We all know the history of science that we learned from grade-school textbooks. How Galileo used his telescope to show that the earth was not the center of the universe. How Newton divined gravity from the falling apple. How Einstein unlocked the mysteries of time and space with a simple equation. These few great men with great ideas tower over the ordinary laboring mass of people, and in this traditional heroic account it is to them that we owe science in its entirety.
But science has always been a collective endeavor. In A People’s History of Science the attention is at last turned to hunter-gatherers, peasant farmers, sailors, miners, blacksmiths, folk healers, and others who wrested the means of their survival from an encounter with nature on a daily basis. The science of medicine began with knowledge of plants’ therapeutic properties discovered by preliterate ancient people. Chemistry and metallurgy originated with ancient miners, smiths, and potters; geology and archeology were also born in the mines. Mathematics owes its existence and a great deal of its development to surveyors, merchants, clerk-accountants, and mechanics of many millennia. And the empirical method that characterized the Scientific Revolution, as well as the mass of scientific data upon which it built, emerged from the workshops of European artisans.
Clifford D. Conner has published a number of articles on the history of science in scholarly journals and has participated in international colloquia on various subjects, including the history of science. He taught history in the CUNY system (John Jay College and Lehman College) for several years before deciding to devote full time to writing.
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