Changes In The Perspective And Content Of The Research On The History Of Science From The View Of Public History

With the predicament of the traditional school history,public historiography raised and has been rapidly developing.Historians are increasingly concerned about getting history out of the ivory tower,breaking professional barriers,facing the public,and being involved in the public.As the typical elite in history,scientific history should consciously accept this challenge.This paper firstly reviews the basic theoretical issues of public history and historiography of science,and then investigates the changes and the trends in studying the history of science from the public perspective,and finally,focuses on analyzing how to develop and enrich the history of science on different perspectives under the public views.As a bridge linking science and humanity,the history of science possesses two attributes,namely history and science.Studying the science history under the public history perspective not only need to break the barriers of professional history,lead school history,which is highly specialized,to public domain,and perform its function;but also to break its own professional scientific barriers,understand science while science and society are interacting,and deal with science-related public issues regarding equal rights between scientists and publicity.These two breakthroughs make the combination of public historiography and scientific history a unique academic value.This paper takes the study of Chinese and Western ancient astronomy as the starter and then examines the changes in science history brought by public perspective.When reviewing the history of astronomy in the public perspective of science history,differences between Chinese and Western astronomy are problems due to the missing factors in publicity view now can be thoroughly answered.Based on the comparisons of the traditional and new public technology history,changes of contents in science history can be studied.This paper also pointed out that studying the science history in the perspective of public history is how scientific historians take consideration of the changes in the research contents and then,with an open mind,regard public need as one of the selecting criteria.In a word,under the public and multi-cultural perspectives,the conception,science,need to be expanded,and the studying of science history will contain life science which is closely linked with personal life,opening up a new situation for the history of science.