The APS is older than the concept of an expert, but it has always championed expertise. In the Society’s antecedent—Benjamin Franklin’s lively Junto Club—highly-knowledgeable, self-educated working men argued passionately about ideas and their relevance to civic life. Even as science and scholarship have become much more specialized, the Society’s stated mission to promote “useful knowledge” has urged experts to consider their role within a democratic nation. A new series from the APS Press, APS Classics, will reintroduce examples of what this historical democracy of experts accomplished.
The series will feature attractive, affordable paperback editions of books and essays previously published by the APS, as well as significant works by APS members in the public domain. We will print readable editions of keystone texts from all the disciplines represented at the Society—from astronomy to anthropology, from evolutionary biology to economics, from quantum physics to political science.
Each APS Classic will be contextualized in a foreword by a leading scholar of the relevant field and concluded in an afterword by a living specialist. The forewords will offer crucial context and establish links between the historical moment of the primary text and our own, while the afterwords will give major contemporary thinkers an opportunity to wrestle publicly with the ideas and legacies of their predecessors, including where they fell short, intellectually or ethically. We think of this as a dual exercise in “framing”: using historical context to frame the original texts and using those very texts to frame today’s debates.
Series Editor for APS Classics is Joyce E. Chaplin, James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. She was elected a member of the APS in 2020.