Science / History

The twelfth volume of The Correspondence of John Tyndall contains 326 letters and covers the fifteen months of Tyndall’s life from March 1871 through May 1872, a time when he was a central figure in the field and had a substantial reputation in both the UK and the United States. It begins ...

Winner, 2022 Edward Kremers Award Compound Remedies examines the equipment, books, and remedies of colonial Mexico City’s Herrera pharmacy—natural substances with known healing powers that formed part of the basis for modern-day healing traditions and home remedies in Mexico. Paula S. De Vos traces the evolution of the Galenic ...

The Many Voices of Modern Physics follows a revolution that began in 1905 when Albert Einstein published papers on special relativity and quantum theory. Unlike Newtonian physics, this new physics often departs wildly from common sense, a radical divorce that presents a unique communicative challenge to physicists when writing for other ...

In the final decades of the twentieth century, the advent of evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) offered a revolutionary new perspective that transformed the classical neo-Darwinian, gene-centered study of evolution. In The Architecture of Evolution, Marco Tamborini demonstrates how this radical innovation was made possible by the largely forgotten study of ...

Millions of scientific articles are published each year, making it difficult to stay abreast of advances within even the smallest subdisciplines. Traditional approaches to the study of science, such as the history and philosophy of science, involve closely reading a relatively small set of journal articles. And yet many questions ...

In The Globalization of Wheat, Marci R. Baranski explores Norman Borlaug’s complicated legacy as godfather of the Green Revolution. Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his role in fighting global hunger, Borlaug, an American agricultural scientist and plant breeder who worked for the Rockefeller Foundation, left a ...

Popular natural history periodicals in the nineteenth century had an incredible democratizing power. By welcoming contributions from correspondents regardless of their background, they posed a significant threat to those who considered themselves to be gatekeepers of elite science, and who in turn used their own periodicals to shape more exclusive ...

The discovery of radium by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898 eventually led to a craze for radium products in the 1920s until their widespread use proved lethal for consumers, patients, and medical practitioners alike. Radium infiltrated American culture, Maria Rentetzi reveals, not only because of its potential to treat cancer ...

Technocratic Visions examines the context and societal consequences of technologies, technocratic governance, and development in Mexico, home of the first professional engineering school in the Americas. Contributors focus on the influential role of engineers, especially civil engineers, but also mining engineers, military engineers, architects, and other infrastructural and mechanical technicians. ...

This ninth volume of the Tyndall correspondence contains 314 letters. Tyndall was by now in his mid-forties and in the prime of life. His career as a man of science was firmly established and flourishing. He had been professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution for more than a dozen ...

The eleventh volume of The Correspondence of John Tyndall covers the period from January 1869 to the end of February 1871 and contains 427 letters with more than 130 individual correspondents, as well as letters to several newspapers. These years find Tyndall an internationally established scientist with broad influence and feeling increasingly confident in ...

This volume considers the relationship between the development of evolution and its historical representations by focusing on the so-called Darwinian Revolution. The very idea of the Darwinian Revolution is a historical construct devised to help explain the changing scientific and cultural landscape that was ushered in by Charles Darwin’s ...

Psychic Investigators examines British anthropology’s engagement with the modern spiritualist movement during the late Victorian era. Efram Sera-Shriar argues that debates over the existence of ghosts and psychical powers were at the center of anthropological discussions on human beliefs. He focuses on the importance of establishing credible witnesses of ...

Finalist, 2023 Turku Book Award In 1972, the US Navy installed a base for nuclear submarines in the Archipelago of La Maddalena off the northeastern shore of Sardinia, Italy. In response, Italy established a radiation surveillance program to monitor the impact of the base on the environment and public health. In the ...

In the late eighteenth century, enlightened politicians and upper-class women in Spain debated the right of women to join one of the country’s most prominent scientific institutions: the Madrid Economic Society of Friends of the Country. Societies such as these, as Elena Serrano describes in her book, were founded ...