A History of Brief Time

It is inviting to write the history of dissenters who come out on the side of the angels. It is something else to write about dissenters who still believe in angels, and in devils too-who in fact ascribe some of the academic world's fundamental convictions to Satanic conspiracy. Thus one measure of Ronald Numbers's achievement in Creationists is the care with which he treats his subjects, who demonize evolutionary theory in precisely that way. achievement is all the more impressive in that Numbers, now well established in the academy as professor of the history of science and medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, grew up in the heart of creationist country. He wrote this book, he tells us, beneath a framed handbill from the early 1940s announcing public lecture on 'God's Answer to Evolution: Are Men and Monkeys Relatives?' featured speaker was my father, Raymond W. Numbers, then holding series of evangelistic meetings in the Kansas City Canvas Tabernacle (p. xvi). poignant story of Numbers's religious odyssey has been published elsewhere (in Jonathan M. Butler's introduction, The Historian as Heretic, to the second [1992] edition of Numbers's Prophetess of Health: Ellen G. White and the Origins of Seventh-Day Adventist Health Reform). present volume testifies to his retention of remarkable grace that has enabled him to convert any desire for avenging the past into productive scholarship, that respects what from the outside might seem sheer battiness, that holds the science establishment to the same measure it would impose on heretics, and that gives both sides justice. So much for tone. Substantively, Creationists provides superb map to significant and unexplored domain of popular culture. Not, to be sure, one of the regions therein that post-structuralist chic has reserved for elevation. Even though creationism is disproportionately popular among blacks, women, and the poor (p. 300)-a fact neither its advocates nor critics give much thought-Numbers's subjects are virtually all white, patriarchal, Protestant, and typically (but not uniformly) given to the agenda of the New Right. Their effusions are not pleasant reading, then, nor easily traced. A whole generation

History · History of Science and Medicine · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices