Category Archives: All years

Year 102 – 1962: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn

Published: Chicago, 1962 The Oxford Companion to Philosophy calls The Structure of Scientific Revolutions “the most influential book in modern philosophy of science.” Published originally in 1962 as part of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, the book was apparently begun while Kuhn was still a graduate student at Harvard, where he earned the Ph.D. in physics in 1949. The work has had a profound impact on the study of philosophy, economics, sociology, and of course history of science. Indeed it’s difficult in a context such as this brief, book-a-year survey of the MIT Libraries’ holdings, to do justice to […]

Year 101 – 1961: Inaugural Address by John F. Kennedy

Published: Washington, 1961 The list of important speeches delivered in America in the 20th century is lengthy. Much shorter by far is the list of noteworthy quotes from such speeches – excerpts that have cut through the clutter of a noisy epoch to become almost universally familiar: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character (Martin Luther King, Jr.) Ask […]

Year 100 – 1960: The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch

Published: Cambridge, Mass., 1960 Could you direct a pedestrian from Post Office Square in downtown Boston to Myrtle Street on Beacon Hill? How about from Mass General Hospital to South Station? And could you describe what that pedestrian would see once they got there? As one part of his 1954-1959 “Perceptual Form of the City” study, Kevin Lynch sent researchers out into the streets of Boston to ask people to do just that. That study laid the groundwork for The Image of the City, Lynch’s seminal 1960 work on the urban environment. Kevin Lynch studied at Yale University, Rennselaer Polytechnic […]

Year 99 – 1959: The Soviet Citizen: Daily Life in a Totalitarian Society by Alex Inkeles and Raymond A. Bauer

Published Cambridge, Mass., 1959 From 1950 to 1951, an allied team of Harvard social scientists and psychologists interviewed more than 3,000 Soviet refugees in Europe and the United States. The directors of the study, Alex Inkeles and Raymond A. Bauer, hoped to use the information to create a “working model” of the Soviet Union to better understand other advanced industrial societies. It was called the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System, and The Soviet Citizen was the major fruit of its research. The Soviet Citizen is an attempt to capture what the authors call the “social-psychology of Soviet life.” […]

Year 98 – 1958: Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Published: New York, 1958 Young people today might have difficulty actually believing what daily life was like for people of color in the segregated South as recently as 50-odd years ago. Assaults on individual dignity were wide-ranging and ubiquitous. A case in point: the public bus system in Montgomery, Alabama in the 1950s. In Stride Toward Freedom, Martin Luther King, Jr. writes: Even if the bus had no white passengers, [but was] packed throughout, [black passengers] were prohibited from sitting in the first four seats (which held ten persons). The indignities didn’t stop there. Upon boarding, people of color had […]

Year 97 – 1957: Syntactic Structures by Noam Chomsky

Published: ‘s-Gravenhage, Netherlands, 1957 If a reader should take away a single sentence from this unassuming paperback publication, let it be this one: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. Most of us will agree that this sentence is grammatically correct. Semantically speaking, on the other hand, it makes no sense at all. Armed with this example, Noam Chomsky undermined the prevailing linguistic models of the day, sending shockwaves through academia and altering the linguistic landscape forever. Like Newton’s Principia and Marx’s Das Kapital, this slim volume precipitated nothing short of a revolution in its field. With Syntactic Structures, Chomsky – now […]

Year 96 – 1956: Frontier to Space by Eric Burgess, with a foreword by Sir Harold Spencer Jones

Published: New York, 1956 On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik I – the event that would jumpstart the Space Race. Only a month later, on November 3, the Soviets launched Sputnik II, this time with a dog on board. Frontier to Space, a look at high-altitude rocket research in the United States, was published in the year prior to these game-changing events. In the book’s final chapter, Eric Burgess touches on projected developments: It has been postulated that artificial satellites of this planet could be established and diverse proposals have been put […]

Year 95 – 1955: Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss

Published: Paris, 1955 Written more than a decade after Claude Lévi-Strauss completed his few years of fieldwork in the Mato Grosso and Amazonian regions of Brazil, Tristes Tropiques is more a memoir than a systematic ethnographical study. In it Lévi-Strauss poetically recounts his observations about the Caduveo, Bororo, Nambikwara, and Tupi-Kawahib peoples of Brazil. He also invites his readers to join him in India and Pakistan and then, somewhat tangentially, to accompany him during his escape from France to Martinique and then to New York City, as France fell to the Nazis. Of particular interest to us at this moment […]

Year 94 – 1954: The Karl Taylor Compton Laboratories

Published: Cambridge, Mass., ca. 1954 Today’s “150 Years in the Stacks” entry will appear for the first time on April 10, the precise date on which, 150 years ago, MIT officially came into existence. It was on April 10, 1861, that Massachusetts Governor John Andrew signed “An Act to incorporate the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.” In recognition of that event, today’s selection is an MIT in-house publication. The Karl Taylor Compton Laboratories was printed to raise funds for the construction of two important facilities: MIT’s nuclear reactor, and the structure that came to be known affectionately – in the magical […]

Year 93 – 1953: The Paris Review: number one

Published: Paris and New York, 1953 The Paris Review is justly famous for its impressive list of founding editors and advisors (George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, Donald Hall, Archibald MacLeish, et al.) as well as for the galaxy of writers whose work has appeared in its pages. In its first year alone, the journal featured material by Adrienne Rich, Donald Windham, Richard Wilbur, Simone Weil, Terry Southern, and other luminaries. During its second year, the Review would publish one of the first works in English by Samuel Beckett. The editors opened their series on “The Art of Fiction” in their very […]