulse, 1845-1870,” in John Harley Warner and Janet Tighe, eds., Major
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Problems in the History of American Medicine and Public Health (New York: Houghton Mifflin
Co., 2001), 165-195.
Week 5
Feb. 14: Mental Health
Joanna Bourke, “Medics and Military,” An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in
Twentieth-Century Warfare (London: Granta, 1999), 230-255; Wilbur J. Scott, “PTSD in DSMIII: A Case in the Politics of Diagnosis and Disease,” Social Problems 37: 3 (Aug. 1990), 294310.
Feb. 16: Experimental Wounds and Soldier Subjects
Eric Prokosch, “Introduction,” “The Science of Wound Ballistics,” and “Korea: The Redesign of
Antipersonnel Weapons,” The Technology of Killing: A Military and Political History of
Antipersonnel Weapons (London: Zed Books, 1995) 1-52; Edward F. Adolph, “Acclimatization
to Heat and Cold” and Philip Bard, “Motion Sickness,” in Science in World War II: Office of
Scientific Research and Development: Advances in Military Medicine Made by American
Investigators Working under the Sponsorship of the Committee on Medical Research (Boston:
Little, Brown & Co., 1948), 486-496, 278-295.
Week 6
Feb. 21: Men and Machines
David Mindell, “Taming the Beasts of the Machine Age: The Sperry Company” and
“Conclusion: Feedback and Information in 1945,” Between Human and Machine: Feedback,
Control, and Computing before Cybernetics (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
2002), 69-104, 307-322.
Feb. 23: Populations Fit for War
J. M. Winter, “Military Fitness and Civilian Health in Britain during the First World War,”
Journal of Contemporary History 15: 2 (Apr. 1980), 211-244; John Carson, “Army Alpha, Army
Brass, and the Search for Army Intelligence,” Isis 84 (1993), 278-309.
Unit 3: Mass Destruction
Week 7
Feb. 28: Draft of review essay 1 due
March 2: Extermination
Edmund Russell, “Total War (1936-1943)” and “Annihilation (1943-1945),” War and Nature:
Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 95-144; Excerpt from oral history of Section Chief on Fire
Warfare, NDRC Hoyt C. Hottel by James J. Bohning, (Philadelphia: Chemical Heritage
Foundation, 1985).
Week 8
March 7: Norms and Laws of War: Chemical Weapons I
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J.B.S. Haldane, Callinicus: A Defense of Chemical Warfare (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.,
1925); Richard Price, “World War I,” The Chemical Weapons Taboo (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1997), 44-69.
March 9: Norms and Laws of War: Chemical Weapons II
Final Draft of review essay 1 due (annotated bibliography due for research paper)
W. A. Noyes, Jr., “Offensive Chemical Warfare and Related Problems,” Science in World War
II: Office of Scientific Research and Development: Chemistry: A History of the Chemistry
Components of the National Defense Research Committee, 1940-1946 (Boston: Little, Brown &
Co., 1948), 318-329; Prohibition of Chemical and Biological Weapons, Hearing before the
Committee on Foreign Relations United States Senate (Dec. 1974), 1-71.
Week 9
March 21: Air Power I
Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1987), Chapters 1-2, 4.
March 22: Air Power II
Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1987), Chapters 8 (last section), 9-10.
Week 10
March 28: Meanings of the Bomb
Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the
Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 1-81.
March 30: MAD
Albert Wohlstetter, “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” Foreign Affairs 37: 2 (Jan. 1959), 211234; Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, “On Thermonuclear War,” The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The
Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 203-235.
Unit Four: Big Science
Week 11
Topic description and initial bibliography for review essay due (Research proposal for
original research paper due)
Apr. 4: Big Science
Lillian Hoddeson, “Mission Change in the Large Laboratory: The Los Alamos Implosion
Program, 1943-1945,” in Peter Galison and Bruce Hevly, eds., Big Science: The Growth of
Large-Scale Research (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 265-289; Peter Neushel,
“Science, Government and Mass Production of Penicillin,” Journal of the History of Medicine
and Allied Sciences 48 (1993), 371-95.
Apr. 6: The Military-Industrial Complex
Larry Owens, “The Counterproductive Management of Science in the Second World War:
Vannevar Bush and the Office of Science Research and Development,” Business History Review
68 (Winter 1994), 515-576; Solly Zuckerman, “The Impact of Technology,” Scientists and War:
The Impact of Science on Military and Civil Affairs (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 29-51
(posted on Blackboard).
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Week 12
Apr. 11: Environmental Sciences at War
Roy MacLeod, “‘Strictly for the Birds,’: Science, the Military and the Smithsonian’s Pacific
Ocean Biological Survey Program, 1963-1970,” Journal of the History of Biology 34 (2001),
315-352; Ronald Doel and Pristine Harper, “Prometheus Unleashed: Science as a Diplomatic
Weapon in the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration,” Osiris 21 (2006), 66-85.
Unit Five: Wars against Nature and for Hearts and Minds
Apr. 13: The Moral Equivalent of War and the Science of Democracy
Annotated bibliography for review papers due (outline for original research papers due)
William James, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” (1910), 16pp; David Blackbourn, “Race and
Reclamation,” The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany
(New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006), 251-310.
Week 13
Apr. 18: Machines as a Measure of Men;
Michael Adas, “Imposing Modernity” Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and
America’s Civilizing Mission (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 219-280 (posted on
Blackboard).
Apr. 20: Counter-Insurgency
Michael Latham, “Modernization at War: Counterinsurgency and the Strategic Hamlet Program
in Vietnam,” Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and ‘Nation Building’ in the
Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 151-208.
Week 14
Apr. 25: Scientific Democracy and Peace Studies
David Hollinger, “Science as a Weapon in Kulturkampfe in the United States during and after
World War II,” Isis 86 (1995), 440-454; Kenneth Boulding, “A Data-collecting Network for the
Sociosphere,” Impact of Science on Society 18: 2 (1968), 97-101.
Apr. 27: Presentations
Week 15
May 2: Presentations
May 4: Presentations
Final papers due date of final exam, May 13th by 10pm.
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