From the Editor

     Science and history: two fields of inquiry in which new information or a new angle of vision can lead to dramatic re-evaluations of what we think we know. The articles in the Fall 2018 issue of The Torch look at the past in the light of new discoveries and emerging realities, and vividly illustrate how new knowledge may revise our conceptions.

     Roland Moy of the High Country Torch Club returns to our pages with his second Paxton Award winning paper, "American Political Economy: Forty Years of Metastatic Normality." Drawing on what we can learn from the past about economic growth, Prof. Moy looks at what we can reasonably expect in the immediate future.

     Also returning to our pages is 2014 Paxton winner Henry Ticknor of the Winchester club. The Rev. Ticknor’s paper on Julia Ward Howe, best known as the author of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," looks at a novel she left unpublished in her lifetime that reveals Howe's relevance on some surprisingly contemporary questions.

     Another intriguing 19th century figure, Alexander von Humboldt, is the subject of a paper by Fred Oppenheimer of the Lancaster club. Though no longer a household name today, the charismatic Humboldt was probably the most famous scientist of his time and changed the way his contemporaries thought about the natural world.

     Anne Legge of the Winchester club died in June 2017, just a few months after delivering her Paxton-nominated paper, "Eugenics in America," which we are honored to publish here. It is a powerful reminder of the care and conscientiousness we must apply in turning science into public policy.

     Changing historical perspectives also play a part in "Vietnam: The Rest of the Story" by Joseph Calderone of the Elmira Torch Club. A Vietnam veteran, Dr. Calderone looks at what subsequent historians have had to say about this controversial, much-debated conflict.

     Speaking of much-debated conflicts, how do you feel about the demotion of Pluto? Jim Johnson of the Tom Carroll Lincoln Torch Club provides an engaging survey of how and why our solar system’s ninth "planet" needed to be re-classified.

     Our issue closes with a masterly example of how science and history can illuminate each other in "Medicine and War: Military Advances in the Context of World War I," a Paxton-nominated paper by Dr. Gerald Stulc of the Saratoga club.