Science / History

Science under Adversity argues that the Global South served as a dynamic arena of scientific innovation, circulation, and international collaboration. In this richly detailed history of the development of Latin American physiology in the early- to mid-twentieth century, Marcos Cueto shows that productive tensions between doctors and scientists in Argentina, ...

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 ...

A Science for Everyday Life argues that mass media and communications technologies transformed the way British people thought about and experienced the natural world by democratizing knowledge about science and the environment. From progressive educational methods and new modes of museum display to microcinematographic film techniques, new broadcast technologies, and ...

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

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 ...

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 Charles Darwin’s death in 1882, people across the world have used forms of commemoration and memorialization to celebrate, and at times critique, various aspects of Darwin’s scientific, social, and cultural impact. Commemorative events, activities, and publications marking major anniversaries of Darwin’s birth and death, of the publication ...

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 ...

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 ...

Mass media in the late nineteenth century was full of news from Mars. In the wake of Giovanni Schiaparelli’s 1877 discovery of enigmatic dark, straight lines on the red planet, astronomers and the public at large vigorously debated the possibility that it might be inhabited. As rivalling scientific practitioners looked ...

Trade flowed across Eurasia, around the Indian Ocean, and over the Mediterranean for millennia, but in the early modern period, larger parts of the globe became connected through these established trade routes. Knowledge, embodied in various people, materials, texts, objects, and practices, also moved and came together along these routes ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...