Science / General

Total 60 results found.

Field Life

Field Life

Science in the American West during the Railroad Era
Field Life examines the practice of science in the field in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains of the American West between the 1860s and the 1910s, when the railroad was the dominant form of long-distance transportation. Grounded in approaches from environmental history and the history of technology, it emphasizes ...
Communicating Physics

Communicating Physics

The Production, Circulation, and Appropriation of Ganot's Textbooks in France and England, 1851–1887
The textbooks written by Adolphe Ganot (1804-1887) played a major role in shaping the way physics was taught in the nineteenth century. Ganot’s books were translated from their original French into more than ten languages, including English, allowing their adoption as standard works in Britain and spreading their influence ...
The Imagined Empire

The Imagined Empire

Balloon Enlightenments in Revolutionary Europe
The hot-air balloon, invented by the Montgolfier brothers in 1783, launched for the second time just days before the Treaty of Paris would end the American Revolutionary War. The ascent in Paris—a technological marvel witnessed by a diverse crowd that included Benjamin Franklin—highlighted celebrations of French military victory against ...
Medicine and Modernism

Medicine and Modernism

A Biography of Henry Head
This is the first in-depth study of the English neurologist and polymath Sir Henry Head (1861-1940). Head bridged the gap between science and the arts. He was a published poet who had close links with such figures as Thomas Hardy and Siegfried Sassoon. His research into the nervous system and ...
The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Volume 1

The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Volume 1

The Correspondence, May 1840–August 1843
The 230 letters in this inaugural volume of The Correspondence of John Tyndall chart Tyndall’s emergence into early adulthood, spanning from his arrival in Youghal in May 1840 as a civil assistant with just a year’s experience working on the Irish Ordnance Survey to his pseudonymous authorship of an open ...
The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Volume 2

The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Volume 2

The Correspondence, September 1843–December 1849
The 161 letters in this volume encompass a period of dramatic change for the young John Tyndall, who would become one of Victorian Britain’s most famous physicists. They begin in September 1843, in the midst of a fiery public conflict with the Ordnance Survey of England, and end in December 1849 with ...
Global Scientific Practice in an Age of Revolutions, 1750-1850

Global Scientific Practice in an Age of Revolutions, 1750-1850

The century from 1750 to 1850 was a period of dramatic transformations in world history, fostering several types of revolutionary change beyond the political landscape. Independence movements in Europe, the Americas, and other parts of the world were catalysts for radical economic, social, and cultural reform. And it was during this age ...
Exploratory Experiments

Exploratory Experiments

Ampère, Faraday, and the Origins of Electrodynamics
Translated by Alex Levine The nineteenth century was a formative period for electromagnetism and electrodynamics. Hans Christian Orsted’s groundbreaking discovery of the interaction between electricity and magnetism in 1820 inspired a wave of research, led to the science of electrodynamics, and resulted in the development of electromagnetic theory. Remarkably, in ...
Old Age, New Science

Old Age, New Science

Gerontologists and Their Biosocial Visions, 1900-1960
Between 1870 and 1940, life expectancy in the United States skyrocketed while the percentage of senior citizens age sixty-five and older more than doubled—a phenomenon owed largely to innovations in medicine and public health. At the same time, the Great Depression was a major tipping point for age discrimination and poverty ...
The Andean Wonder Drug

The Andean Wonder Drug

Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630-1800
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 ...
What Makes a Good Experiment?

What Makes a Good Experiment?

Reasons and Roles in Science
What makes a good experiment? Although experimental evidence plays an essential role in science, as Franklin argues, there is no algorithm or simple set of criteria for ranking or evaluating good experiments, and therefore no definitive answer to the question. Experiments can, in fact, be good in any number of ...
Science as It Could Have Been

Science as It Could Have Been

Discussing the Contingency/Inevitability Problem
Could all or part of our taken-as-established scientific conclusions, theories, experimental data, ontological commitments, and so forth have been significantly different? Science as It Could Have Been focuses on a crucial issue that contemporary science studies have often neglected: the issue of contingency within science. It considers a number of ...
World’s Fairs on the Eve of War

World’s Fairs on the Eve of War

Science, Technology, and Modernity, 1937–1942
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 ...
Soviet Space Mythologies

Soviet Space Mythologies

Public Images, Private Memories, and the Making of a Cultural Identity
Winner, 2021 Gardner-Lasser Aerospace History Literature Award | Shortlist, 2016 Historia Nova Prize From the start, the Soviet human space program had an identity crisis. Were cosmonauts heroic pilots steering their craft through the dangers of space, or were they mere passengers riding safely aboard fully automated machines? Tensions between Soviet cosmonauts and ...
The Classification of Sex

The Classification of Sex

Alfred Kinsey and the Organization of Knowledge
Alfred C. Kinsey’s revolutionary studies of human sexual behavior are world-renowned. His meticulous methods of data collection, from comprehensive entomological assemblies to personal sex history interviews, raised the bar for empirical evidence to an entirely new level. In The Classification of Sex, Donna J. Drucker presents an original analysis ...

Total 60 results found.