Science at the American Frontier: A Biography of De Witt Bristol Brace

“Science at the American Frontier” is both a biography of American physicist DeWitt Bristol Brace (1859-1905) and a study of the processes by which scientific knowledge and associated instrumentation were transferred from Europe to the United States and from the east coast to the American frontier. The authors trace Brace’s first-class scientific education in Boston, Baltimore, and Berlin, and they follow his career as he founded and built a department of physics at the University of Nebraska and pursued a research program at that institution. In doing so, they show how Brace’s career brought him into the vanguard of the American scientific community, and they illuminate the developmental process of departments of science at the newly founded land-grant colleges. David Cahan is a professor of history at the University of Nebraska and the author of “An Institute for an Empire”. M. Eugene Rudd is a professor emeritus of physics and astronomy at the University of Nebraska. He is coauthor of “Atomic Collisions: Heavy Particle Projectiles”.