Alan I. Marcus – författare

Americans have benefited from substantial improvements in health since the end of World War II. They live longer and grow taller; they have the safest and cheapest food supply on the planet; they have seen virtually all childhood diseases brought under control. Yet concerns about health remain widespread today. Cancer seems to be everywhere; autoimmune, nervous, and environmental diseases have reached pandemic proportions; medical malpractice suits have proliferated.How can we have received so many benefits while still being as worried as ever about our health and the health care system established to ensure and extend those benefits? The historical perspective provided by the essays in this volume helps answer this question by identifying two points of significant change in health care policy. Beginning in the 1950s there emerged a subtle yet critical reconceptualization as the individual rather than the group came to figure prominently as the central policy-making unit. Then in the late 1960s a palpable sense of limits rendered the individualism of the previous decade into a Malthusian formulation: the greater the access or benefits that any one person received, the less others could get. Besides tracing these patterns in health care development, the essays also show how traditional notions of expertise have been affected by the changes. Contributors are Amy Sue Bix, Hamilton Cravens, Gerald N. Grob, Alan I Marcus, Diane Paul, David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, and James Harvey Young.

In Land of Milk and Money, Alan I Marcus examines the establishment of the dairy industry in the United States South during the 1920s. Looking specifically at the internal history of the Borden Company—the world's largest dairy firm—as well as small-town efforts to lure industry and manufacturing south, Marcus suggests that the rise of the modern dairy business resulted from debates and redefinitions that occurred in both the northern industrial sector and southern towns. Condensed milk production in Starkville, Mississippi, the location of Borden's and the South's first condensery, so exceeded expectations that it emerged as a touchstone for success. Starkville's vigorous self-promotion acted as a public relations campaign that inspired towns in Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas to entice northern milk concerns looking to relocate. Local officials throughout the South urged farmers, including Black sharecroppers and tenants, to add dairying to their operations to make their locales more attractive to northern interests. Many did so only after small-town commercial elites convinced them of dairying's potential profitability.Land of Milk and Money focuses on small-town businessmen rather than scientists and the federal government, two groups that pushed for agricultural diversification in the South for nearly four decades with little to no success. As many towns in rural America faced extinction due to migration, northern manufacturers' creation of regional facilities proved a potent means to boost profits and remain relevant during uncertain economic times. While scholars have long emphasized northern efforts to decentralize production during this period, Marcus's study examines the ramifications of those efforts for the South through the singular success of the southern dairy business. The presence of local dairying operations afforded small towns a measure of independence and stability, allowing them to diversify their economies and better weather the economic turmoil of the Great Depression.

This text addresses the relationship between what modern-day experts say to each other and to their constituencies and whether what they say and do relates to the larger culture and society. It challenges the social impact model by looking at science and technology as intellectual activities.

Established by the Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862, America’s land-grant universities have had far-reaching influences on the United States and the world. Service as Mandate, Alan I Marcus’s second edited collection of insightful essays about land-grant universities, explores how these universities have adapted to meet the challenges of the past sixty-five years and how, having done so, they have helped to create the modern world.From their founding, land-grant schools have provided educational opportunities to millions, producing many of the nation’s scientific, technical, and agricultural leaders and spawning countless technological and agricultural innovations. Nevertheless, their history has not always been smooth or without controversy or setbacks. These vital centers of learning and research have in fact been redefined and reconceptualized many times and today bear only a cursory resemblance to their original incarnations.The thirteen essays in this collection explore such themes as the emphasis on food science and home economics, the country life movement, the evolution of a public research system, the rise of aerospace engineering, the effects of the GI Bill, the teaching of military science, the sustainable agriculture movement, and the development of golf-turf science. Woven together, these expertly curated scenes, vignettes, and episodes powerfully illustrate these institutions’ ability to flex and adapt to serve the educational needs of an ever-changing American citizenry.By dint of their mission to remedy social, economic, and technical problems; to improve standards of living; and to enhance quality of life, land-grant universities are destined and intended to be agents of change—a role that finds them at times both celebrated and hotly contested, even vilified. A readable and fascinating exploration of land-grant universities, Service as Mandate offers educators, policy makers, students, and the wider communities land-grant universities serve a vital exploration of these dynamic institutions.

Science as Service: Establishing and Reformulating American Land-Grant Universities, 1865–1930 is the first of a two-volume study that traces the foundation and evolution of America’s land-grant institutions. In this expertly curated collection of essays, Alan I Marcus has assembled a tough-minded account of the successes and set-backs of these institutions during the first sixty-five years of their existence. In myriad scenes, vignettes, and episodes from the history of land-grant colleges, these essays demonstrate the defining characteristic of these institutions: their willingness to proclaim and pursue science in the service of the publics and students they serve.   The Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862 created a series of institutions—at least one in every state and territory—with now familiar names: Michigan State University, Ohio State University, Purdue University, Rutgers University, the University of Arizona, and the University of California, to name a few. These schools opened educational opportunities and pathways to a significant segment of the American public and gave the United States a global edge in science, technical innovation, and agriculture.   Science as Service provides an essential body of literature for understanding the transformations of the land-grant colleges established by the Morrill Act in 1862 as well as the considerable impact they had on the history of the United States. Historians of science, technology, and agriculture, along with rural sociologists, public decision and policy makers, educators, and higher education administrators will find this an essential addition to their book collections.

Established by the Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862, America’s land-grant universities have had far-reaching influences on the United States and the world. Service as Mandate, Alan I Marcus’s second edited collection of insightful essays about land-grant universities, explores how these universities have adapted to meet the challenges of the past sixty-five years and how, having done so, they have helped to create the modern world.   From their founding, land-grant schools have provided educational opportunities to millions, producing many of the nation’s scientific, technical, and agricultural leaders and spawning countless technological and agricultural innovations. Nevertheless, their history has not always been smooth or without controversy or setbacks. These vital centers of learning and research have in fact been redefined and reconceptualized many times and today bear only a cursory resemblance to their original incarnations.   The thirteen essays in this collection explore such themes as the emphasis on food science and home economics, the country life movement, the evolution of a public research system, the rise of aerospace engineering, the effects of the GI Bill, the teaching of military science, the sustainable agriculture movement, and the development of golf-turf science. Woven together, these expertly curated scenes, vignettes, and episodes powerfully illustrate these institutions’ ability to flex and adapt to serve the educational needs of an ever-changing American citizenry.   By dint of their mission to remedy social, economic, and technical problems; to improve standards of living; and to enhance the quality of life, land-grant universities are destined and intended to be agents of change—a role that finds them at times both celebrated and hotly contested, even vilified. A readable and fascinating exploration of land-grant universities, Service as Mandate offers a vital exploration of these dynamic institutions to educators, policy makers, students, and the wider communities that land-grant universities serve.

An examination of the first attempt to conquer cancer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.   In Malignant Growth: Creating the Modern Cancer Research Establishment, 1875–1915, Alan I Marcus explores a relatively understudied period in the history of cancer by providing a careful investigation of the first public crusade to determine the cause of cancer. The search for cancer’s cause during the heady era of bacteriology was colored by the Germ Theory of Disease. Researchers had demonstrated in malady after malady that each disease was the result of a singular and specific pathogenic agent. That model led investigators to optimistically conclude that they would soon find the cause of what was termed the “emperor of all maladies,” cases of which were apparently increasing at a prodigious rate worldwide.   In this accessible history of science and medicine, Marcus exposes the complex story of the efforts made from 1875 through 1915 to first conquer and, failing that, to control cancer—a dual approach that remains in force to this day. He reveals the messiness of real-time scientific research, tracing the repeated lurches of promise, discoveries of hope, and the inevitable despair that always followed. Other barriers existed to the research, such as inconsistency in test standards and inter-laboratory competition and mistrust. Researchers approached cancer from such disparate specialties as clinical medicine, zoology, botany, chemistry, nutrition, bacteriology, pathology, and microbiology. Although they came from diverse fields, each steadfastly maintained that cancer operated in an analogous fashion to other bacteriological diseases.   Virtually every country and a slew of various clinicians and investigators waged this first war on cancer, operating in remarkably diverse scientific venues. Cancer laboratories and hospitals, as well as organizations like the American Cancer Society, were born out of this first offensive on cancer. Even as cancer continues to proliferate today, these institutions that initially formed to defeat cancer more than a hundred years ago persist and continue to expand.

Now in a thoroughly updated new edition, this successful textbook surveys the history of technology in America from the 1600s to the 21st century. Alan I Marcus and Howard P. Segal explore the effect society, culture, politics and economics have had upon technological advances, and place the evolution of American technology within the broader context of the development of systems such as transportation and communications. This unique book connects phenomena such as colonial printing presses with the American Revolution; early photographs with the creation of an allegedly unique American character; and high-tech advances in biotechnology with a growing desire for individual autonomy.This is an ideal resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of the history of technology, the history of science, and American history.

Now in a thoroughly updated new edition, this successful textbook surveys the history of technology in America from the 1600s to the 21st century. Alan I Marcus and Howard P. Segal explore the effect society, culture, politics and economics have had upon technological advances, and place the evolution of American technology within the broader context of the development of systems such as transportation and communications. This unique book connects phenomena such as colonial printing presses with the American Revolution; early photographs with the creation of an allegedly unique American character; and high-tech advances in biotechnology with a growing desire for individual autonomy.This is an ideal resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of the history of technology, the history of science, and American history.