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

~ (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.
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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: #50,368 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 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.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Close but no cigar, May 8, 2007

By	M. A. Krul (Utrecht, Kingdom of the Netherlands) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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Being of a generally socialist bent, I am very sympathetic to the project of "people's histories", ever since it was conceived by A.L. Morton's excellent A people's history of England, but that does not mean that we should be uncritical towards what is actually written. Not just Howard Zinn's prototype book (People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present) in the modern series should be evaluated with care, but this goes as well for other books in this series, including this one, the "People's History of Science" by Clifford Conner.

Conner's thesis is that although the history of science has often been portrayed in the usual "Great Men" style as the work of a privileged few brilliant men (and yes, almost only men) seeing further than anyone elses and inventing wondrous new sciences and technologies, in reality most of established academia during the ages was of no value whatever, and real scientific progress resulted through the experiments and practice of artisans, painters, miners, etc., not through the academic thinking of the learned.
Tracing a chronology of technological development, Conner gives a convincing if not entirely open-and-shut case for this thesis, in particular when it comes to demonstrating the great advances in science made by the lowly and unacademic during the ancient periods as well as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Equally, Conner gives women and non-Europeans their due, quite correctly emphasizing the large advances in technology made by the Chinese, the Native American societies, the Arabs, and so on, often ages before any European ever conceived of the thought. Conner does this quite well, in the process also repudiating the popular view of the natives as the "noble savages living in communion with nature"; in reality the various Indian tribes were masters at the manipulation of nature to their advantage, such as forestry and the genetic selection of edible plants to improve agriculture.

However, this book also has clear and evident downsides. Conner's own specialization seems to be in the history of science during the period of the Renaissance through the 18th-19th Centuries, for it is the chapters on this that are by far the best part of the book and particularly worth reading. On other subjects, however, he is much less informed. Especially the chapter on science in ancient Greece is woefully erroneous: Conner has bought completely into the oft-refuted theories of Martin Bernal, including even the slanderous commentary on Karl Otfried Müller, which even Bernal himself has since withdrawn. The entire "out of Africa" tendency of this chapter is as wrong and unscientific as that idea itself. But that's not all, since Conner's understanding of Plato is also horribly mangled, leading him to either ignore or completely misunderstand the possibly progressive elements in Plato's "Republic". For example, when discussing Plato's political views, Conner at no point even deems it worth mentioning that in Plato's ideal society men and women would have an equal opportunity to lead if worthy, surely a very revolutionary view in his time (compare it to Aristoteles!). He also does not understand Plato's conception of the various classes in his society, which are explicitly opposed to the idea of castes one are born into, unlike what Conner seems to assume. Conner even quotes Marx who refutes the point he is trying to make in that context.

I do not know enough about most of the other subjects Conner writes on without being specialized in them, like classical China, prehistoric societies, and so on, to judge whether that suffers from similar flaws, but at least if he gets these things that I do happen to know so horribly wrong, that bodes ill for the trustworthiness of the entire book. So do take his analysis with a grain of salt at all times, and check the sources elsewhere. Additionally, the book contains many minor spelling errors and wrong expressions in foreign languages cited; not a big deal, but something a competent editor should have caught and removed.

On the whole, the book's chapters on the so-called Scientific Revolution are very good, and his commentaries on other historians of science are worth reading. His thesis is also sufficiently proven to be convincing, if not enough to be certain; it may be added though that he does not establish very well that the Great Men theory of the history of science is actually still supported by contemporary historians, making his case seem a bit obsolete. And his use of sources is very narrow and occasionally wholly incorrect at times, so be skeptical when reading.