|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 the Brazilian monarchy that had declared its independence in the 1820s. A seasoned explorer of South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas, Burton provided a panoramic view of Brazil, highlighting the obstacles created by region, race, class, religion, and culture and offered advice on how to build a nation from…

|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…

|9780822944461|Cholera in Madras and Quebec City, 1818–1910|Throughout the nineteenth century, cholera was a global scourge against human populations. Practitioners had little success in mitigating the symptoms of the disease, and its causes were bitterly disputed. What experts did agree on was that the environment played a crucial role in the sites where outbreaks occurred. In this book, Michael Zeheter offers a probing case study of the environmental changes made to fight cholera in two markedly different British colonies: Madras in India and Quebec City in Canada. The colonial state in Quebec aimed to emulate British precedent and develop similar institutions…