In this fascinating personal account of what he calls the “American century,” Arnold Thackray, former member of the Consortium Board of Directors, views his long career through the lens of the United States’ rise and fall as a global power, from the testing of the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo in 1945, to the ignominious retreat of American forces in Afghanistan in 2020, coinciding with the rise of artificial intelligence—a technology whose benefits, and perils, have yet to be fully realized.
An absorbing read for anyone with an interest in the technological developments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Making Science History is at once a memoir as well as a thoughtful examination of the achievements, and limitations, of human scientific thought. Arnold Thackray’s many roles in the public life of scholarship include founding and building both the Science History Institute and the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of History and Sociology of Science. Earlier, he was central to the creation of what would become the Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College, University of Cambridge. He also served as treasurer of the American Council of Learned Societies for over a decade. Thackray has written, edited, or published some two dozen books on the modern technosciences.
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