This comprehensive survey of the members of France's Academie des Sciences to the 1750s takes up the challenge to search for a way to connect history of science with social and cultural history at the bottom (the level of the scientists) rather than at the top (the level of philosophical debate about science and culture) (T.L. Hankins, In Defence of Biography: the Use of Biography in the History of Science, in History of Science, 17 (1979), 1-16). The book focuses primarily on the academicians themselves; and although it has much to say about the Academie as an institution, it does so in the light of the changing positions which the academicians occupied in the social hierarchy of early modern France. It explores the implications of those changes for the development of the Academie down to the mid-1700s, and it argues that throughout this period the the relationship which the Academie had with the Bourbon regime, and with French society in general, was governed governed to a large extent by the personal circumstances of the academicians.

When it was published in 1968, a year noted for historic student protests on campuses across the country, The American University spoke in Jacques Barzun's characteristically wise and lucid voice about what colleges and universities were really meant to do—and how they actually worked. Drawing on a lifetime of extraordinary accomplishment as a teacher, administrator, and scholar, Barzun here describes the immense demands placed on the university by its competing constituencies—students, faculty, administrators, alumni, trustees, and the political world around it all. "American higher education is fortunate to have had a scholar and intellectual of Jacques Barzun's stature give so many years of service to the daily bread-and-butter details of running a great university and then share his reflections with us in a literate, humane, and engaging book."—Charles Donovan, America