Natural World Hero Image
Natural World
Rethinking History, Science, and Religion Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 316
ISBN: 9780822945741
Pub Date: 05 Nov 2019
Illustrations: 14
Description:
The historical interface between science and religion was depicted as an unbridgeable conflict in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Starting in the 1970s, such a conception was too simplistic and not at all accurate when considering the totality of that relationship. This volume evaluates the utility of the “complexity principle” in past, present, and future scholarship.

British Arboretum, The

Trees, Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century
Format: Paperback
Pages: 200
ISBN: 9780822966203
Pub Date: 01 Nov 2019
Description:
This study explores the science and culture of nineteenth-century British arboretums, or tree collections. The development of arboretums was fostered by a variety of factors, each of which is explored in detail: global trade and exploration, the popularity of collecting, the significance to the British economy and society, developments in Enlightenment science, changes in landscape gardening aesthetics and agricultural and horticultural improvement. Arboretums were idealized as microcosms of nature, miniature encapsulations of the globe and as living museums.
Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 368
ISBN: 9780822945819
Pub Date: 29 Oct 2019
Illustrations: 30
Description:
The story of the “conflict thesis” between science and religion—the notion of perennial conflict or warfare between the two—is part of our modern self-understanding. As the story goes, John William Draper (1811–1882) and Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) constructed dramatic narratives in the nineteenth century that cast religion as the relentless enemy of scientific progress. And yet, despite its resilience in popular culture, historians today have largely debunked the conflict thesis.
From Commodification to the Common Good Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 312
ISBN: 9780822945796
Pub Date: 24 Sep 2019
Description:
The commodification of science—often identified with commercialization, or the selling of expertise and research results and the “capitalization of knowledge” in academia and beyond—has been investigated as a threat to the autonomy of science and academic culture and criticized for undermining the social responsibility of modern science. In From Commodification to the Common Good, Hans Radder revisits the commodification of the sciences from a philosophical perspective to focus instead on a potential alternative, the notion of public-interest science. Scientific knowledge, he argues, constitutes a common good only if it serves those affected by the issues at stake, irrespective of commercial gain.
World's Fairs in the Cold War Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 302
ISBN: 9780822945789
Pub Date: 24 Sep 2019
Illustrations: 30 b&w illustrations, 11 color plates in a gallery
Description:
The post–World War II science-based technological revolution inevitably found its way into almost all international expositions with displays on atomic energy, space exploration, transportation, communications, and computers. Major advancements in Cold War science and technology helped to shape new visions of utopian futures, the stock-in-trade of world’s fairs. From the 1940s to the 1980s, expositions in the United States and around the world, from Brussels to Osaka to Brisbane, mirrored Cold War culture in a variety of ways, and also played an active role in shaping it.
News from Mars Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 312
ISBN: 9780822945529
Pub Date: 17 Sep 2019
Illustrations: 21 b&w illustrations
Description:
Mass media in the late nineteenth century was full of news from Mars. In the wake of Giovanni Schiaparelli’s 1877 discovery of enigmatic dark, straight lines on the red planet, astronomers and the public at large vigorously debated the possibility that it might be inhabited. As rivalling scientific practitioners looked to marshal allies and sway public opinion—through newspapers, periodicals, popular books, exhibitions, and encyclopaedias—they exposed disagreements over how the discipline of astronomy should be organized and how it should establish acceptable conventions of discourse.
Everything for the Garden Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 144
ISBN: 9780989059848
Pub Date: 01 Sep 2019
Description:
Everything for the Garden is for anyone who enjoys gardening at home, visiting historic landscapes, or admiring plants and flowers in art and culture. Colorfully illustrated by material from Historic New England’s extensive collection, the book celebrates the objects and literature that people used to make and enjoy gardens from the mid-nineteenth century to today. Essays by well-known experts include Virginia Lopez Begg on garden clubs and horticultural societies, Alan Emmet on garden portraits, Richard Nylander on a cornucopia of catalogues and on garden architecture and ornament, and Judith Tankard on designing and making the garden.
Solid State Insurrection Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 312
ISBN: 9780822966036
Pub Date: 27 Aug 2019
Description:
Solid state physics, the study of the physical properties of solid matter, was the most populous subfield of Cold War American physics. Despite prolific contributions to consumer and medical technology, such as the transistor and magnetic resonance imaging, it garnered less professional prestige and public attention than nuclear and particle physics.Solid State Insurrection argues that solid state physics was essential to securing the vast social, political, and financial capital Cold War physics enjoyed in the twentieth century.
Working with Paper Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 320
ISBN: 9780822945598
Pub Date: 25 Jun 2019
Illustrations: 27 b&w illustrations, 19 color plates in a gallery
Description:
Working with Paper builds on a growing interest in the materials of science by exploring the gendered uses and meanings of paper tools and technologies, considering how notions of gender impacted paper practices and in turn how paper may have structured knowledge about gender. Through a series of dynamic investigations covering Europe and North America and spanning the early modern period to the twentieth century, this volume breaks new ground by examining material histories of paper and the gendered worlds that made them. Contributors explore diverse uses of paper—from healing to phrenological analysis to model making to data processing—which often occurred in highly gendered, yet seemingly divergent spaces, such as laboratories and kitchens, court rooms and boutiques, ladies’ chambers and artisanal workshops, foundling houses and colonial hospitals, and college gymnasiums and state office buildings.
Experimenting at the Boundaries of Life Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 472
ISBN: 9780822945536
Pub Date: 18 Jun 2019
Illustrations: 41 b&w illustrations
Description:
Attempts to distinguish a science of life at the turn of the nineteenth century faced a number of challenges. A central difficulty was clearly demarcating the living from the nonliving experimentally and conceptually. The more closely the boundaries between organic and inorganic phenomena were examined, the more they expanded and thwarted any clear delineation.
Inevitably Toxic Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 280
ISBN: 9780822966128
Pub Date: 18 Jun 2019
Illustrations: 13 b&w
Description:
Not a day goes by that humans aren’t exposed to toxins in our environment - be it at home, in the car, or workplace. But what about those toxic places and items that aren’t marked? Why are we warned about some toxic spaces’ substances and not others?
New Order of Medicine, A Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 272
ISBN: 9780822945604
Pub Date: 18 Jun 2019
Illustrations: 24 b&w interspersed
Description:
The sixteenth century saw an unprecedented growth in the number of educated physicians practicing in German cities. Concentrating on Nuremberg, A New Order of Medicine follows the intertwined careers of municipal physicians as they encountered the challenges of the Reformation city for the first time. Although conservative in their professed Galenism, these men were eclectic in their practices, which ranged from book collecting to botany to subversive anatomical experimentations.
Destined for the Stars Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 304
ISBN: 9780822945567
Pub Date: 28 May 2019
Illustrations: 23 b&w illustrations, 17 color plates in a gallery
Description:
Where did humanity get the idea that outer space is a frontier waiting to be explored? Destined for the Stars unravels the popularization of the science of space exploration in America between 1944 and 1955, arguing that the success of the US space program was due not to technological or economic superiority, but was sustained by a culture that had long believed it was called by God to settle new frontiers and prepare for the inevitable end of time and God’s final judgment. Religious forces, Newell finds, were in no small way responsible for the crescendo of support for and interest in space exploration in the early 1950s, well before Project Mercury—the United States’ first human spaceflight program—began in 1959.
Entangled Itineraries Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 408
ISBN: 9780822965770
Pub Date: 28 May 2019
Illustrations: 67 b&w illustrations
Description:
Trade flowed across Eurasia, around the Indian Ocean, and over the Mediterranean for millennia, but in the early modern period, larger parts of the globe became connected through these established trade routes. Knowledge, embodied in various people, materials, texts, objects, and practices, also moved and came together along these routes in hubs of exchange where different social and cultural groups intersected and interacted. Entangled Itineraries traces this movement of knowledge across the Eurasian continent from the early years of the Common Era to the nineteenth century, following local goods, techniques, tools, and writings as they traveled and transformed into new material and intellectual objects and ways of knowing.
Drugs on the Page Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 384
ISBN: 9780822945628
Pub Date: 14 May 2019
Illustrations: 15
Description:
In the early modern Atlantic World, pharmacopoeias—official lists of medicaments and medicinal preparations published by municipal, national, or imperial governments—organized the world of healing goods, giving rise to new and valuable medical commodities such as cinchona bark, guaiacum, and ipecac. Pharmacopoeias and related texts, developed by governments and official medical bodies as a means to standardize therapeutic practice, were particularly important to scientific and colonial enterprises. They served, in part, as tools for making sense of encounters with a diversity of peoples, places, and things provoked by the commercial and colonial expansion of early modern Europe.
American Dinosaur Abroad Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 336
ISBN: 9780822945574
Pub Date: 30 Apr 2019
Illustrations: 56
Description:
In early July 1899, an excavation team of paleontologists sponsored by Andrew Carnegie discovered the fossil remains in Wyoming of what was then the longest and largest dinosaur on record. Named after its benefactor, the Diplodocus carnegii—or Dippy, as it’s known today—was shipped to Pittsburgh and later mounted and unveiled at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in 1907. Carnegie’s pursuit of dinosaurs in the American West and the ensuing dinomania of the late nineteenth century coincided with his broader political ambitions to establish a lasting world peace and avoid further international conflict.