I won’t have to rewrite this history; over at Skulls in the Stars there is a summary of one of the sessions I attended — Science Online 2012: Weird and Wonderful Stories in the History of Science

When I was starting out as a student of physics, most of the stories I heard about the history of physics were anecdotes about the eccentric behaviors of various famous figures. There is so much more that we can learn from the history of science, however, and at the same time that we entertain people with stories from the past we can educate them about how science works.