Subject: Science / History

Subject: Science / History

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Sanitizing Moscow

|9780822948612|Waste, Animals, and Urban Health in Late Imperial Russia|Sanitizing Moscow presents an environmental history of public health reforms in late imperial Moscow between 1870 and 1917. It explores the relationship between Russia’s urban modernization and the more-than-human environment in the context of the major social and political changes, triggered by the liberal reforms of the 1860s and 1870s, and the transnational rise of scientific medicine and sanitary technologies. Mazanik is the first to combine environmental history and the history of urban public health in the context of imperial Russia.| Anna Mazanik| History of the Urban Environment| History / Europe /…

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The Gray Zones of Medicine

|9780822967514|Healers and History in Latin America|Health practitioners working in gray zones, or between official and unofficial medicines, played a fundamental role in shaping Latin America from the colonial period onward. The Gray Zones of Medicine offers a human, relatable, complex examination of the history of health and healing in Latin America across five centuries. Contributors uncover how biographical narratives of individual actors—outside those of hegemonic biomedical knowledge, careers of successful doctors, public health initiatives, and research and medical institutions—can provide a unique window into larger social, cultural, political, and economic historical changes and continuities in the region. They reveal the…

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Imperial Weather

|9780822948421|Meteorology, Science, and the Environment in Colonial Malaya|Tropical weather in colonial Malaya presented an unknown atmosphere that manifested in extremes and uncertainties. From 1840 to 1940, the Indigenous landscapes of Singapore and Penang Islands were altered in ways that will never be reclaimed, the natural ecology of much of the peninsula forever changed by the British colonial government. With this book, Fiona Williamson revisits the fraught relationship between climate, weather science, and empire within the Straits Settlements in the long nineteenth century. Her book examines official and scientific responses to local weathers within the multicultural ports and peripheries of Singapore…

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Cosmic Fragments

|9780822948438|Dislocation and Discontent in the Global Space Age|Looking beyond the well-trodden, celebratory narratives of space exploration and the powerful nostalgia of lunar landings, Cosmic Fragments focuses instead on the moral ambiguities of spaceflight. Beyond the fetishization of machines, men, and manifest destiny and the Cold War tensions of the space race lies a history rife with violence, racial inequity, colonial ambitions, and catastrophe. This volume yields new insights on the crucial role of environmental damage, Indigenous dispossession, population displacements, infrastructural entanglements, and narratives of decline in space exploration situated within larger questions in the history of science, technology, and the…

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Reading the World

|9780822948513|British Practices of Natural History, 1760-1820| In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—a period that marked the emergence of a global modernity—educated landowners, or “gentlemen,” dominated the development of British natural history, utilizing networks of trade and empire to inventory nature and understand events across the world. Specimens, ranging from a Welsh bittern to the plants of Botany Bay, were collected, recorded, and classified, while books were produced in London and copies distributed and used across Britain, Continental Europe, the Pacific, Asia, and the Americas. Natural history connected a diverse range of individuals, from European landowners to Polynesian priests, incorporating, distributing,…

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