Books

Despite its popular association today with magic, astrology was once a complex and sophisticated practice, grounded in technical training provided by a university education. The Crown and the Cosmos examines the complex ways that political practice and astrological discourse interacted at the Habsburg court, a key center of political and ...

The development of nuclear technologies for war, medicine, and energy production dramatically increased the number of people exposed to artificial radioactivity and raised new stakes and questions about protecting them. This volume examines how the establishment of standards and protocols for radiation protection was not only a technical process, but ...

In the nineteenth century, changes to the environment, driven by ideology, natural forces, and burgeoning fossil fuel power, shifted the course of the Habsburg Empire. Along the Danube—Europe’s second longest river—hydraulic engineering projects ranging from bridges to embankments and shipping hubs affected the river’s dynamics, as ...

Join Domenico Bertoloni Meli on a detailed journey through the understanding and investigations of nature, when profound changes transformed the intellectual landscape and the beginning of European expansion and colonialism. His book takes us on a guided tour through history, when the religious unity of Europe was broken with huge ...

As rigorous scientific and philosophical discourse circulated during the Enlightenment, aided by the Republic of Letters, a revolutionary understanding of gender emerged that would impact nation building in Europe and the Americas. In From Virile to Sterile, Adriana Novoa analyzes the cosmopolitan citizens of this metaphysical republic—an international community ...

The fifteenth volume of The Correspondence of John Tyndall contains 466 letters covering the period from November 1875 to December 1877. Tyndall was by now an established man of science with a far-reaching reputation. The most significant work he undertook in this period involved his experiments on spontaneous generation and his consulting for ...

The astronomy lecturing trade in Britain experienced a theatrical turn in the early 1800s, as practitioners relied on larger and more elaborate visual aids to enhance the scenic and dramatic effects of their traveling spectacles. Commercial and Sublime explores this phenomenon in the long nineteenth century, a time when astronomical ...

Exotic drugs and spices, from tea to opium, were among the first fruits of European commercial expansion in the sixteenth century. By the eighteenth, many had become profitable products of the European empires that had spread across the globe. Often, they were objects of appropriation—substances whose curative virtues were ...

Sanitizing Moscow presents an environmental history of public health reforms in late imperial Moscow between 1870 and 1917. It explores the relationship between Russia’s urban modernization and the more-than-human environment in the context of the major social and political changes, triggered by the liberal reforms of the 1860s and 1870s, and ...

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—a period that marked the emergence of a global modernity—educated landowners, or “gentlemen,” dominated the development of British natural history, utilizing networks of trade and empire to inventory nature and understand events across the world. Specimens, ranging from a Welsh bittern to the ...

Winner, The Athenaeum of Philadelphia 2024 Literary Award for Nonfiction Pennsylvania naturalist William Bartram (1739–1823) is best known as the author of a travelogue describing his botanizing journey through the American South in the late eighteenth century. Writing was not, however, Bartram’s only or even preferred method of recording the natural ...

From the beginning of Galileo’s career, well before the publication of the Sidereus Nuncius, his contemporaries took pains to shape his reputation and fame. They were fully aware that their efforts would shape the course of his career; they also knew that they would profit from helping him. With ...

Health practitioners working in gray zones, or between official and unofficial medicines, played a fundamental role in shaping Latin America from the colonial period onward. The Gray Zones of Medicine offers a human, relatable, complex examination of the history of health and healing in Latin America across five centuries. Contributors ...

Tropical weather in colonial Malaya presented an unknown atmosphere that manifested in extremes and uncertainties. From 1840 to 1940, the Indigenous landscapes of Singapore and Penang Islands were altered in ways that will never be reclaimed, the natural ecology of much of the peninsula forever changed by the British colonial government. With ...

Looking beyond the well-trodden, celebratory narratives of space exploration and the powerful nostalgia of lunar landings, Cosmic Fragments focuses instead on the moral ambiguities of spaceflight. Beyond the fetishization of machines, men, and manifest destiny and the Cold War tensions of the space race lies a history rife with violence, ...