Historical memory has served as an important analytical category in social and political history. In contests over the meaning and memorialization of war, genocide, revolution, and national identity, rival groups have often constructed versions of history to advance competing agendas. Collective stories about the past are an essential part of modern politics. What role have they played in modern science? This panel asks whether and how historical memory might be a useful concept for the history of science. Why have some narratives and interpretations become lodged in the collective consciousness of science, but not others? How has context interacted with and shaped the ways that scientific biographies, events, and fields have been remembered by scientists—and by historians of science? How has memory been cultivated and maintained over time? What are the political and moral dimensions of the social memory of modern science?
The panel’s four papers explore these questions in different fields, moments, and national contexts. They demonstrate some of the diverse ends to which evidence and narrative have been mobilized: tarnishing unsavory views about postwar German nuclear armament with the stain of National Socialism; soothing anxiety over physicists’ participation in the Cold War nuclear competition; fashioning an (allegedly) anti-racist politics from the “fact” of a common African ancestry; and flattening the disciplinary history of the history of science itself. The papers suggest that in the history of science, too, we should bear in mind the medieval scholar Patrick Geary’s suggestion that collective memory is always “memory for something.”
