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This chapter discusses the twentieth-century history of Saudi Arabia through the biography of Hamad al-Jāsir. More than any other single person, al-Jāsir was responsible for shaping the modern genealogical culture of Saudi Arabia. The chapter examines al-Jāsir's life from his birth in 1909 in a central Arabian village to the beginnings of his genealogical project in the 1970s. It considers al-Jāsir's sometimes tumultuous relationship with his patrons in the Wahhabi religious establishment, his contributions to the development of the Saudi press and public culture, and his views on Arabia's bedouin populations and on the Arabic language. It also explores al-Jāsir's turn toward scholarship and the documenting of Saudi lineages in the last third of his life.

This chapter gives an overview of the history of religious competition and secular-religious politics in the twentieth century. It introduces two key terms of this volume, secularism and apologetics. It proposes apologetics as a novel way to understand not only how religious but also secular actors defend their ideological positions. Following a history of the term apologetics in church use, this chapter proposes a model of apologetics neutralized of its narrowly Christian context that can be used for comparison across time and space. This introductory chapter then offers some general findings about the nature of religious competition in the twentieth century, before discussing in a comparative fashion the contributions to this volume.

This chapter integrates important topics into the mainstream of early twentieth-century Egyptian history. It gives a general overview of 1919–52 visual artistic expression, which depicts how painting and sculpture were critical to the articulation of a national image. It also provides valuable insights into the cursus honori of Egyptian artists during these years, who emerge as truly international figures. Artistic pioneers of the 1920s and 1930s viewed Egypt in ways distinct from the orientalists who preceded them. In the process, they established Egypt as unique among Arab countries. By also examining 1940s approaches expressing the subjective, psychological world of the masses, this chapter demonstrates Egyptian artists' intensifying social concerns toward the end of the monarchy, rendering the visual arts a key barometer of societal dynamics.

In this introductory chapter to the volume Therapeutic Revolutions: Pharmaceuticals and Social Change in the Twentieth Century, the editors review the utility of "revolution" as an analytic category in the history of science, technology, and medicine, survey the different uses that historical actors have made of the concept of "therapeutic revolution" over the twentieth century, and introduce the common themes and goals of the volume: revisiting the history of therapeutic revolutions in modern medicine.

In this chapter, the reading of historical market data from IMS Health suggests that the twentieth century therapeutic revolution was not a straightforward process of radical change with a clear cut boundary between an ancient regime and a new present. Instead, the authors delineate the multiple forms of therapeutic change that took place in different fields of therapy. This chapter sheds light on selected drug markets in a twofold manner. First, it investigates to what degree “revolutionary” medicines were present in pharmacy purchases in the 1960s and 1970s. Second, it analyzes markets for drugs that do not appear in the classical therapeutic revolution narrative. Antibiotics and cardiovascular drugs serve as examples of the former, and analgesics, hypnotics, and sedatives serve as examples of the latter. Approaching the therapeutic revolution from the less investigated perspective of sales, this chapter suggests that the therapeutic revolution narrative is highly normative. Like other progress narratives, it mobilizes a selective vision of a glorious past to legitimize action in the present and future.

Fears of a post-antibiotic future date back to the very beginning of the antibiotic era. This chapter asks: what can we learn from the history of such expectations? The revolutions claimed in the name of antibiotics and the crises envisioned regarding their usage and enduring utility provide instructive analytical lenses for understanding the history of expectations in science and medicine. The authors begin with a review of the major transformation in medicine ushered in by the advent of the antimicrobial wonder drugs and an examination of the futures claimed in their name. They then proceed to examine two intersecting strands of therapeutic reform (the first beginning in the 1950s, the second not fully taking off until the 1980s) justified by alternate antibiotic dystopias, before proceeding to more general reflections on antibiotics and therapeutic futures, past and present.

Most mental health professionals acknowledged the revolutionary nature of neuroleptics almost immediately after their introduction to psychiatry in the early 1950s. But stabilizing a consensual interpretation of their contribution to the field soon proved to be much harder. This chapter addresses the evolving, divergent, and at times competing narratives of revolution and counter-revolution in the field of North American and European psychopharmacology and psychiatry at large from the 1950s to the 1980s. Focusing on discursive constructions of change and progress, it locates revolutionary claims about psychotropic drugs within the dynamics of pharmacological innovation and industrial marketing, as well as within larger visions of transforming mental health care and changing societies.

This chapter traces how a new critique of differential access to therapeutics developed in American domestic health policy and approaches to international development over the course of the 1960s and 1970s. This is not a comprehensive global history of pharmaceutical disparities. Rather, it is an attempt to read the globalizing narrative of American pharmaceutical policy and international relations in close relation to one another in the old War era. It focuses on a few key episodes in which the voices of several stakeholders present in debates over the role of pharmaceuticals in health and development—physicians, patients, lawmakers, regulators, researchers, and manufacturers—became audible. All of these parties agreed that a veritable therapeutic revolution had taken place in the mid-twentieth century. All believed furthermore that the problem of uneven access to new and lifesaving drugs was an urgent and pressing issue for their times. They differed significantly, however, in their understanding of what kind of objects pharmaceuticals were, and how and why they moved or did not move across domestic and global scales.

Evolution and revolution are both models of change over time. It is easy to see the appeal of a claim of revolution for scientists and for their historians: it pronounces a radical break from the past, confident and triumphant. Progress is implied by the decisiveness of the rupture. Such rhetoric is good for marketing, especially when contrasted against the cautious gradualism of evolution. But evolution has its own appeals, especially its reassuring connotations of progressive improvement. It is not enough simply to debate what counts, or not, as revolution or evolution. Instead, much can be gained through serious engagement with the theory and language of revolution and evolution in pursuit of the best possible accounts of scientific change.

Although much ink was spilt in the 1960s either crediting or blaming the pill for fomenting sexual revolution, it is clear from the historical record that the pill played only a supporting role as one of many factors contributing to the liberalization and democratization of sexual behaviors and attitudes. It played a similarly auxiliary part in the revolutionary appeal of second wave feminist activism that swept the US in the late 1960s and 1970s. Yet the Pill, in concert with a host of other social, cultural, and political forces, helped to make women’s lives in the 1980s look very different from those of their mothers in the 1950s. By the 1990s, the pill had become part of the birth control establishment, prescribed and used more often than any other method of reversible contraception. Well past its revolutionary heyday, it still served as the standard to which newer methods were compared. This chapter explores the shift in the conceptualization of the pill from life-changing to life-enhancing, from revolutionary to commonplace, and the implications for the trajectories of women, birth control, and pharmaceutical consumerism.

Narratives of revolutionary change in biomedical therapeutics continue to have lasting explanatory power. This book as a whole engages the concept of therapeutic revolution developed in 1977 by Charles Rosenberg, who used the term to describe a fundamental shift between the beginning and the end of the nineteenth century in lay and professional understandings of efficacy, or what makes a medicine work. For Rosenberg, therapeutic efficacy was both historically contingent and locally specific; it mattered where, how, by whom, for whom, and within what cultural and cognitive framework a medical intervention was employed. This concept has since been extended and amended to account for changes in medicine in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as well. In this chapter, Rosenberg revisits the concept of therapeutic revolutions as a durable preoccupation in the stories we tell ourselves regarding the modernity of our medicine. Reconsidering the same topic from a remove of nearly four decades, Rosenberg suggests how and why therapeutics have become such important things to think with, for historians, providers, and patients alike.

This chapter analyzes Dick's most popular novel, The Man in the High Castle (1962). It argues that the novel reaches the limits of extrapolated recreation of history, and that it does this in the course of its engagement with the dreadful, undifferentiating aspects of twentieth-century history, the way events are often so vast in scale and so indiscriminate in effects that anyone who contemplates them is afflicted with a kind of vertigo. The novel's moments of fellow feeling are explicitly connected to an ethic of the local and humble, which is Dick's recognition of the interdependence of realism and humanism, but they are narrated in the course of a series of attempts to sublimate the dreadfulness of twentieth-century history.