Centennial Bibliography On The History Of American Sociology

THE CENTENNIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY ON THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN SOCIOLOGY is intended as an inclusive clearinghouse for sources, studies, and other references that illuminate the origins and subsequent development of the sociological enterprise in the United States of America.2 As such, this bibliography is necessarily provisional and is envisioned as an on-going project to which further citations may be added as they are discovered and as new works are published. Due to the enormous scope of the project, and the short time frame within which the initial compilation was completed, countless useful and insightful references have been unintentionally omitted. Some portions of the citations are currently more comprehensive than others. Gaps, holes, and inexplicable lapses are the sole responsibility of the compiler, for which he not so much apologetic as he is determined to repair them. The assistance of each reader of this bibliography is earnestly enlisted to supply additional references with which they are familiar. Likewise, the current bibliography undoubtedly contains bibliographic errors due in part to the sheer impracticality of physically checking each and every item referenced herein. Again, the assistance of bibliographically astute readers is heartily enlisted to correct such errors. Readers wishing to report errors or to nominate additional candidates for inclusion in future updates of this bibliography are warmly invited to communicate corrections or recommendations together with brief explanations and complete bibliographic particulars via email to: [email protected]

Reports to the President

A compilation of annual reports including a report from the President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as reports from the academic and administrative units of the Institute. The reports outline the year's goals, accomplishments, honors and awards, and future plans

Heuristics of capital: a historical sociology of US venture capitalism, 1946-1968

This thesis examines the emergence and early history of venture capitalism in the US as a project of capitalization. As theorized in recent literatures on valuation studies and the “new” history of capitalism, capitalization is a collective activity, simultaneously cognitive and socio-technical, of “turning things into assets.” As such, it requires the capitalizing subject to “think as an investor.” The history of capitalism can be reconstructed as a history of successive “regimes of investment,” differing in terms of which assets get capitalized and under what terms. Before stabilizing as a “regime,” however, capitalization begins as a project that is logically and historically anterior to the institutions and technologies that will later hold it together. Rather, projects of capitalization emerge as ways of imagining certain objects as investments, or capital assets. In the early history of venture capital in the US, this imagination was targeted at young, small, technology-based firms. Prospective investors — who eventually became early venture capitalists — deployed a set of informal heuristics adopting some of the categories from the classifications used by the applied financial and managerial disciplines. This thesis follows the sequence of episodes through which these heuristics increasingly became centered on “people,” eventually helping create a novel action under a description and, to put it in Ian Hacking’s terms, a corresponding human kind — technical entrepreneurs. Accordingly, the analytical approach is nominalist: no claim is made as to whether the heuristics deployed by the actors featuring on the pages to follow could serve as a substitute for probabilistic calculation or any other formal calculative device. Yet however “effective” these heuristics might have been, they did have certain dynamic effects, applying and creating new classifications of investment opportunities, companies, and, eventually, people. As a result, in the early 1970s, venture capitalists defined themselves as being engaged in the “people business.” Rather than effectively “turning engineers into entrepreneurs” through coercive or performative effects, they created the category of “technical entrepreneurs” as a human kind, that is, as an open possibility for being a certain kind of person, without necessarily becoming one

Centennial Bibliography On The History Of American Sociology

THE CENTENNIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY ON THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN SOCIOLOGY is intended as an inclusive clearinghouse for sources, studies, and other references that illuminate the origins and subsequent development of the sociological enterprise in the United States of America.2 As such, this bibliography is necessarily provisional and is envisioned as an on-going project to which further citations may be added as they are discovered and as new works are published. Due to the enormous scope of the project, and the short time frame within which the initial compilation was completed, countless useful and insightful references have been unintentionally omitted. Some portions of the citations are currently more comprehensive than others. Gaps, holes, and inexplicable lapses are the sole responsibility of the compiler, for which he not so much apologetic as he is determined to repair them. The assistance of each reader of this bibliography is earnestly enlisted to supply additional references with which they are familiar. Likewise, the current bibliography undoubtedly contains bibliographic errors due in part to the sheer impracticality of physically checking each and every item referenced herein. Again, the assistance of bibliographically astute readers is heartily enlisted to correct such errors. Readers wishing to report errors or to nominate additional candidates for inclusion in future updates of this bibliography are warmly invited to communicate corrections or recommendations together with brief explanations and complete bibliographic particulars via email to: [email protected]

Shaping Public Discourses of Nature: Biological Mutation in the American Press, 1820-1945

The application of the recombinant DNA technologies to modify plant genomes became an issue of public controversy in the United States, a dispute which culminated during the last years of the century and continued unabated into the next. Scholarship which examines public perceptions of genetic engineering focuses almost exclusively on the reception of rDNA technologies, ignoring the rich history of interactions between the American society and organisms with hereditary traits modified by botanists, plant physiologists, and geneticists prior to the emergence of laboratory methods for genetic recombination. Examining three historical episodes which prompted the American society to confront the concept of mutation, in the present dissertation I explore the historical development of public attitudes to the possibility of modifying hereditary traits of living organisms. On the pages of this dissertation, I argue that tracing the history of public discourses revolving around biological mutation – in the form of species transmutation, the theory of mutation, and genetic mutation – allows access to the discursive space where such early interactions took place. Each chapter of the dissertation unveils the historical and discursive circumstances which lead the American media to associate the quality of “unnaturalness” with modified organisms in the public sphere. Consequently, the dissertation aims to demonstrate that the discourses employed by the media and social movements campaigning against genetic engineering in the 1990s – still reverberating among the American public – relied on essentialist assumptions about the natural environment which had circulated in the American press centuries before the emergence of rDNA technologies

Historic Resources Study of Pullman National Monument, Illinois

This Historic Resource Study is a Baseline Research Report for Pullman National Monument. This HRS summarizes the historical writings about Pullman, provides context for the significant themes identified in its founding document, collates collections of primary documents and historical resources that are important sources of information on those themes, and recommends questions that will require additional study. These cultural resources include primary historical materials in archives and oral history collections, as well as architectural, archaeological, museum collections, or landscape resources. While this report includes new historical narrative based in original archival research, other sections present synthetic reviews of existing publications. National Park Service staff will use this document and included resources as they make management decisions and design interpretive programming. In addition to this report and its appendices—which are only published digitally—the research team deposited its entire library with the monument staff, including nearly 2,000 references and thousands of pages of digitally-imaged archival documents

Reports to the President

A compilation of annual reports for the 1981-1982 academic year, including a report from the President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as reports from the academic and administrative units of the Institute. The reports outline the year's goals, accomplishments, honors and awards, and future plans

College and Research Libraries 39 (2) March 1978

published or submitted for publicatio