The Boott Cotton Mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, 1835-1955 (POD)
Studies of American industry frequently cite Lowell, Massachusetts, as an early model for business practices. Scholars have sought to explain the city's rise to prominence, the impact of its textile mills on workers and on commerce, and its part in regional development and American prosperity. Laurence Gross looks beyond these issues. Focusing on ......
For decades, the creationist movement was primarily fixed in the United States. Then, in the 1970s, American creationists found their ideas welcomed abroad, first in Australia and New Zealand, then in Korea, India, South Africa, Brazil, and elsewhereincluding Europe, where creationism plays an expanding role in public debates about science policy ......
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, ......
Stephen Jay Gould and the Struggle for American Democracy
How Stephen Jay Gould's career illustrates that criticizing science is important for American democracy. The question of public trust in science feels newly urgent, but today is not the first time that opposing ends of the American political spectrum have critiqued modern science. This dynamic has historical roots in the early 1970s, when ......
Avner Ben-Zaken reconsiders the fundamental question of how early modern scientific thought traveled between Western and Eastern cultures in the age of the so-called Scientific Revolution. Through five meticulously researched case studies -- in which he explores how a single obscure object or text moved in the eastern world -- Ben-Zaken reveals ......
Cyberneticsthe science of communication and control as it applies to machines and to humansoriginates from efforts during World War II to build automatic antiaircraft systems. Following the war, this science extended beyond military needs to examine all systems that rely on ......
Cybernetics the science of communication and control as it applies to machines and to humans originates from efforts during World War II to build automatic anti-aircraft systems. Following the war, this science extended beyond military needs to examine all systems that rely on information and feedback, from the level of the cell to that of ......
Probes the divergent approaches to the universe that compel individuals and cultures to pursue astrology or astronomy, the intuitive or the analytical. This book blends modern science, ancient science, mythology, history, literature, and naked-eye astronomy. It provides details about astrology, celestial mythology, and calendar development.
Language, Race, and Natural Theology in the Nineteenth Century (POD)
In the nineteenth century, philologyespecially comparative philologymade impressive gains as a discipline, thus laying the foundation for the modern field of linguistics. In Darwinism and the Linguistic Image, Stephen G. Alter examines how comparative philology provided a genealogical model of language that Darwin, as well as other scientists ......
Place, Politics, and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution
Using place, politics, and rhetoric as analytical tools, historical geographer David N. Livingstone investigates how religious communities sharing a Scots Presbyterian heritage engaged with Darwin and Darwinism at the turn of the twentieth century. His findings, presented as the prestigious Gifford Lectures, transform our understandings of the ......
For most of the 19th and much of the 20th centuries, railroads dominated American transportation. They transformed life and captured the imagination. Yet by 1907 railroads had also become the largest cause of violent death in the country, that year claiming the lives of nearly twelve thousand passengers, workers, and others. In Death Rode the ......
Can a Scientist Really Be a Believer?: A Geneticist Responds to Francis
In his bestselling book, "The Language of God", Francis Collins attempted to harmonise the findings of scientific research with Christian belief. This title presents a point-by-point rebuttal of "The Language of God", arguing that there is no scientifically acceptable evidence to support belief in a personal God and much that discredits it.
The Emergence of Ornithology as a Scientific Discipline, 1760-1850
Discovering Birds, Paul Lawrence Farber rejects the view that eighteenth-century natural history disappeared with the rise of nineteenth-century biology. In this penetrating case study of the history of ornithology, Farber demonstrates interesting continuities: as natural history evolved into individual sciences (botany, geology, and zoology) and ......
"This work considers the spectrum of face recognition from face blindness to super-recognizers and the influence of face evaluation on race, gender, class and ability judgments"--
Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England
The draining of the Fens in eastern England was one of the largest engineering projects in seventeenth-century Europe. A series of Dutch and English ""projectors,"" working over several decades and with the full support of the Crown, transformed hundreds of thousands of acres of putatively barren wetlands into dry, arable farmland. The drainage ......
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.
Incremental Technology in Twentieth-Century America
The commonly accepted history of FM radio is one of the twentieth century's iconic sagas of invention, heroism, and tragedy. Edwin Howard Armstrong created a system of wideband frequency-modulation radio in 1933. The Radio Corporation of America (RCA), convinced that Armstrong's system threatened its AM empire, failed to develop the new technology ......
From about 1600 to 1800 scientists and mariners made increasingly sophisticated attempts to understand the earth's magnetic field and use it in navigation. Europeans had long understood the difference between magnetic and true north, but why did it vary as one traversed the sea? Could this variation be used to pinpoint longitude? Drawing on a ......
Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900
In this pioneering study of the first major challenges to Darwinism, Bowler examines the completing theories of evolution, identifies their intellectual origins, and describes the process by which the modern concept of evolution emerged.
This is the story of the 'other' Thomas Edison -- not the heroic lone inventor, but Edison the businessman, industrialist, and successful manager of one of the world's largest industrial research laboratories. Tracing his career from his boyhood to his death in 1931, Edison and the Business of Innovation reveals Edison to be an entrepreneur of ......
In September 1878, Thomas Alva Edison brashly -- and prematurely -- proclaimed his breakthrough invention of a workable electric light. That announcement was followed by many months of intense experimentation that led to the successful completion of his Pearl Street station four years later. Edison was not alone -- nor was he first -- in ......
The Many Discoveries of the Most Curious Astronomer Royal
In this surprising biography, author David K. Love reveals the boundless mind and endless curiosity of Edmond Halley, a man whom many readers may think they already know. From his inventions and innovations to his personal life, Edmond Halley firmly cements the legacy of the second Astronomer Royal among the first-rate scientists of his time.
These intimate, candid descriptions of the private life of Albert Einstein come from a series of interviews with Herta Waldow, a housekeeper who lived with Einstein and his wife and daughter from 1927 to 1933 at their residence in Berlin. After World War II, science historian Friedrich Herneck interviewed Ms. Waldow and published the conversations ......
Lured by a top academic position sponsored by the Prussian Academy of Sciences, Albert Einstein moved from Zurich to Berlin in 1914 and lived there until 1932, just weeks before Hitler became chancellor of Germany. During this fraught economic and political time, Einstein developed the general theory of relativity, gained worldwide fame, supported ......
Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion
Is relativity Jewish? The Nazis denigrated Albert Einstein's revolutionary theory by calling it 'Jewish science,' a charge typical of the ideological excesses of Hitler and his followers. Philosopher of science Steven Gimbel explores the many meanings of this provocative phrase and considers whether there is any sense in which Einstein's theory of ......
Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion
Is relativity Jewish? The Nazis denigrated Albert Einstein's revolutionary theory by calling it ''Jewish science,'' a charge typical of the ideological excesses of Hitler and his followers. Philosopher of science Steven Gimbel explores the many meanings of this provocative phrase and considers whether there is any sense in which Einstein's theory ......
In 1775, a visitor to Laurent Spinacuta's Grande Ménagerie at the annual winter fair in Paris would have seen two tigers, several kinds of monkeys, an armadillo, an ocelot, and a condor--in all, forty-two live animals. In Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots, Louise Robbins explains that exotic animals from around the world were common in ......
Awarded the Dexter Prize of the Society for the History of Technology.''Superb . . . In this careful study of a single inventor, Hughes has done more to demonstrate the `questionable' nature of traditional accounts of invention than all of the theoretical arguments of the past few years combined.''--Technology and Culture.Softshell Books.
The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority
Thomas L. Haskell's The Emergence of Professional Social Science signaled the beginning of his distinguished career as a historian of ideas and critic of historical logic. His first book, now available in this paperback edition with a new preface by the author, explores the background and premises of the American Social Science Association ......
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.
Naval, aeronautic, and mechanical engineers played a powerful part in the military buildup of Japan in the early and mid-twentieth century. They belonged to a militaristic regime and embraced the importance of their role in it. Takashi Nishiyama examines the impact of war and peace on technological transformation during the twentieth century. He ......
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 ......
Experimenting with Humans and Animals offers readers a context within which to understand more fully the responsibility we all bear for the suffering inflicted on other living beings in the name of scientific knowledge.
Drawing on a fictional account of a youth pastor and the various students he encounters, Root paints a compelling picture of how faith can flourish, even in our scientific age.
