December 8, 2010 @ 4:00pm
4207 Helen C. White (SLIS Commons)
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Among historians of science, most discussion of textbooks as objects of study falls into two broad categories: as tools used to recruit and train new scientists or as a subgenre of books engaged in science popularization. Often textbooks are brought into such discussions with presumptions about their authority, objectivity, and consumption. In this talk I use the example of American high school biology textbooks of the early twentieth century to argue that textbooks are more than simply tools-for-training and/or books-for-popularization.

This program is part of the A.W. Mellon Interdisciplinary Workshops in the Humanities, sponsored by the Center for the Humanities at UW-Madison with support from the A.W. Mellon Foundation and the College of Letters and Science.