A People's History of Science: Miners, Midwives, and Low Mechanicks (Nation Books) (Paperback)

by Clifford D. Conner (Author) "WE ALL KNOW the history of science that we learned from grade-school textbooks: how Galileo used his telescope to show that the earth was not..." (more)
Key Phrases: new scientific elite, sidereal compass, elite science, Royal Society, Prince Henry, Robert Boyle (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
In this persuasive history, Conner aggressively pursues evidence of how, since the earliest civilizations, elite scientists have suppressed and excluded lower class innovators while learning from and using their discoveries, often without giving them credit. As Conner notes, many of the "Great Man" myths about people like Galileo and Columbus, once believed to have made their contributions to science out of their own genius, have been debunked, but even those persist in the popular imagination, and others have never been addressed. The pages are dense with information and quotes from both primary sources and modern revisionist historians, and Conner tries to cover too much in too little space, but he writes clearly and skillfully shows connections as he ranges across time periods and disciplines from medicine to art to astronomy. However, despite promising to highlight women's important role in the sciences, they are mostly absent, and the brief chapter on modern times mostly concerns itself with corruption in the pharmaceuticals and atomic weaponry industries. Nonetheless, this book is a valuable synthesis of previously spotty attempts to show science's reliance on the anonymous multitudes for many important advances.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Explicitly emulating Howard Zinn's enduringly popular A People's History of the United States (1979), Conner applies an anti-elitist point of view in his survey of science from prehistory to the present. Conner is not as occupied with scientific ideas and discoveries as he is with the sociology and historiography of science. He is keen to oppose the inculcation of admiration for the Great Men of Science--words he capitalizes in disparagement--but since science historians of socialist bent have preceded him in this iconoclastic project, Conner acknowledges that his work is something of a synthesis. That will be valuable for bringing specialist literature to general readers, who will imbibe Conner's contention that manual workers, tradesmen, and craftsmen, through a trial-and-error process, created the empirical basis for the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. In Conner's collectivist framework, names associated with the experimental method, such as Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle, are like copyright pirates; and the notion of the individual genius-scientist is illusory. With a stout left-wing attitude, Conner's tome will instigate debate. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 568 pages
• Publisher: Nation Books; illustrated edition edition (November 7, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560257482
• ISBN-13: 978-1560257486
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #428,699 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Challenging Interpretation Ruffles Feathers, November 28, 2006

By	Paul LeBlanc (Pittsburgh, PA, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

It seems that Cliff Conner's challenging interpretation has ruffled some feathers. The fact that he dares to think that there has been gender and racial and class bias impacting on the history of science immediately damns him in the eyes of some reviewers on this site.

One reviewer has been so upset that he felt compelled to reach for the most terrible label ever: "post-modernist." It seems to me that there is nothing of the sort in Cliff Conner's conceptions or vocabulary. He may be a small "d" democrat, even a good old-fashioned Marxist, but not one of those terrrible, terrible post-modernists (although they, too, happen to talk about the impact of bias on science).

To speak of such things is apparently reason for some folks to uncork their bottle of insults, and splash about unpleasant accusations. That's too bad, since it can easily be documented that social bias and elitism have had an impact among scientists as well as among intellectual historians. It's not such a controversial point.

Rather than getting bent out of shape over Conner's statement of the obvious, the reader should relax and follow the flow of this clearly written book. What Conner shows is rooted in the anthropologically sound understanding that science is a collective process of comprehending and changing the world around us. This is hardly to deny the fact that there have been outstanding and "craftsman-like" individuals who have sythesized the work of others to develop new insights and make exciting breakthroughs. (For every such genius, of course, there are a number of intellectual thieves -- some of whom fare badly in Conner's book -- but that it is another matter.) Unlike so many intellectual historians, however, Conner's focus is on the collective process, the unacknowledged heroines and heroes, Conner's "Miners, Midwives, and 'Low Mechaniks'" (as well as hunters and gatherers and early horticulturalists) whose efforts were essential to the forward movement of science.

This is a very good book. As with any such work one can disagree with this or that aspect of the interpretation, of course. But it can be read profitably in conjunction with more standard works which focus on the contributions coming from the "great names" in science. Is it the last word in the history of science? Of course not. But it does offer us, in a very readable and often compelling form, essential dimensions of the story.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars opinion of a close reader, November 25, 2005

By	Larry Fagan - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

From a seemingly inexhaustible warehouse of knowledge, documented to the nth degree, Clifford Conner shows the reader the people's side of knowledge called science. The book is very readable, accessible to lay persons of any age or educational attainment.It's the sort of book that will not sit quietly on a shelf, but one that will be returned to often as questions about the past arise.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Ideologically biased, a lot of cherry-picking, and inaccurate, November 17, 2008

By	Michael Aristidou (Renton, WA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I am not sure whether the author writes history or he is "cherry-picking" to justify his own ideology. The book is definitely BIASED and contains many things that inaccurate or incorrect.

I will focus basically on Chapter 3, entitled "What Greek Miracle?".

Regarding mathematics, of course the Greeks came into contact, were influenced, etc, by the Egyptians, Babylonians, etc, (as many ancient Greeks reported), but that's not the point. The point, which Conner deliberately or by ignorance is missing, is that the Greeks (first) saw the need to introduce the notion of PROOF (and rigor in general) in mathematics, perhaps due to the socio-political (and religious) dynamics of their time, and that's what we mean when we say that they founded contemporary mathematics. The Pythagorean Theorem was well known to the Babylonians, true, but the proof of it was NOT. The need to provide a rigorous argument for such property of a right-angle triangle begins with the Greeks, and not with the Babylonians, unless Conner has any evidence to the contrary which he does NOT.

The author also tends to identify Plato's insistence on geometry with Greek mathematics. Geometry was not ALL Greek mathematics. Even in Euclid's "Elements" we have several Chapters on Number Theory, but Conner conveniently doesn't mention that. Conner also downplays the practical mathematics that Archimedes engaged into, and completely omits the immense contributions of Diophantus in algebra and arithmetic, just so give weight to his silly argument that "geometry was for the elite, arithmetic was for the poor, therefore the Greeks and the rest of the scientist until today, who relied on Greeks, had one thing in mind: to distort history, and keep poor and non-whites down".

Regarding Aristotle (and science in general), to say that "he didn't give us anything new, other than what the farmers, fishermen, etc, knew already", betrays a lack of knowledge of Aristotle's work or/and misses the point on what we mean by science altogether. Just as in Math above, true, maybe the fishermen knew much of what Aristotle said, that's not the point. The point is that he gave us the METHOD (observation-
hypothesis-experiment, verification etc). That's what we mean by when we call him the "father of modern science". He was also "hands-on", unlike Plato, cutting open dead animals to study their anatomy, etc, and in his emphasis on experience is justified in several chapters in his "The Parts of Animals".

The same mistakes Conner does on the subject of medicine. The separation of religion, superstition, etc, from medicine, was THE important contribution of the Greeks (Hippocrates) to the world. The rest, come later.

Conner wants to dismiss or undermine major contributions done by ancient Greek scientists, just because they might had been rich, noble, upper-class, etc, or because their contributions did not result to directly and immediately improving poor peoples lives. Why should one's scientific contributions be rated in view of his class, personality, etc?
Should we also dismiss the whole body of Theoretical Physics, because it
doesn't directly give something useful to ordinary engineers, mechanics, carpenters, etc? Also, Conner's claim that Greek science (whatever they didn't "steal" from Africans) was overall damaging to the world, since taken for granted and unquestioned (that science) the Middle Ages scientists did not improve upon it, at least it could be characterized as a joke. It is certainly not the Greeks fault that religious blindness, oppression, and misery in the Dark Ages did not allow scientists to improve upon the ideas of Greek scientists (who, of course, they were not perfect).

Now, of course, the saddest thing in this book is that for Conner to justify his pretty much unjustifiable claims regarding the unoriginal, useless, etc, of Greek science, he ends up relying on unhistorical, unscientific, totally DEBUNKED, and ridiculous references like M. Bernal's "Black Athena". Considering his otherwise good references, his relying on Bernal's book to justify his claims against the Greeks (which most scholars reject), was an unfortunate event.

This book should not be thought as comparable to "A People's History of the US", by H. Zinn, an otherwise very good book. The title might mislead one to think that just because the latter was good, that the former is as good too. It is not the case. Also, they examine different things: one examines the history of a 200 year old country, where the other examines a 2000 year old (or more) activity. Justifiably, though, concerns could be raised on Zinn's position (if not on his book above) as he is the only commentator of Conner's book (on the back cover), claiming that is actually a good book.

Nevertheless, ignoring its un-historicity and bias, it is a well written book. I would recommend it ONLY to critical and careful readers.


Dr. Michael Aristidou
WA