Science / History

Explores Public-Interest Science as a Potential Alternative to Commodification

Explores a Transatlantic News Economy That Circulated Information and Actively Shaped New Claims about the Red Planet

A Deeper Understanding of the Work and Character of the Great Eighteenth-Century Engineer

Reveals Both the Gendered and Material Dimensions of Knowledge Production

Examines Debates Surrounding the First Articulations of a Science of Life and Experiments on the Processes of Organic Vitality

Divine Destiny and the Popularization of Space Exploration in America

The Pressures of Modern Life and Their Impact on Bodily and Mental Health in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Adolphe Quetelet was an influential astronomer and statistician whose controversial work inspired heated debate in European and American intellectual circles. In creating a science designed to explain the “average man,” he helped contribute to the idea of normal, most enduringly in his creation of the Quetelet Index, which came to be known as the Body Mass Index. Kevin Donnelly presents the first scholarly biography of Quetelet, exploring his contribution to quantitative reasoning, his place in nineteenth-century intellectual history, and his profound influence on the modern idea of average.

Examining the Circulation, Commodification, and Organization of Healing Goods and Healing Knowledge

This sixth volume of Tyndall’s correspondence contains 302 letters covering a period of twenty-eight months (1856–1859).

The Movement and Circulation of Materials, People, and Practices across the Eurasian Continent over Nearly Two Millennia

A Historical Investigation of Mechanism in Seventeenth-Century Debates

The Construction of Medical Privilege and a New Argument about Medical “Progress”

A Prehistory of Genius

Volume 5 contains 266 letters covering a period of twenty-two months, when Tyndall was in his mid-thirties and had been employed by the Royal Institution as professor of natural philosophy since September 1853.