|9780822948308|Technology, Mediation, and Human-Animal Relationships|Human and animal lives intersect, whether through direct physical contact or by inhabiting the same space at a different time. Environmental humanities scholars have begun investigating these relationships through the emerging field of multispecies studies, building on decades of work in animal history, feminist studies, and Indigenous epistemologies. Contributors to this volume consider the entangled human-animal relationships of a complex multispecies world, where domesticated animals, wild animals, and people cross paths, creating hybrid naturecultures. Technology, they argue, structures how animals and humans share spaces. From clothing to cars to computers, technology acts as a mediator and…

|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…

|9780822967415|Retracing the Origins of Conflict|The story of the “conflict thesis” between science and religion—the notion of perennial conflict or warfare between the two—is part of our modern self-understanding. As the story goes, John William Draper (1811–1882) and Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) constructed dramatic narratives in the nineteenth century that cast religion as the relentless enemy of scientific progress. And yet, despite its resilience in popular culture, historians today have largely debunked the conflict thesis. Unravelling its origins, James Ungureanu argues that Draper and White actually hoped their narratives would preserve religious belief. For them, science was ultimately a scapegoat for…

|9780822947936|Challenging Twentieth-Century Genetics|The global triumph of Mendelian genetics in the twentieth century was not a foregone conclusion, thanks to the existence of graft hybrids. These chimeral plants and animals are created by grafting tissue from one organism to another with the goal of passing the newly hybridized genetic material on to their offspring. But prevailing genetic theory insisted that heredity was confined to the sex cells and there was no inheritance of characteristics acquired during an organism’s lifetime. Under sustained attacks from geneticists, scientific belief in the existence of graft hybrids slowly began to decline. Yet ordinary horticulturalists and breeders…

|9780822947660|NASA, the Shuttle Era, and Public Engagement after Apollo|When the Apollo 11 astronauts returned from humanity’s first voyage to the moon in 1969, NASA officials advocated for more ambitious missions. But with the civil rights movement, environmental concerns, the Vietnam War, and other social crises taking up much of the public’s attention, they lacked the support to make those ambitions a reality. Instead, the space agency had to think more modestly and pragmatically, crafting a program that could leverage the excitement of Apollo while promising relevance for average Americans. The resulting initiative, the space shuttle, would become the centerpiece of…