Science / History

The Ending of Tyndall’s Relationship with the Drummond Family, Disputes about His Glaciology Work, and More

The Development of a Distinctive Public Science in Nineteenth-Century Australia

The Crucial Role Urban Spaces Played in the Production of Scientific Knowledge in Dublin

The Cosmopolitan and Practical Science of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Istanbul

Evaluating the Complexity Principle for Scholarship in the History of Science and ReligionEvaluating the Complexity Principle for Scholarship in the History of Science and Religion

Revisiting the Origins, Development, and Popularization of the “Conflict Thesis”

Explores Public-Interest Science as a Potential Alternative to Commodification

Investigates the Ways World’s Fairs Expressed and Provoked Cold War Culture

Explores a Transatlantic News Economy That Circulated Information and Actively Shaped New Claims about the Red Planet

A Deeper Understanding of the Work and Character of the Great Eighteenth-Century Engineer

Reveals Both the Gendered and Material Dimensions of Knowledge Production

Examines Debates Surrounding the First Articulations of a Science of Life and Experiments on the Processes of Organic Vitality

Divine Destiny and the Popularization of Space Exploration in America

The Pressures of Modern Life and Their Impact on Bodily and Mental Health in Nineteenth-Century Britain

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.