Offers a view of the development of nuclear weapons from the perspective of the scientist. This book discusses such topics as the discovery of fission, the Manhattan Project, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the arms race, and steps towards arms control. It provides a context for developments in the period 1939-1963.
High Technology and Organizational Change in the U.S. Space Program
Inside NASA explores how an agency praised for its planetary probes and expeditions to the moon became notorious for the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger and a series of other malfunctions. Using archival evidence as well as in-depth interviews with space agency officials, Howard McCurdy investigates the relationship between the ......
What is science? Is social science a science? Why are more and more so-called scientific discoveries being exposed as outright frauds? Henry Bauer tackles these and many more intriguing questions that are emerging from within the academic and scientific communities and attracting attention from the popular media and the general public. Whether one ......
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.
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 ......
''[This book's] timeliness is remarkable. Now that the Western system of responsible (that is, profit-based) production has emerged as the victor over command economies, the secrets of how we did it may replace foreign relations as `topic A' at conferences, and historians who continue to reject `material civilization' as unworthy of genuine ......
Awarded the Dexter Prize by the Society for the History of Technology.''An exciting, major contribution to the field of history, for it establishes very convincingly that the growth of . . . power networks is as intrinsic to and characteristic of modern society as the growth of manorialism was to medieval society.''--American Historical ......
''Timely and cogent in its aims and arguments, it should prompt debate and discussion leading to fresh critical and historiographical insights concerning all those topics that historians of science, of society, and of culture associate with `Darwinism' and `evolutionism.'''--British Journal of the History of Science.
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.
''Original and delightful . . . [Mayr's] persuasive and beautifully written book is reminiscent of Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.''--American Historical Review.
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.
Such organizations as ATandT, General Electric, and the U.S. Navy played major roles in radio's evolution, but early press coverage may have decisively steered radio in the direction of mass entertainment. Susan J. Douglas reveals the origins of a corporate media system that today dominates the content and form of American communication.
The leading American botanist of the nineteenth century, Asa Gray helped organize the main generalizations of the science of plant geography. The manual of botany that carries his name is still in use today. Friend and confidant of Charles Darwin, Gray became the most persistent and effective American protagonist of Darwin's views. Yet at the same ......
Technology and the American Photographic Industry, 1839-1925 (POD)
From the early daguerreotype to the rise of the motion picture, Images and Enterprise explores the business, technical, and social factors that transformed the American photographic industry between 1839 and 1925. Reese Jenkins's prize-winning history traces the technical changes that culminated in George Eastman's creation of the Kodak system of ......
A History of Policies and Activities, revised edition (POD)
From the Constitutional Convention of 1787 to the onset of World War II, Dupree shows how federal involvement in science centered on key national interests--geographical exploration and expansion, agriculture and conservation, medicine, public health, industry and the military. Dupree examines the roles and impact that individuals and institutions ......
''A splendid book . . . Rossiter's tone in recounting [the struggle of women scientists] is never strident. A clear enough case emerges from the sources that she skillfully weaves into a tapestry of social trends and individual experience.''New York Times In this landmark study, Margaret Rossiter describes the activities and personalities of the ......
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a radical change occurred in the patterns and the framework of European thought. In the wake of discoveries through the telescope and Copernican theory, the notion of an ordered cosmos of 'fixed stars' gave way to that of a universe infinite in both time and space -- with significant and far-reaching ......
Published to commemorate the centennial of the publication of Darwin's 'Origin of Species', this volume brings together several important essays on the history of the idea of evolution. Included are discussions of Maupertuis, Buffon, Diderot, Kant, Herder, Lamarck, and Schopenhauer by such leading scholars as Arthur O. Lovejoy, Bentley Glass, ......
