n describing the origins of modern ''science,'' historians often fail to appreciate or misread how the ancients understood and used significant expressions of ''natural knowledge.'' Few read the story of the cyclops, for example, as useful advice about where to travel and settle -- and where not to. Others search for ''lost Egyptian wisdom'' ......
The Naturalist Tradition from Linnaeus to E. O. Wilson
Since emerging as a discipline in the middle of the eighteenth century, natural history has been at the heart of the life sciences. It gave rise to the major organizing theory of life--evolution--and continues to be a vital science with impressive practical value. Central to advanced work in ecology, agriculture, medicine, and environmental ......
Between 1800 and 1870 meteorology emerged as both a legitimate science and a government service in America. Challenging the widely held assumption that meteorologists were mere ''data-gatherers'' and that U.S. scientists were inferior to their European counterparts, James Rodger Fleming shows how the 1840s debate over the nature and causes of ......
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 ......
As any American who has traveled abroad knows, the American home contains more, and more elaborate, plumbing than any other in the world. Indeed, Americans are renowned for their obsession with cleanliness. Although plumbing has occupied a central position in American life since the mid-nineteenth century, little scholarly attention has been paid ......
Information Processing for the Pentagon, 1962-1986 (POD)
Over the course of several decades, the Pentagon's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) helped transform computing from a cumbersome enterprise based on batch processing to the instantly interactive, graphically rich, highly intelligent computing of today. With the purpose of improving command and control systems for the military, IPTO ......
These talks outline the subtle changes in our ideas and feelings in relation to the development of natural science. Through this, Steiner shows the significance of scientific research and the mode of thinking that goes with it.
For nearly 600 years, from the battles of the early fourteenth century to the dropping of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima, firearms derived from gunpowder and other chemicals defined the frightful extent of war. The apparatus and materials used in World War I would have been familiar to our remote ancestors. In this classic work, first published in ......
''Highly readable and exquisitely informative. Rossiter's documentation of this gloomy chapter in the history of women striving to make a place for themselves in science serves as a pungent antidote for questions concerning the fairness of affirmative action.''Journal of American History''What we have here is a remarkable example of historian as ......
