Magnificent Distances: The Rise and Fall of the Capital City of Science, 1862-1920

My current book project, Magnificent Distances: The Rise and Fall of the Capital City of Science, 1862-1920, tells the story of what I call “capital science,” a period (1862-1920) in which scientists and intellectuals in Washington, DC consistently turned to the problems and opportunities of a modernizing capital city to make claims on the authority of science, authority within their disciplines, and, in many cases, the authority of the state. By bringing the scale of state science down to the streets and the everyday lives, concerns, and relationships of people in the city, the book shows how scientists became active political actors within the capital: architect-engineers controlled municipal improvements; astronomers became lobbyists; naturalists negotiated land development; social scientists pursued uplift through neighborhood reform and institution building; and chemists guarded the District’s public health in their efforts to achieve national regulation. Magnificent Distances reexamines bureau scientists in this period as modernists whose notions of labor, progress, and civilization remained bound to the racial, gender, and class politics of the city. “Capital science” had an urban vision. It saw postbellum scientific state building and the cultivation of Washington scientific culture as acts of city building, both culturally and physically, especially in a time when funding for science was meager.

Magnificent Distances makes three key interventions. First, departing from traditional narratives of institutional consolidation and the cohesion of scientific disciplines, it tells the story of the post-Civil War rise of state science from the standpoint of urban culture, sociability, and the built environment. Indeed, Magnificent Distances argues that scientists often understood the institutions to be weak, impotent, and, at times, hindrances to the change they wanted. In the face of weak institutions, scientists turned to lobbying, politicking, collective organizing, and civic and development projects in a city that aspired to “national” and eventually “model” status after Union victory. Second, by decentering the institutions, Magnificent Distances argues that the history of the rise of state science in the United States needs to also be understood as local history, a story of urban collectivism, labor politics, and intellectual class formation as much as institutional and disciplinary formation and national “legibility.” By situating this story in the city, rather than the halls of government agencies, capital science includes many who were perceived as outside science’s orbit, most notably DC’s burgeoning Black intellectual community. Third, as an urban history of Washington, DC after the Civil War, it argues that scientists remade Washington’s cultural and physical landscapes in this period, a facet of the city’s Gilded Age history largely ignored by urban historians.