Perspectives on Science

In this episode, we talk with Cameron Strang, author of Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands: 1500-1850. Cameron Strang takes American scientific thought and discoveries away from the learned societies, museums, and teaching halls of the Northeast and puts the production of knowledge about the natural world in the context of competing empires and an...

Natalia Molina discusses the intersection of race and public health during the covid-19 and other pandemics. Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on COVID-19 at: https://www.chstm.org/video/74

In this podcast episode, we discuss the history of how biblical notions of race influenced European understandings of Africa with Michael Robinson, author of The Lost White Tribe: Explorers, Scientists, and the Theory that Changed a Continent. Find this podcast and further resources on the Consortium's website at: https://www.chstm.org/video/70

Is the story of American girls’ and women’s access to science and math education a direct path from exclusion to inclusion? What does equity for girls in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) look like, and how do we get there? Pairing a historian and educational researcher, this event takes a journey from the 1800s through the present, including surprising histories, continuing...

Why do we refer to patients as "consumers" in the United States? Is today's opioid crisis the result of medical consumerism run amok--of pills hawked like soap to gullible shoppers? Is picking a doctor really like choosing a new car? Join us as historians Nancy Tomes and David Herzberg discuss when and why patients started to be called "consumers," and examine the positive and negative aspects of...

Join us to examine vaccine skepticism, in contemporary America, historically, and in the clinic. What are the historical roots of resistance to vaccination? What is the data about contemporary attitudes? How do these attitudes relate to changing social, economic and political contexts? How do these issues play out in the relationship between a doctor and a patient? Three experts share their resear...

In this episode, we discuss race, anthropology, and the collection and display of human remains with Samuel Redman. Sam is Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the author of Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums. Find this podcast and further resources on the Consortium's website at: https://www.chstm.org/video/65

Many social, economic, and political factors affect urban health on local, regional and global scales. Examples from near and far, past and present, abound. In the 18th century, yellow fever coursed from city to city across the world as merchant shipping helped spread the disease. As cities incubated the disease, social relations among urban communities were reconfigured. In modern times, increasi...

Are we now approaching a time when we could all live, at least in freezers, forever? Modern collection and storage of biological samples make possible a kind of "immortality" for anyone who has ever had a saliva sample frozen for genealogical testing or a blood sample stored in medical collections. New technologies, like CRISPR for gene editing, expand possible future uses of biological materials...

In this episode, we will discuss energy, environment, and the origins of the American fossil fuel paradigm with Christopher Jones. Christopher is Assistant Professor of History at Arizona State University, and the author of Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America. Routes of Power traces the pathways by which the American energy industry grew into a vast network of canals, pipelines, and wires c...

What's that smell? Join us as we discuss the history of cities, senses and public health. The first episode of our new podcast series features Melanie Kiechle's book, Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America. This book illuminates the lives of 19th-century Americans—including medical experts and ordinary city-dwellers—who used their noses to detect and address san...