Science / History

Total 138 results found.

Commercial and Sublime

Commercial and Sublime

Popular Astronomy Lectures in Nineteenth-Century Britain
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 ...
The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Volume 15

The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Volume 15

The Correspondence, November 1875-December 1877
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 ...
From Virile to Sterile

From Virile to Sterile

Science, Masculinity, and Modernity in Argentina, 1776–1852
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 ...
Investigations of Nature

Investigations of Nature

Europe in a Global World, 1450s-1780s
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 ...
The Danube Empire

The Danube Empire

An Environmental History of Habsburg State Building and Civic Engagement
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 ...
Negotiating Radiation Protection in the Nuclear Age

Negotiating Radiation Protection in the Nuclear Age

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 ...
William Bartram’s Visual Wonders

William Bartram’s Visual Wonders

The Drawings of an American Naturalist
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 ...
Sanitizing Moscow

Sanitizing Moscow

Waste, Animals, and Urban Health in Late Imperial Russia
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 ...
Exoticizing Consumption

Exoticizing Consumption

European Drug Cultures, 1670-1740
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 ...
Galileo’s Fame

Galileo’s Fame

Science, Credibility, and Memory in the Seventeenth Century
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 ...
Reading the World

Reading the World

British Practices of Natural History, 1760-1820
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 ...
The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Volume 14

The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Volume 14

The Correspondence, October 1873–October 1875
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 ...
Cosmic Fragments

Cosmic Fragments

Dislocation and Discontent in the Global Space Age
Edited By Asif A. Siddiqi
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, ...
Ecologies of Disease Control

Ecologies of Disease Control

Spaces of Health Security in Historical Perspective
Ecologies of Disease Control explores the relationship between ecological conceptions of epidemics and forms of infectious disease control. Bringing historical, sociological, anthropological, and geographical case studies from the late eighteenth century to the present into dialogue, contributors unearth a multiplicity of spatial configurations in governing epidemics, putting contemporary health security ...
Imperial Weather

Imperial Weather

Meteorology, Science, and the Environment in Colonial Malaya
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 ...

Total 138 results found.