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American Astronomy: Community, Careers, and Power, 1859-1940, by John Lankford, with the assistance of Ricky L. Slavings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. 447 pp. NPL cloth. ISBN: 0-226-46886-0.
Lankford presents a "collective biography" of three cohorts of astronomers up to the 1940s to trace changes in their community's level of professionalization and intellectual divisions and conflicts. For conceptual framework, he draws mostly on the community-oriented specialty studies of science prominent in the 1970s, enriched by some observations from the social movements literature and by some Kuhnian themes regarding disciplinary matrices. Among his major findings are that the astronomical community was highly stratified, stratification increased over...