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HERODOTUS WAS GREEK HISTORIAN WHOSE SUBJECT WAS THE RECENT PAST. PRIMARILY, HIS ACCOUNTS DEALT WITH THE REPULSION OF THE PERSIAN EMPEROR BY HIS INTENDED VICTIMS. THUCYDIDES SOUGHT TO PRESENT MORE THAN AN ACCOUNT OF THE WAR AND SAW THE EVENTS AND SPEECHES IN TERMS OF WAR IN GENERAL AND OF RECURRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR.

"This book explores the ways in which scientific objects are both real and historical. Whether discovered or invented, objects of inquiry broaden and deepen in meaning -- growing more 'real' -- as they become entangled in webs of cultural signficance, material practices, and theoretical derivations. Thus their biographies will matter to anyone concerned with the formation of scientific knowledge and with the reconciliation of ontology and history."--Back cover

Social historians formed an important part of the Social Science History Association from its early days, and they widened its intellectual space beyond initial emphases on political history and quantitative methods. Lee Benson and other faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as Charles and Louise Tilly, were particularly influential in attracting a broad mix of scholars to the group. The openness of the association and its interdisciplinarity appealed to younger scholars, and those interested in the "new urban history" were early recruits. A growing number of women, many of whom were social historians, participated in the first conventions and newly organized networks.

"Sex has no history, but sexual science does. During the late nineteenth century, people all over the world suddenly began to insist that understandings of sex must be based on science. As Japanese and Indian sexologists influenced their German and American counterparts, and vice versa, sexuality, modernity, and imaginings of exotified "Others" became intimately linked. The first anthology to provide a worldwide perspective on the birth and development of the field, A Global History of Sexual Science contends that actors outside of Europe--in Asia, Latin America, and Africa--became important interlocutors in a globalizing field where ideas were circulated through intellectual exchange, travel, and internationally produced and disseminated publications. Twenty scholars tackle specific issues, including prostitution and the criminalization of male homosexuality, to demonstrate how concepts and ideas introduced by sexual scientists gained currency throughout the modern world"--Provided by publisher.

Five episodes in the history of quantitative science provided the occasions for changes in the understanding of measurement important for attempts at quantification in the social sciences. First, Euclid's generalization of the ancient concept of measure to the concept of ratio provided a clear rationale for the use of numbers in quantitative science, a rationale that has been important through the history of science and one that contradicts the definition of measurement currently fashionable within the social sciences. Second, Duns Scotus's modelling of qualitative change upon quantitative change provided the opportunity to extend measurement from extensive to intensive attributes, a shift that makes it clear that the possibility of measuring qualitative attributes in the social sciences is not one that can be ruled out a priori. Third, Hölder's specification of the character of quantitative attributes showed that quantitative structure is a specific kind of empirical structure, one that is not logically necessary and, therefore, it shows that it is not necessary that any psychological attributes must be quantitative either. Taking the points emanating from Duns Scotus and Hölder together, the issue of whether psychological attributes are quantitative is shown to be an empirical issue. Fourth, Campbell's delineation of the categories of fundamental and derived measurement, and his subsequent critique of psychophysical measurement, showed that attempts at psychological measurement raised new challenges for measurement theory. Fifth, the articulation of the theory of conjoint measurement by Luce and Tukey reveals one way in which those challenges might be met. Taken as a whole, these episodes show that attempts at measurement in the social sciences are continuous with the rest of science in the sense that the issue of whether social science attributes can be measured raises empirical questions that can be answered only in the light of scientific evidence.

What are the social sciences? What unifies them? This essay collection seeks to answer these and other important questions as it considers how the field has developed over the years, from post-World War II to the present day throughout the world. Edited by Cyril Lemieux, Laurent Berger, Marielle Macé, Gildas Salmon, and Cécile Vidal, A History of the Social Sciences in 101 Books brings together a diverse range of researchers in the social sciences to present short essays on 101 books – both renowned and lesser known – that have shaped the field, from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) to Michel Aglietta's Money: 5000 Years of Debt and Power (2016). While there have been surveys and intellectual histories of particular disciplines within the social sciences (history, anthropology, sociology), until now there has been no intellectual history of the social sciences as a unified whole. Far from presenting a fixed and frozen canon, A History of the Social Sciences in 101 Books offers instead a moving, multiform landscape with no settled questions, only an ongoing series of new perspectives and challenges to previously established grounding.

As they were in other East Asian countries, Joseph Needham and his monumental works were warmly received by Korean historians of science in the late twentieth century. Korean historians appreciated both Needham's pioneering research on the history of Chinese science and his praise of Korea's contribution to East Asian scientific tradition, as expressed, for example, in the addenda to volume 3 of Science and Civilisation in China. But the Koreans' praise of Needham was not unqualified. Needham's largely favorable remarks on Korean science invited criticism from several prominent Korean historians who noted many factual errors, particularly relating to Korea's priority over China in several technological inventions. They regarded those errors as indicative of Needham's deep-rooted historiographical bias, his view of Korea as a mere tributary of China's scientific tradition. But the Koreans' criticism of Needham ironically shows that they agreed with the central tenets of Needham's methodology of crediting scientific achievements to different civilizations, whereby to measure China's contribution to what Needham termed "universal modern science." The Koreans only scaled down the scope of comparison from the world of civilizations to a smaller region called East Asia, whereby to compare Korea's share with that of China. This article thus takes the Korean criticism of Needham as an illuminating case, which invites us to think over a less explored issue in the history of East Asian science: how to write a balanced history of science in a region that is characterized by a stark disparity in power, resources, and achievements between China and its smaller neighbors.