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Full-Text Articles in History

First Mover: Otto Struve And The Use Of Scientific Capital In Astrophysics, 1921–1950, Erik Paul Norquest Dec 2011

First Mover: Otto Struve And The Use Of Scientific Capital In Astrophysics, 1921–1950, Erik Paul Norquest

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Otto Struve (1897-1963) came to the United States in 1921 and became one of the dominant personalities in the field of astrophysics. Struve’s career made him, in the words of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, a “first mover” in a scientific field that was firmly engaged in the process of what Thomas Kuhn called “normal science.” Struve pulled astrophysics further away from its empirical roots in categorization and made it more like physics in its unification of theory and observation. The primary way that he accomplished this was through his administration of Yerkes and McDonald observatories, where he brought in theorists to …


Dow Chemical Vs. ‘Coercive Utopians’: Constructing The Contested Ground Of Science And Government Regulation In 1970s America, Amy M. Hay Jan 2011

Dow Chemical Vs. ‘Coercive Utopians’: Constructing The Contested Ground Of Science And Government Regulation In 1970s America, Amy M. Hay

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

In 1979, the Dow Chemical Company published an excerpt from a speech by H. Peter Metzger that announced an emerging conflict in American ideals and public policy. He stated that a new kind of individual inhabited Washington, people from the counterculture who were “coercive utopians” because they sought to achieve their agenda through covert actions and hoped to end the American free market economy. Following the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the subsequent banning of DDT in 1972, Dow and other chemical manufacturers fought to keep the regulatory climate favorable to industry. Dow found itself defending the …