Books

On June 23, 1946, Italy and Belgium signed the “men in exchange for coal” agreement, in which Italy committed to sending fifty thousand workers each year to the Belgian coal mines, and Belgium pledged to supply a few thousand tons of coal to Italy each month. The first treaty of its kind, ...

Since Darwin’s death in 1882, commemorations organized in different parts of the world have celebrated various aspects of his scientific impact. Events, activities, and publications marking major anniversaries of Darwin’s birth and death, of the publication of On the Origin of Species (1859) and other works, and of the Beagle ...

The ancient landmass of Gondwanaland began to break up two hundred million years ago into what would become present-day Africa, Antarctica, Australasia, South America, and South Asia—a prehuman “Global South” connected territorially across the southern hemisphere. Named by European geologists in the nineteenth century after the Gondwana region in ...

Albert Einstein transformed our understanding of the universe—but he didn’t do it alone. This book traces the full arc of the relativity revolution, from the overlooked protorelativity period (1880–1905) to Einstein’s 1905 breakthrough and the long road to acceptance through the 1930s. It explains Einstein’s radical reconception of ...

In twentieth-century Britain, popular natural histories reshaped the bounds of popular science by foregrounding the everyday experiences of ordinary people. With rapidly developing communications technologies, natural history blended into the experience of modern life, reaching millions of people through new media, which included radio, newspapers, cinema, and television. Max Long ...

The seventeenth volume of The Correspondence of John Tyndall includes 456 letters, documenting a pivotal period in his life. It opens with Tyndall’s resignation from his long-held post as scientific adviser to the Board of Trade and Trinity House, a decision that provoked a very public dispute with a government ...

Cueto shows that productive tensions between doctors and scientists in Argentina, Mexico, and Peru and their counterparts at US research centers and philanthropies shaped the life sciences in the region. Despite assumptions that countries in the Global South produced science of doubtful quality, and despite institutional and economic obstacles, Latin ...

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 ...

A man of many talents—naturalist, geographer, anthropologist, and political commentator—Alfred Russel Wallace made seminal contributions to science in the nineteenth century. With Wallace in the Field, Victor Rafael Limeira-DaSilva unpacks the early life of one of the most beloved and famous Victorian scientific figures. Focusing on Wallace’s ...

The 500 letters in this sixteenth volume of The Correspondence of John Tyndall document the period from January 1, 1878, to December 31, 1881. They chart a defining stage in the later life and career of an aging John Tyndall with unprecedented detail. Key developments evidence the fragility of a self-fashioned Carlylean hero, one whose ...

As scientists debated the nature of life in the nineteenth century, two theories predominated: vitalism, which suggested that living things contained a “vital spark,” and mechanism, the idea that animals and humans differed from nonliving things only in their degree of complexity. Erik L. Peterson tells the forgotten story of ...

In the eighteenth century, malaria was a prevalent and deadly disease, and the only effective treatment was found in the Andean forests of Spanish America: a medicinal bark harvested from cinchona trees that would later give rise to the antimalarial drug quinine. In 1751, the Spanish Crown asserted control over the ...

The 499 letters in the fourteenth volume of The Correspondence of John Tyndall cover a number of particularly intense and acrimonious disputes. More notably, this volume spans the period of the composition, delivery, and furious reaction to Tyndall’s famous—or, more accurately, infamous—Belfast Address. This prestigious lecture, which he ...

Since the first world’s fair in London in 1851, at the dawn of the era of industrialization, international expositions served as ideal platforms for rival nations to showcase their advancements in design, architecture, science and technology, industry, and politics. Before the outbreak of World War II, countries competing for leadership ...

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 ...