|9780822967798|An Environmental History of Habsburg State Building and Civic Engagement|In the nineteenth century, changes to the environment, driven by ideology, natural forces, and burgeoning fossil fuel power, shifted the course of the Habsburg Empire. Along the Danube—Europe’s second longest river—hydraulic engineering projects ranging from bridges to embankments and shipping hubs affected the river’s dynamics, as did new activities related to trade, industrialization, sanitation, recreation, and agriculture. Taking a unique environmental perspective to explore questions of transnational solidarity and identity, The Danube Empire argues that the Danube River served as both a catalyst and a tool for institution building. Drawing on…

|9780822948742|An Environmental History of Habsburg State Building and Civic Engagement|In the nineteenth century, changes to the environment, driven by ideology, natural forces, and burgeoning fossil fuel power, shifted the course of the Habsburg Empire. Along the Danube—Europe’s second longest river—hydraulic engineering projects ranging from bridges to embankments and shipping hubs affected the river’s dynamics, as did new activities related to trade, industrialization, sanitation, recreation, and agriculture. Taking a unique environmental perspective to explore questions of transnational solidarity and identity, The Danube Empire argues that the Danube River served as both a catalyst and a tool for institution building. Drawing on…

|9780822967859|Richard Francis Burton’s Travels in Brazil|Empires and Explorations interweaves nineteenth-century Brazilian history, the extraordinary life of Richard Francis Burton, and the use of travel writing by historians. Burton witnessed the origins of the early processes of nation-building in Brazil including the power and influence of Great Britain on a monarchy that had ruled an independent Brazil since the 1820s laying the foundations for the physical integration of the nation, an economy based on coffee and slave labor, the construction of national myths, and very hesitant steps toward electoral, representative politics. A seasoned explorer of South Asia, the Middle East, the…

|9780822948728|Richard Francis Burton’s Travels in Brazil|Empires and Explorations interweaves nineteenth-century Brazilian history, the extraordinary life of Richard Francis Burton, and the use of travel writing by historians. Burton witnessed the origins of the early processes of nation-building in Brazil including the power and influence of Great Britain on a monarchy that had ruled an independent Brazil since the 1820s laying the foundations for the physical integration of the nation, an economy based on coffee and slave labor, the construction of national myths, and very hesitant steps toward electoral, representative politics. A seasoned explorer of South Asia, the Middle East, the…

|9780822948384|John Herschel and the Invention of Science|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 honors as a student at Cambridge, conducted groundbreaking work in chemistry and optics, helped establish a mathematical revolution, extended his father’s astronomical surveys to the entire sky, and wrote the popular texts by which a generation of readers learned what it meant to do science. Along…