This dissertation examines the intellectual and cultural reception of the phonograph at the turn of the 20th century in Western Europe and the United States. My main goal in this project is to investigate the varied reception of the phonograph by different constituencies, such as scientists, cultural critics, ethnomusicologists, and musicians. From apprehension to enthusiasm, the phonograph generated a diverse set of reactions amongst its users and listeners. In order to better understand this range of responses to the sound-recording device, I utilize the theory of the automaton as an important reference point throughout this dissertation. In scientific, musical, economic, and fictional contexts, the phonograph was imbued with life-like characteristics by its users, which stirred fear in some and excitement in others. This perception of the phonograph to be uncanny - to be both mechanical and somehow alive - shapes the focus of the dissertation and demonstrates how a seemingly simple device managed to destabilize traditional notions about human identity. The perceived ability of the phonograph to preserve and reproduce the human voice in isolation from its bodily source raised fundamental questions about what it meant to be human at a time of unprecedented technological and cultural change. The various manifestations of modernization transformed the human experience of time and space. As a consequence, the phonograph became part of this reconceptualization of the human experience in a plethora of human activities. The first part of the dissertation examines the positioning of the phonograph as a doubling agent in the domains of stenography, law, and music. It then explores how the phonograph shaped Thomas Edison's ideas about the structure of the universe and the possibilities of immortality. The second half of the dissertation looks at the role of the phonograph in the domain of ethnomusicology - in both the United States and England - and how it impacted debates over musical authenticity and the practice of scientific objectivity. In its various applications, the phonograph elicited a spectrum of emotions and this dissertation explores the critical first 20 to 30 years of the phonograph before it became a commoditized playback machine in the early 1900s.

Higher education institutions in California worked to make the state more prosperous through the science taught and conducted in these institutions during the state’s first three decades. This dissertation examines the role of science in these early California colleges and how they interacted with the state’s political economy. The colleges founded in this period worked to provide an education that students would recognize as leading to good jobs. While many of these schools were religiously affiliated, the institutions needed students regardless of their religious background in order for the schools to survive.

These early colleges were able to provide services both to students and to the state in general as they reached the public through various means. These included utilizing scientific equipment for conducting experiments and analyzing mineral ores and illustrating scientific concepts with collections of animals, plants, and minerals. Additionally, lectures and public demonstrations brought science to a wider audience and helped to financially support the schools. Jesuit schools Santa Clara College and St. Ignatius College engaged with areas of mining, agriculture, and electricity. Protestant schools, such as the University of the Pacific and the College of California, also emphasized scientific education, including teaching it to women. The state’s healthcare infrastructure was strengthened by the start of medical education in the state with the University of the Pacific’s medical department and the Toland Medical College. Future teachers of California’s children were taught science in the California State Normal School. The federal Morrill Act’s passage allowed California the financial resources to establish a land grant institution, and the University of California was founded with a curriculum emphasizing mining, mechanic arts, agriculture, and engineering.

The dissertation relies on archival sources–such as catalogues, diaries, and board meeting minutes–that are generally located on the present-day campuses of these institutions. Analysis of these documents provides evidence of how these institutions, through their science education, helped California’s economy to prosper.

This dissertation investigates how Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright used science to manufacture consent among slave laborers in the antebellum South. I hope to contribute to debates on black health by addressing the issue of mental health and the role of race in the history of psychiatry. Cartwright's early essays and anonymous publications, heretofore addressed, provide unique insight into what led the physician to articulate blacks' acts of defiance and rebellion as instances of mental instability. Instead of viewing black people's vigilance for freedom as earnest, Cartwright was well known for having delineated a variety of mental disorders to which he claimed all Africans were prone, including shirking work related responsibilities (Dysaesthesia Aethiopica), and the practice of running away to freedom (Drapetomania). This dissertation demonstrates how Cartwright mobilized statistics and diagnostic categories in hopes to convince others to limit black mobility and to eliminate power-sharing.

Whether in the form of whites negotiating with slaves, providing incentives for them to work harder, or by rejecting the "Free Negro" category altogether, Cartwright saw his duty as twofold: to correct what he argued was the misguided notion that some blacks held the capacity to endure freedom whereas others did not, and to put forth a therapeutic regimen by which to curb blacks' enthusiasm for freedom -- he repudiated gradual and immediate abolition altogether and advocated instead that whites worldwide reduce all blacks to slavery. Following the lead of the Founding generation Cartwright reasoned that there were structurally-based, mental and physiological differences between blacks and whites which led blacks to be governed differently and through coercion. So, in addition to being innovate in his diagnostic claims, on par with Jefferson's accomplishment in Notes on the State of Virginia, Cartwright consolidated existing scientific opinion and then gave it powerful and influential articulation. He motivated a trans-Atlantic debate about "Free Negro Insanity" which reflected widespread 19th century scientific thinking about race, slave management and stimulating correct conduct in laborers. An inquiry into "Free Negro Insanity" enables a conversation about how trans-Atlantic science and medicine served the requirements of slavery as an institution; how science is used to determine what constituted a slave's status, what was meant by a slave "running away" and why slaves' "mental competence" was necessarily an issue. By examining the genealogy of Cartwright's concepts, one can see better his process of concept-creation and inquire into how `objects' in science get created or set aside for study.

Cartwright wrote extensively on the need for Southerners to pursue independent medical education as a way to explore diseases particular to the Southern climate and "its Negroes." But despite the fact that Cartwright's early work (published before his tenure as "Professor of Negro Diseases" at the University of Louisiana) established his career and achieved him status, scholars address it rarely. I argue that charting how he achieves, loses and then regains his status provides a unique window into the thinking of the emerging plantation aristocracy on how to regulate "Free Negro" activity in the Mississippi and Louisiana territories as well as in the English, Spanish and French West Indies. This inquiry into conduct disorder and defiance diagnoses helps readers to see both medicine's curative and productive values. The implications of such a focus stretch from the applied science of 19th century "Negro Management" handbooks and "Plantation Manuals" to the 20th century presence of medical diagnoses like "Attention Deficit Disorder" (A.D.D.), "Hyperactivity Disorder" (A.D.H.D.), and "Oppositional Defiance Disorders" (O.D.D.) which are aimed at curbing the behavior of disobedient, defiant and rebellious youth through pharmaceutical treatments.

I explore three different themes in the history of science through the lens of the museum: 1) science and the public; 2) science and empire; 3) material and visual culture. The book is an institutional history of a provincial museum with international aspirations to standardize museum management and anthropological practice. The founding director of the Dresden Museum for Zoology, Anthropology and Ethnography proposed an historical, non-essentialist approach to understanding racial and cultural difference because of his commitment to extensive field research, Darwinian evolution, and experimentation with techniques of visual representation. Director A. B. Meyer (1840-1911) identified the widely practiced science of craniometry as defined by technologies of exoticization that actively erased the historical, cultural and social details that human remains carried with them. He developed new methods that emphasized intimate familiarity with variety within any one ethnic group, from skull shape to material ornamentation, as integral to the new disciplines of physical and cultural anthropology. This approach to the anthropological sciences pitted the Dresden scholars against the dominant ahistorical methods and anti-Darwinian beliefs of the German Society of Anthropology, Ethnology and Pre-history. Internationally, this historical understanding of individual cultures attracted the attention of Filipino nationalists and numerous US research institutions.

I build on the work of other historians of modern German science who have pointed out that we must look beyond the power of the university-state model and consider the role of other cultural factors to understand the place and power of science in nineteenth-century German culture. I also address the current debate in the history of the German anthropological sciences regarding the disciplines’ relationship to racism and colonialism. In order to expand our understanding of the complex development of these sciences, I emphasize the importance of visual approaches to historical scholarship.

The intellect is beset with numerous problems and shortcomings some of which have been historically noted by Plato, Bacon, Locke and others. A particularly challenging problem in reasoning, is the problem of (colored) ‘lenses’ whose source is culture, broadly construed. While the vital role of culture in reasoning may have been alluded to by philosophers, it has not been closely analyzed or theorized. Through two empirical case studies drawn from the field of educational anthropology, I demonstrate how cultural lenses block reasoning altogether or severely constrain it. This poses a particular challenge for the cultivation of the intellect in education—a goal universally advocated by historical and contemporary philosophers of education.

Current educational programs aiming towards the cultivation of the intellect, namely, through critical thinking and through an initiation into the disciplines, while they have their merits in helping students think more effectively, are insufficient in helping students to overcome the barrier of lenses (as theorized herein). And they fail because current educational programs focus on argument identification and evaluation. But problems of reason are not limited to problems of argument and reason is not limited to argument evaluation. Hence, what is required is a philosophy of education for the full cultivation of the intellect based on a broader conception of reason; a conception of reason which I demonstrate through empirical case studies.

To achieve the goal of the fuller cultivation of the intellect in education, I indicate a pedagogical direction for a possible educational program. I also recommend a focused research program in (i) the philosophical study of reason in a broader sense than just evaluation of arguments, (ii) a multidisciplinary study of various problems facing reason and (iii) an empirical study of educational methods for overcoming problems of reason. The implications of the present work are not just limited to students’ reasonings but have relevance to teachers’ and policy makers’ reasonings and indeed to the reasonings of philosophers of education as well.

“Time to Cure” reveals that from the late nineteenth century and well into the first decades of the twentieth, different notions of time and various time-keeping tools were instruments of change in French psychiatric theory and practice. During this period French alienists and mind scientists became preoccupied not only with how their patients and experimental subjects related to the increasingly widespread presence of clocks and watches and to the temporal constructs and pressures of modern life, but also with how they might deploy time-keeping tools themselves to serve the still elusive goal of curability. Using a wide variety of sources from course books and clinical reports to cinematography and photography, each chapter of this dissertation explores a different facet of how French mental health practitioners used time to re-envision psychiatric classification, diagnosis, treatment duration, the spatial organization of psychiatric hospitals, and lastly, the observation of their patients’ inner mental lives.

By looking at different aspects of mental health practice and research, including charting techniques, reaction time measurements, and the interpretation of “temporal delusions,” “Time to Cure” queries how the rise and proliferation of precision time-keeping instruments, the seductive power of speed, and new ideas about the temporal trajectory of mental illness were intertwined in France from the 1880s to the 1930s. It asks: how did mental health practitioners and researchers fashion time into a device, tool, measure, and metaphor with the aim of chipping away at the thorny problem of psychiatric curability? This study equally examines how the ability to accelerate processes in science and technology has influenced the expectations and experiences of mental illness and treatment.

Meditating on how what “counts” as cured is highly dependent on context, this study demonstrates that it is through the framework of temporality that the criteria for, and limitations of, curability become visible in starkest relief. Finally, by placing the relationship between time and psychiatric cure center stage, this history connects to contemporary concerns about the pressures of productivity and profit for medicine more broadly.