Why did so many early modern scientific authors dislike and distrust the printing press? While there is no denying the importance of the printing press to the scientific and medical advances of the early modern era, a closer look at authorial attitudes toward this technology refutes simplistic interpretations of how print was viewed at the time. ......
Iconic and Inspiring Space Race Inventions That Shaped History
On July 20, 1969, Americans had their eyes and ears glued to their TVs and radios. NASA's successful moon landing left the nation in awe. This moment inspired inventors and engineers across the nation. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 1969 moon landing, we share with you 20 patents that were inspired by the space race and how they reshaped ......
Connecting the emergence and development of certain dog breeds to both scientific understandings of race and blood as well as Britain's posture in a global empire, The Invention of the Modern Dog demonstrates that studying dog breeding cultures allows historians to better understand the complex social relationships of late-nineteenth-century ......
Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England
This is compelling reading for British historians, environmental scholars, historians of technology, and anyone interested in state formation in early modern Europe.
This comprehensive treatment should appeal to not only specialists but anyone who is interested in how diagnoses of mental illness have evolved over the past seven decades-from unwanted and often imposed labels to resources that lead to valued mental health treatments and social services.
Authoritative, fascinating, and eye-opening, this short history of malaria concludes with policy recommendations for improving control strategies and saving lives.
Contributors: Alexander Bevilacqua, Ann Blair, Daniela Bleichmar, William J. Bulman, Frederic Clark, Anthony Grafton, Jill Kraye, Yuen-Gen Liang, Elizabeth McCahill, Nicholas Popper, Amanda Wunder
In the nineteenth century, teams of men began digging the earth like never before. Sometimes this digging'often for sewage, transport, or minerals'revealed human remains. Other times, archeological excavation of ancient cities unearthed prehistoric fossils, while excavations for irrigation canals revealed buried cities. Concurrently, ......
Sha concludes that both fields benefited from thinking about how imagination could cooperate with reason-but that this partnership was impossible unless imagination's penchant for fantasy could be contained.
The untold history of how people came to conceive, to manage, and to dispute environmental crisis, The Environment is essential reading for anyone who wants to help protect the environment from the numerous threats it faces today.
Engineering Rules is a riveting global history of the people, processes, and organizations that created and maintain this nearly invisible infrastructure of today's economy, which is just as important as the state or the global market.
Today's scientists, policymakers, and citizens are all confronted by numerous dilemmas at the nexus of technology and the environment. Every day seems to bring new worries about the dangers posed by carcinogens, ""superbugs,"" energy crises, invasive species, genetically modified organisms, groundwater contamination, failing infrastructure, and ......
Beginning around 1500, in the decades following Columbus's voyages, the Atlantic Ocean moved from the periphery to the center on European world maps. This brief but highly significant moment in early modern European history marks not only a paradigm shift in how the world was mapped but also the opening of what historians call the Atlantic ......
Australian Science from its Beginning to the mid-20th Century
A large colour illustrated book of Australian science history and biography, containing rare maps and illustrations from the personal collection of Emeritus Professor Robert Clancy. His book presents the advancements that Australia has contributed to the world in wide-ranging fields like Biology, Physics, Astronomy and Geology, and encourages ......
Recent polls show that a quarter of Americans claim to have no religious affiliation, identifying instead as atheists, agnostics, or ""nothing in particular."" A century ago, a small group of American intellectuals who dubbed themselves humanists tread this same path, turning to science as a major source of spiritual sustenance. In The ......
Scientists like to proclaim that science knows no borders. Scientific researchers follow the evidence where it leads, their conclusions free of prejudice or ideology. But is that really the case? In Freedom's Laboratory, Audra J. Wolfe shows how these ideas were tested to their limits in the high-stakes propaganda battles of the Cold ......
Science, Scale, and Spatiality in the Nineteenth Century
Over the past twenty years, scholars have increasingly questioned not just historical presumptions about the putative rise of modern science during the long nineteenth century but also the geographical contexts for and variability of science during the era. In Geographies of Knowledge, an internationally distinguished array of historians ......
Beginning around 1650, the emergence of a number of new scientific concepts, methods, and instruments'including Copernicanism, the mechanical philosophy, and the microscope'challenged existing syntheses of science and religion. Physico-theology, which embraced the values of personal, empirical observation, was an international movement of the ......
The Geniuses, Visionaries, Egomaniacs, and Scoundrels Who Built Our El
Conquering the Electron offers readers a true and engaging history of the world of electronics, beginning with the discoveries of friction and magnetism and ending with the creation of the smart phone and the iPad.
Originally published in 1999. Imagining Consumers tells for the first time the story of American consumer society from the perspective of mass-market manufacturers and retailers. It relates the trials and tribulations of china and glassware producers in their contest for the hearts of the working- and middle-class women who made up more ......
In 2007, Antje Jackelen adopted the motto "God is greater" from the First Letter of John 3:18-20 for her consecration as the bishop of the Diocese of Lund. Today, as the Lutheran archbishop of Sweden, Jackelen ministers by the same, ever-expanding belief: Of all the suffering, divisiveness, and hostility in the modern world's social and political ......
Erasmus Darwin and his grandson, Charles, were the two most important evolutionary theorists of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. Although their ideas and methods differed, both Darwins were prolific and inventive writers: Erasmus composed several epic poems and scientific treatises, while Charles is renowned both for his collected ......
Charles Martin and the Foundation of Biological Science in Australia
Charles Martin was an Englishman who made a lasting impact on Australian science in the first half of the twentieth century. This illustrated book describes his life and various breakthroughs, as head of the Lister institute, in the allied forces in WW2, and on myxomatosis with the CSIRO. He brought modern experimental science to Australia.
Winner, William H. Welch Medal, American Association for the History of MedicineWinner, Ludwik Fleck Prize, Society for Social Studies of ScienceWinner, General History Award, New South Wales Premiers History Awards
When whites first encountered the Fore people in the isolated highlands of colonial New Guinea ......
To many people in the nineteenth century, the railroad and the telegraph were powerful, transformative forces, ones that seemed to work closely together to shape the economy, society, and politics of the United States. However, the perception'both popular and scholarly'of the intrinsic connections between these two institutions has largely ......
Throughout the Age of Exploration, European maritime communities bent on colonial and commercial expansion embraced the complex mechanics of celestial navigation. They developed schools, textbooks, and instruments to teach the new mathematical techniques to sailors. As these experts debated the value of theory and practice, memory and ......
Scientists like to proclaim that science knows no borders. Scientific researchers follow the evidence where it leads, their conclusions free of prejudice or ideology. But is that really the case? In Freedom's Laboratory, Audra J. Wolfe shows how these ideas were tested to their limits in the high-stakes propaganda ......
Is it possible for the economy to grow without the environment being destroyed? Will our lifestyles impoverish the planet for our children and grandchildren? Is the world sick? Can it be healed? Less than a lifetime ago, these questions would have made no sense. This was not because our ancestors had no impact on naturenor because they were ......
For centuries, different types of dog were bred around the world for work, sport, or companionship. But it was not until Victorian times that breeders started to produce discrete, differentiated, standardized breeds.
In The Invention of the Modern Dog, Michael Worboys, Julie-Marie Strange, and Neil Pemberton explore when, ......
The "conflict thesis"-the idea that an inevitable and irreconcilable conflict exists between science and religion-has long been part of popular imagination. In The Warfare between Science and Religion, Jeff Hardin, Ronald L. Numbers, and Ronald A. Binzley have assembled a group of distinguished historians who explore the ......
Science, Exploration, and the Theory of Continental Drift
Alfred Wegener aimed to create a revolution in science which would rank with those of Nicolaus Copernicus and Charles Darwin. After completing his doctoral studies in astronomy at the University of Berlin, Wegener found himself drawn not to observatory science but to rugged fieldwork, which allowed him to cross into a variety of disciplines. ......
How Physicians, Engineers, and Airpower Enthusiasts Redefined Flight
As aircraft flew higher, faster, and farther in the early days of flight, pilots were exposed as vulnerable, inefficient, and dangerous. They asphyxiated or got the bends at high altitudes; they fainted during high-G maneuvers; they spiraled to the ground after encountering clouds or fog. Their capacity to commit fatal errors seemed ......
The Wonder and Complexity of Spontaneous Generation
We accept that, at some point in the history of our universe, living creatures emerged from nonliving matter. Yet from the time of Aristotle until the late nineteenth century, many people believed in spontaneous generation, that living creatures sprang into existence from rotting material. As Daryn Lehoux explains in this fascinating book, ......
