Editor’s Note

This issue begins with a set of articles on the cultural positioning of science and technology, with emphasis on their relation to constructs of the nation and the museum. Robert Bud’s ‘“Applied Science” in nineteenth-century Britain: public discourse and the creation of meaning, 1817–1876’ examines how that lead phrase became a critical site of negotiation among a range of historical actors seeking to define the relations among science as newly emergent profession, industry, technical education, and newspaper and magazine publishing. Such sociocultural negotiation was motivated, Bud offers, by a larger concern over Britain’s economic and political standing vis-à-vis Europe and the US. ‘Applied Science’, thus, was less about the specific intellectual question of science’s relation to technology and more about its meanings and implications for a complex of issues seen as defining of the nation. In this vein, Bud’s research substantively complements Ron Kline’s (1995) classic article ‘Construing “Technology” as “Applied Science.”’¹

Embedded in Bud’s account is the founding of national museums devoted to science and technology as one means of expressing such cultural cross-currents, as with the mid-nineteenth century establishment of the Science Museum, London. Jean-Baptiste Guoyon’s ‘Making science at home: visual displays of science and technology at the Science Museum and on television in post-war Britain’ carries that historiographic concern to the post-World War II period, looking at the intersection of television programming and Science Museum exhibitions in presenting narratives of the nation through attention to nuclear and space technologies – two pre-eminent markers of mid-twentieth century modernity. Hermione Giffard’s ‘The power of technological artifacts: techno-nationalism and the donations of the world’s first jet engines’ considers the Cold War national and international dimensions of such modernity through another technology with freighted meaning – jet engines. The twist of her analysis is to look at two cases of jet engine donation to the Smithsonian Institution separated by three decades: the first by Britain in 1949 and the second by West Germany in 1980, revealing the differences in meaning each gave to composing the relations among the nation, invention claims, and a postwar geopolitics dominated by the US.

The question of postwar US power in Europe also is at the center of Daniele Cozzoli’s ‘Penicillin and the European response to post-war American hegemony: the case of Leo-penicillin,’ in which a critical means of response was not via state policy or action, but through market-based innovation and business strategy. Jenny Andersson and Anne-Greet Keizer’s ‘Governing the future: science, policy and public participation in the construction of the long term in the Netherlands and Sweden’ attends to a theme present at the margins of the other postwar-oriented contributions in this issue: the future as a specific object of study, an interest that acquired special intensity through the 1960s and 1970s. Though the authors’ focus is on Europe in this time period, US futures research and methodology provide crucial foil and context for these national projects. Their article might profitably be read in relation to the 2012 American Historical Review forum on postwar futures studies to which Andersson was a contributor.²

Last, the issue includes an Images, Technology, and History essay by Anna Kryczka, ‘Television and taste on the New Frontier: “A tour of the White House with Mrs John F. Kennedy”’ in which the author examines how a television documentary organized by Jacqueline Kennedy sought to link JFK’s New Frontier with a vision of domestic taste-making grounded in particular narratives of US history.

Martin Collins
Smithsonian Institution

Notes

1. Kline, “Construing ‘Technology’ as ‘Applied Science’.”

2. “AHR Forum: Histories of the Future.”