Science / History

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 ...

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 ...

Over the past two decades, natural things—especially those collected, exchanged, studied, and displayed in museums, such as animals, plants, minerals, and rocks—have emerged as fascinating protagonists for historical research. Nature on Paper follows a different, humbler set of objects that make it possible to trace the global routes ...

Human and animal lives intersect, whether through direct physical contact or by inhabiting the same space at a different time. Environmental humanities scholars have begun investigating these relationships through the emerging field of multispecies studies, building on decades of work in animal history, feminist studies, and Indigenous epistemologies. Contributors to ...

In his lifetime, John Herschel was Britain’s best-known natural philosopher, a world celebrity, and arguably the first modern scientist of the generation in which the term itself was invented. The polymath son of William Herschel, discoverer of Uranus and constructor of the world’s largest telescopes, Herschel took highest ...

In a globalized and networked world, where media crosses national borders, contributors reveal how transnational processes have shaped popular representations of scientific and religious ideas in the United Kingdom, Argentina, Ecuador, India, Spain, Turkey, Israel, and Japan. Most Adaptable to Change demonstrates the varied and divergent ways evolutionary ideas and ...

The Matter of Empire examines the philosophical principles invoked by apologists of the Spanish empire that laid the foundations for the material exploitation of the Andean region between 1520 and 1640. Centered on Potosi, Bolivia, Orlando Bentancor’s original study ties the colonizers’ attempts to justify the abuses wrought upon the environment ...

William Whewell, the famous master of Trinity College in Cambridge, was a central figure in nineteenth-century British scientific culture and one of the last great polymaths. His influential work ranged from history and philosophy of science, education, architecture, mineralogy, and political economy to mathematics, engineering, natural theology, metaphysics, and moral ...

The idea that a new technology could challenge human intelligence is as old as the warning from Socrates and Plato that written language eroded memory. With the emergence of generative artificial intelligence programs, we find ourselves once again debating how a new technology might influence human thought and behavior. Researchers, ...

The specialization thesis—the idea that nineteenth-century science fragmented into separate forms of knowledge that led to the creation of modern disciplines—has played an integral role in the way historians have described the changing disciplinary map of nineteenth-century British science. This volume critically reevaluates this dominant narrative in the ...

When the Apollo 11 astronauts returned from humanity’s first voyage to the moon in 1969, NASA officials advocated for more ambitious missions. But with the civil rights movement, environmental concerns, the Vietnam War, and other social crises taking up much of the public’s attention, they lacked the support to make ...

The story of the “conflict thesis” between science and religion—the notion of perennial conflict or warfare between the two—is part of our modern self-understanding. As the story goes, John William Draper (1811–1882) and Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) constructed dramatic narratives in the nineteenth century that cast religion as the relentless ...

The global triumph of Mendelian genetics in the twentieth century was not a foregone conclusion, thanks to the existence of graft hybrids. These chimeral plants and animals are created by grafting tissue from one organism to another with the goal of passing the newly hybridized genetic material on to their ...

The 476 letters in the thirteenth volume of The Correspondence of John Tyndall document the period from June 1, 1872, to September 28, 1873, much of which was consumed by Tyndall’s lecture tour of the United States. We meet him in the midst of the Ayrton affair, which saw Tyndall coming to the defense ...

Before the advent of radio, conceptions of the relationship between science and religion circulated through periodicals, journals, and books, influencing the worldviews of intellectuals and a wider public. In this volume, historians of science and religion examine that relationship through diverse mediums, geographic contexts, and religious traditions. Spanning within and ...