Books

A Fresh Perspective on Colonial-Era Science, Climate, and Empire in Malaysia and Singapore

Uncovers the Colonial Ambitions and Moral Ambiguities of Spaceflight

Considers the Entangled Human-Animal Relationship of a Complex Multispecies World

Calls for an Honest Reckoning of the Successes, Failures, and Unanticipated Results of International Developments

Shows the Cultural Resonance of Mammal Paleontology from an International Perspective

Debunks Myths of the Green Revolution with a Long-Awaited Critique of Wide Adaptation

Daniel French examines the American social perceptions of electricity as an energy technology between the mid-19th and early decades of the 20th centuries. Arguing that both technical and cultural factors played a role, French shows how electricity became an invisible and abstract form of energy in American society, leading Americans to culturally construct electricity as unlimited and environmentally inconsequential—a newfound “basic right” of life in the United States.

This book examines the practice of science in the field in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains of the American West between the 1860s and the 1910s, when the railroad was the dominant form of long-distance transportation. Grounded in approaches from environmental history and the history of technology, it emphasizes the material basis of scientific fieldwork, joining together the human labor that produced knowledge with the natural world in which those practices were embedded.

The Coeur d’Alenes, a twenty-five by ten mile portion of the Idaho Panhandle, is home to one of the most productive mining districts in world history. Its legacy also includes environmental pollution on an epic scale. Living with Lead untangles the costs and benefits of a century of mining, milling, and smelting in a small western city and the region that surrounds it.

The essays in this collection ask us to confront the toxic landscapes that pervade modern life using the example of exposure of people in four countries to nuclear radiation, industrial waste, pesticides and future biological warfare.

An Examination of How Urban Citizens and the State Remade One of Africa’s Largest Cities During a Pivotal Era of National and Global Uncertainty.

Sixteen contributors dig deeper and uncover the national and transnational negotiation of expertise, including the role of Latin American experts in these processes.

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 ...

A History of Early International Preservationist Groups and the Natures They Sought to Preserve

An Engaging History of the Less Glamorous but Equally Essential Aspects of Space Travel: Sanitation, Food Supply, and Waste Disposal