In his path-breaking work Science as Public Culture (1992), Jan Golinski urged historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science to pay more careful attention to the ways in which the boundaries between supposedly elite and popular science were negotiated and defined. Attention to such “demarcationist issues,” has been a hallmark of much STS-related scholarship over the last twenty years, but this approach creates an unexamined tension. By defining “science and popular culture” as a field of inquiry in relation to the history of scientific disciplines, historians have been reluctant to assess synthetic or generalist questions – such as the extent to which “‘popular science’ and its cognates” are historically unified or “variable and multiple.” (Pandora, 2009) This symposium will focus on more recent sciences and the myriad ways in which they entered public consciousness in the twentieth century. Speakers will examine the ways in which science provided resources for the public to debate their political and economic concerns and how these in turn shaped the ways in which science was presented and promoted by experts. The symposium aims to offer a re-evaluation of science as public culture, in Anglo-American institutions and media, from the mid nineteenth into the late twentieth century.