Science & Technology  /  History of Science & Technology
Victorian Interdisciplinarity and the Sciences Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 336
ISBN: 9780822948148
Pub Date: 30 Dec 2024
Description:
The specialization thesis—the idea that nineteenth-century science fragmented into separate forms of knowledge that led to the creation of modern disciplines—has played an integral role in the way historians have described the changing disciplinary map of nineteenth-century British science. This volume critically reevaluates this dominant narrative in the historiography. While new disciplines did emerge during the nineteenth century, the intellectual landscape was far muddier, and in many cases new forms of specialist knowledge continued to cross boundaries while integrating ideas from other areas of study.
New Energies Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 348
ISBN: 9780822947769
Pub Date: 06 Feb 2024
Description:
Over the past 250 years, energy transitions have occurred repeatedly—the rise of coal in the nineteenth century, the explosion of oil in the twentieth century, the nuclear utopianism of the 1950s and 1960s. These transitions have been as revolutionary as any political or economic upheaval, and they required changes in infrastructure and behaviour. Yet new energies never wholly replace old ones.
The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Volume 11 Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 632
ISBN: 9780822946823
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2024
Description:
The eleventh volume of The Correspondence of John Tyndall covers the period from January 1869 to the end of February 1871 and contains 427 letters with more than 130 individual correspondents, as well as letters to several newspapers. These years find Tyndall an internationally established scientist with broad influence and feeling increasingly confident in that role. They were highly productive research years, and Tyndall had a wide scope of interests, publishing in scientific journals, popular magazines, and newspapers on a variety of topics, including diamagnetism, germ theory, comets, and atmospheric phenomena.
Imagining the Darwinian Revolution from the Nineteenth Century to the Present Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 352
ISBN: 9780822947080
Pub Date: 28 Sep 2022
Description:
Imagining the Darwinian Revolution considers the relationship between the development of evolution and its historical representations by focusing on the so-called Darwinian Revolution. The very idea of the Darwinian Revolution is a historical construct devised to help explain the changing scientific and cultural landscape that was ushered in by Charles Darwin’s singular contribution to natural science. And yet, since at least the 1980s, science historians have moved away from traditional “great man” narratives to focus on the collective role that previously neglected figures have played in formative debates of evolutionary theory.
The Cyclops Myth and the Making of Selfhood Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 285
ISBN: 9781463243487
Pub Date: 06 Jan 2022
Imprint: Gorgias Press
Description:
This book explores the myth of the Cyclops across western history, and how its changing form from ancient Greece until the modern day reveals fundamental changes in each era’s elite understandings and depictions of cultural values. From Homer’s Odyssey to Hellenistic poetry, from Roman epic to early medieval manuscript glosses, and from early modern opera to current pop culture, the myth of the Cyclops persists in changing forms. This myth’s distinct forms in each historical era reflect and distil wider changes occurring in the spheres of politics, philosophy, aesthetics, and social values, and as a story that persists continually across three millennia it provides a unique lens for cross-historical comparison across western thought.
Far Beyond the Moon Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 216
ISBN: 9780822946540
Pub Date: 31 Dec 2021
Illustrations: 40 b&w
Description:
From the beginning of the space age, scientists and engineers have worked on systems to help humans survive for the astounding 28,500 days (78 years) needed to reach another planet. They've imagined and tried to create a little piece of Earth in a bubble travelling through space, inside of which people could live for decades, centuries, or even millennia. Far Beyond the Moon tells the dramatic story of engineering efforts by astronauts and scientists to create artificial habitats for humans in orbiting space stations, as well as on journeys to Mars and beyond.
Correpondence of John Tyndall Vol. 8 Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 448
ISBN: 9780822945772
Pub Date: 05 Jun 2021
Series: The Correspondence of John Tyndall
Description:
The 318 letters in this volume reveal a great deal about Tyndall’s personality, the development of his career, and his role in attempting to better establish science as a respectable and professional enterprise. However, Tyndall was not above controversy, and on more than one occasion he entered public disputes either in defense of his own or a colleagues’ priority claims over scientific discoveries. Perhaps the most dramatic letters - if not those detailing the accounts of his cousin Hector Tyndale’s courageous exploits in the American Civil War - are those relating to Tyndall’s mountaineering adventures.
American Dinosaur Abroad Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 360
ISBN: 9780822966524
Pub Date: 28 Mar 2021
Illustrations: 56 b&w
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.
Identity in a Secular Age Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 312
ISBN: 9780822946281
Pub Date: 28 Mar 2021
Series: Science, Values, and the Public
Illustrations: 21 b&w
Description:
Although historians have suggested for some time that we move away from the assumption of a necessary clash between science and religion, the conflict narrative persists in contemporary discourse. But why? And how do we really know what people actually think about evolutionary science, let alone the many and varied ways in which it might relate to individual belief?
Science and Moral Imagination Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 288
ISBN: 9780822946267
Pub Date: 05 Jan 2021
Series: Science, Values, and the Public
Illustrations: 6 b&w
Description:
The idea that science is or should be value-free, and that values are or should be formed independently of science, has been under fire by philosophers of science for decades. Science and Moral Imagination directly challenges the idea that science and values cannot and should not influence each other. Matthew J.
Compound Remedies Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 404
ISBN: 9780822946496
Pub Date: 22 Dec 2020
Illustrations: 40 b&w
Description:
Compound Remedies examines the equipment, books, and remedies of colonial Mexico City’s Herrera pharmacy - natural substances with known healing powers that formed the basis for modern-day healing traditions and home remedies in Mexico. Paula De Vos traces the evolution of the Galenic pharmaceutical tradition from its foundations in Ancient Greece to the physician-philosophers of the Islamic empires in the medieval Latin West and eventually through the Spanish Empire to Mexico, offering a global history of the transmission of these materials, knowledges, and techniques. Her detailed inventory of the Herrera pharmacy reveals the many layers of this tradition and how it developed over centuries, providing new perspectives and insight into the development of Western science and medicine: its varied origins, its engagement with and inclusion of multiple knowledge traditions, the ways in which these traditions moved and circulated in relation to imperialism, and its long-term continuities and dramatic transformations.
A Pioneer of Connection Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 336
ISBN: 9780822945956
Pub Date: 30 Sep 2020
Illustrations: 9 b&w
Description:
Sir Oliver Lodge was a polymathic scientific figure who linked the Victorian Age with the Second World War, a reassuring figure of continuity across his long life and career. A physicist and spiritualist, inventor and educator, author and authority, he was one of the most famous public figures of British science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A pioneer in the invention of wireless communication and later of radio broadcasting, he was foundational for twentieth-century media technology and a tireless communicator who wrote upon and debated many of the pressing interests of the day in the sciences and far beyond.
Radiation Evangelists Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 288
ISBN: 9780822946090
Pub Date: 30 Sep 2020
Illustrations: 43 b&w
Description:
Radiation Evangelists explores x-ray and radium therapy in the United States and Great Britain during a crucial period of its development, from 1896 to 1925. It focuses on the pioneering work of early advocates in the field, the “radiation evangelists” who, motivated by their faith in a new technology, trust in new energy sources, and hope for future breakthroughs, turned a blind eye to the dangers of radiation exposure. Although ionizing radiation effectively treated diseases like skin infections and cancers, radiation therapists - who did not need a medical education to develop or administer procedures or sell tonics containing radium - operated in a space of uncertainty about exactly how radiation worked or would affect human bodies.
Weather, Climate, and the Geographical Imagination Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 360
ISBN: 9780822946168
Pub Date: 30 Sep 2020
Illustrations: 22 b&w
Description:
As global temperatures rise under the forcing hand of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions, new questions are being asked of how societies make sense of their weather, of the cultural values, which are afforded to climate, and of how environmental futures are imagined, feared, predicted, and remade. Weather, Climate, and Geographical Imagination contributes to this conversation by bringing together a range of voices from history of science, historical geography, and environmental history, each speaking to a set of questions about the role of space and place in the production, circulation, reception, and application of knowledges about weather and climate. The volume develops the concept of “geographical imagination” to address the intersecting forces of scientific knowledge, cultural politics, bodily experience, and spatial imaginaries, which shape the history of knowledges about climate.
Itineraries of Expertise Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 366
ISBN: 9780822945963
Pub Date: 17 Mar 2020
Illustrations: 22 b&w
Description:
Itineraries of Expertise contends that experts and expertise played fundamental roles in the Latin American Cold War. While traditional Cold War histories of the region have examined diplomatic, intelligence, and military operations and more recent studies have probed the cultural dimensions of the conflict, the experts who constitute the focus of this volume escaped these categories. Although they often portrayed themselves as removed from politics, their work contributed to the key geopolitical agendas of the day.
Adolphe Quetelet Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 232
ISBN: 9780822966081
Pub Date: 25 Jun 2019
Description:
Adolphe Quetelet was an influential astronomer and statistician whose controversial work inspired heated debate in European and American intellectual circles. In creating a science designed to explain the “average man,” he helped contribute to the idea of normal, most enduringly in his creation of the Quetelet Index, which came to be known as the Body Mass Index. Kevin Donnelly presents the first scholarly biography of Quetelet, exploring his contribution to quantitative reasoning, his place in nineteenth-century intellectual history, and his profound influence on the modern idea of average.