Evaluating Knowledge, Evaluating Character: Book Reviewing by American Historians and Physicists (1900–1940)

Abstract

How have the evaluative norms and evaluative language of academics developed historically, and how have they varied between disciplines? Meaningful answers to these questions may be obtained from the historical-comparative study of book reviewing, a widely practiced yet historically understudied academic genre. My focus in this article is on book reviews written by American historians and physicists in the American Historical Review, Physical Review, and Science from 1900 until 1940. I show that book reviewers in these journals assessed not only results and methods of authors but also authors themselves. They would praise some authors—especially colleagues—for exhibiting virtues like “carefulness,” “objectivity,” or “thoroughness,” while charging others—especially nonacademics—with vices such as “recklessness,” “dogmatism,” or “exaggeration.” Remarkably, such virtue and vice language was applied not only to the character of authors, but also to their actions and outputs. Indeed, in early twentieth-century book reviews by historians and physicists, epistemic virtues and vices functioned as norms to evaluate both knowledge and character.