Alexander S. Vucinich (October 23, 1914 – May 25, 2002) was an American historian. He taught at the department of history and sociology of science at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

from 1976 until his retirement in 1985. He also taught at

San Jose State College San José State University (San Jose State or SJSU) is a public university in San Jose, California. Established in 1857, SJSU is the oldest public university on the West Coast and the founding campus of the California State University (CSU) sy ...

(1950–64), the University of Illinois (1964–70), and the University of Texas (1970–76). After his retirement he and his wife Dorothy moved to Berkeley, California, where he participated in the activities of Berkeley's Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. His field of research was the history of science and social thought in Russia and the Soviet Union. Alexander Vucinich had a brother,

Wayne S. Vucinich Wayne S. Vucinich (June 23, 1913 – April 21, 2005) was an American historian. Following World War II, he was one of the founders of Russian, Slavic, East European and Byzantine studies at Stanford University, where he spent his entire ac ...

, who was a professor of Eastern European studies at Stanford University.

Life

Vucinich was born in 1914 in the United States to a family of Serb immigrants who had come from

Bosnia Bosnia and Herzegovina ( sh, / , ), abbreviated BiH () or B&H, sometimes called Bosnia–Herzegovina and often known informally as Bosnia, is a country at the crossroads of south and southeast Europe, located in the Balkans. Bosnia and He ...

several years before his birth. When he was three years old, both of his parents died in the

1918 flu pandemic The 1918–1920 influenza pandemic, commonly known by the misnomer Spanish flu or as the Great Influenza epidemic, was an exceptionally deadly global influenza pandemic caused by the H1N1 influenza A virus. The earliest documented case was ...

, after which he and his older brother Wayne went to live with an uncle in

Serbia Serbia (, ; Serbian language, Serbian: , , ), officially the Republic of Serbia (Serbian language, Serbian: , , ), is a landlocked country in Southeast Europe, Southeastern and Central Europe, situated at the crossroads of the Pannonian Bas ...

. Vucinich graduated from the University of Belgrade in 1938, then returned to the United States, where he earned an M.A. at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

, and a Ph.D. in sociology in 1950 from

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

in New York City.

Scholarly legacy

According to Alfred Rieber,

Loren Graham Loren R. Graham (born June 29, 1933, in Hymera, Indiana) is an American historian of science, particularly science in Russia. Career He has taught and published at Indiana University, Columbia University, the Massachusetts Institute of Techno ...

wrote that In 2001 the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies bestowed on Vucinich its Distinguished Contributions Award for lifetime accomplishments.

Selected works

* ''Soviet Economic Institutions: The Social Structure of Production Units'', Stanford University Press, 1952. * ''The Soviet Academy of Sciences'', Stanford University Press, 1956. * ''Science in Russian Culture: A History to 1860'', Stanford University Press, 1963. * ''Science in Russian Culture: 1861-1917'', Stanford University Press, 1970. * ''Social Thought in Tsarist Russia: The Quest for a General Science of Society'', University of Chicago Press, 1976. * ''Empire of Knowledge: The Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1917-1970'', University of California Press, 1984. * ''Darwin in Russian Thought'', University of California Press, 1988. * ''Einstein and Soviet Ideology'', Stanford University Press, 2001.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Vucinich, Alexander 1914 births 2002 deaths 20th-century American historians American male non-fiction writers 20th-century American educators American people of Serbian descent Charles Darwin biographers University of Pennsylvania faculty People from Wilmington, Los Angeles Historians from California 20th-century American male writers San Jose State University faculty