Timothy Burke notes a controversy about an NEH program that some philosophers feel tramples their discipline. In talking about a hypothetical program that would do the same for his field of history, Burke suggests something that caught my eye:
f the NEH set up a course development grant called "Time and the Past" aimed at supporting interdisciplinary courses that examined change over time but framed the grant so that ordinary history courses didn't qualify, my first impulse would be to object. Why exclude the discipline that makes that question its central concern?
But hold on a moment. What might a grant solicitation written that way incentivize? Maybe attention to how thinking about change over time is a real problem for some disciplines: some forms of economics, for example. Maybe a course (by philosophers, even!) on whether history matters or is knowable, which history departments don't tend to offer. Maybe a course in a natural science that asks how and when old science matters to contemporary science. The more I think about it, the more I can think of really interesting courses that respond to the prompt and aren't likely to be taught by most historians. I can think of courses which might respond to the prompt that could be taught by a historian, but they'd be good additions to a curriculum in other departments as well.
I've said a couple of times that one of my half-assed ideas for a general education course is "A Brief History of Timekeeping," which is the first thing I thought of when I saw that. Not because of the relevance of old science to new, but because you could use it to talk about changes in the constants of nature. If the fine-structure constant isn't really constant, you would expect different sorts of atomic clocks to run at different rates over time. There's all sorts of interesting physics to bring into this kind of discussion.
This idea keeps accreting more stuff (becoming more fully assed?). One of these days, I'm going to end up with a full proposal for a course, just by accident... Unless, that is, the NEH jumps on Burke's idea, and I can get them to pay me for it...
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I think I've mentioned before a course I took called "History of Astronomy and Astrology in Medieval and Early Modern Europe". It was taught by J. L. Heilbron and was one of my favorite undergrad experiences. The concept was very close to what I imagine you're talking about here. We got to build sundials and astrolabes, including discussion of how to calculate all those angles and curves.
I remember it as a great fusion between interesting history, scientific principles, and practical activities. The humanities types get a sound appreciation of scientific principles and methods, while the science types get a practical perspective that's not emphasized in most of their classes. Good stuff all around.
We know that Albert Einstein read and thought considerably about what (while he was in the Swiss Patent Office) was the current technology of timekeeping and clock-synchronization for railroad networks.
We know that Shakespeare and Chaucer were well-educated in the equivalents for their eras.
Good enough for Chaucer, Einstein, and Shakespeare? Then good enough for a university course.
Which department gets it? As with almost any subject, that is a history-variable, and not a state variable. For example, some schools started Computer Science in their EE departments, so in Math, some in Physics, and so forth. Some schools have Logic taught by Philosophy , some have it taught by Math.
It would be great to see your course become 'fully assed'. The larger universities often have a separate 'History and Philosophy of Science' department. Combining this with a physics major, I found it gave me a new perspective on the science I was learning, however, the academics were sometimes disconnected when it came to the relevance of what they were teaching to science. I would love to see more of these courses taught by people who have a solid grasp of physics.