Content area
Full Text
North America
A Companion to the History of American Science. Edited by Georgina M. Montgomery and Mark A. Largent. London: Wiley-Blackwell Press, 2016. 712 pp., $204.95, hardback, ISBN 978-1-4051-5625-7.
This volume is the latest in Wiley-Blackwell's series of historiographical and bibliographical guides on a wide range of time periods and themes in American history. Coedited by two faculty members at Michigan State University, both graduate students of Sally Gregory Kohlstedt of the University of Minnesota in the 1990s, it contains a preface, forty-four essays on specific subtopics, and a collective bibliography of all works cited. At least nine of these chapters will be of interest to readers of Agricultural History, including those on agricultural sciences, nutrition, conservation biology, biotechnology, ecology, environmental sciences, eugenics, germ theory, and field and laboratory. The essays generally offer satisfactory overviews accessible to both the academic forager and the neophyte. Altogether this makes for a massive achievement.
However, there are problems. My greatest concern is with the disconnect between the volume's treatment of the agricultural sciences and the preface, which offers a brief three-generational view on the history of the...