Christa Jungnickel (11 April 1935 – 12 August 1990) was a German-American historian of science.
Jungnickel was originally from Germany, one of three daughters of a German soldier who was lost in Russia during World War II. As a teenager, she emigrated with her family to the US; her mother, formerly an office worker, became a house cleaner in San Francisco. Jungnickel herself began work after high school as a typist and later an accountant for a stock broker, while studying part-time at the University of San Francisco. She eventually transferred to full-time study at Stanford University, working there with historian Jacqueline Strain. After graduating in 1969, she began graduate study at the University of Pennsylvania, but transferred in 1972 to Johns Hopkins University, and completed her doctorate at Johns Hopkins in 1978 with a dissertation concerning the Royal Saxon Academy of Sciences.[1]
Jungnickel's doctoral supervisor was Russell McCormmach, whom she married.
When Jungnickel fell ill of cancer in 1983,[1] McCormmach left academia and they moved to Eugene, Oregon,[2] where they remained until she died in 1990 of an unrelated heart condition.[1]
Jungnickel is best known for her two-volume work Intellectual Mastery of Nature: Theoretical Physics from Ohm to Einstein (University of Chicago Press, 1986), which she coauthored with her husband Russell McCormmach. It won the Pfizer Award in 1987, and was reprinted in a revised and shortened form as The Second Physicist: On the History of Theoretical Physics in Germany (Springer, 2017).[3][4]
With McCormmach, Jungnickel also wrote a biography of Henry Cavendish, the book Cavendish (American Philosophical Society, 1996), updated as Cavendish: The Experimental Life (Bucknell University Press, 1999).[5]
Pyenson, Lewis (September 1991), "Eloge: Christa Jungnickel, 11 April 1935–12 August 1990", News of the profession, Isis, 82 (3), University of Chicago Press: 519–520, doi:10.1086/355840, S2CID 143462003 Reviews of Intellectual Mastery of Nature and The Second Physicist:
- Buchwald, Jed Z. (June 1987), "Historical unity", Isis, 78 (2): 244–249, doi:10.1086/354395, JSTOR 231527, S2CID 122972844
- Cahan, David (1988), "Pride and prejudice in the history of physics: The German speaking world, 1740–1945", Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 19 (1): 173–191, doi:10.2307/27757620, JSTOR 27757620
- Cohen, I. Bernard (June 1988), The American Historical Review, 93 (3): 664–665, doi:10.2307/1868107, JSTOR 1868107
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- Crawford, Elisabeth (December 1988), "Competition and centralisation in German and French science in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: The theses of Joseph Ben-David", Minerva, 26 (4): 618–626, JSTOR 41820821
- Deltete, Robert J. (March 2019), HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science, 9 (1): 209–211, doi:10.1086/701866, S2CID 172027895
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- Forman, Paul (March 1991), Philosophy of Science, 58 (1): 129–132, doi:10.1086/289603, JSTOR 187893
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- Lankford, John (March–April 1988), The Journal of Higher Education, 59 (2): 231–233, doi:10.2307/1981694, JSTOR 1981694
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- Moyer, Albert E. (May–June 1987), American Scientist, 75 (3): 294–295, JSTOR 27854615
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- Schumacher, John A. (July 1988), "Mastery of nature", Contemporary Sociology, 17 (4): 516–518, doi:10.2307/2072725, JSTOR 2072725
- Schweber, S. S.; Sigurdsson, S. (June 1989), The Journal of Modern History, 61 (2): 354–358, doi:10.1086/468244, JSTOR 1880870
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- Servos, John W. (Summer 1988), Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 19 (1): 106–108, doi:10.2307/204229, JSTOR 204229
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- Turner, R. Steven (17 October 1986), "An epoch in German physics", Science, New Series, 234 (4774): 371–372, doi:10.1126/science.234.4774.371, JSTOR 1697775, PMID 17834536
- Williams, L. Pearce (November 1988), Historia Mathematica, 15 (4): 389–392, doi:10.1016/0315-0860(88)90038-9
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Reviews of Cavendish and Cavendish: The Experimental Life:
- Abbri, Ferdinando (January 1998), Nuncius, vol. 13 (1 ed.), pp. 363–366, doi:10.1163/182539198X00464
- Fahrmeir, Andreas (April 1998), Historische Zeitschrift, 266 (2): 515–516, JSTOR 27632023
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- Innes, Joanna (April 1999), The English Historical Review, 114 (456): 461–462, doi:10.1093/ehr/114.456.461, JSTOR 580162
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- Lynch, William T. (September 1998), Isis, 89 (3): 548–549, doi:10.1086/384112, JSTOR 237181
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- McClellan, James E. III (December 1998), The American Historical Review, 103 (5): 1591–1592, doi:10.2307/2650011, JSTOR 2650011
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- Rowlinson, J. S. (January 1998), "Aristocratic physics", Notes and Records, 52 (1): 194–196, JSTOR 532087
- Steffens, Henry (Fall 2000), Albion, 32 (3): 496–497, doi:10.2307/4053936, JSTOR 4053936
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- Thomson, Ann (1998), "Review", Dix-Huitième Siècle (in French), 30 (1): 636–637
