History

In this historiographical study of the Scientific Revolution, the author examines the body of work on the intellectual, social and cultural origins of early modern science. Cohen critically surveys a wide range of scholarship since the 19th century,...

Before the hydrogen bomb indelibly associated radioactivity with death, many chemists, physicians, botanists, and geneticists believed that radium might hold the secret to life. Physicists and chemists early on described the wondrous new element in...

A kaleidoscopic rethinking of how we come to know the earth. This book brings the history of the geosciences and world cosmologies together, exploring many traditions, including Chinese, Pacific, Islamic, South and Southeast Asian conceptions of the...

Now in a thoroughly updated new edition, this successful textbook surveys the history of technology in America from the 1600s to the 21st century. Alan I Marcus and Howard P. Segal explore the effect society, culture, politics and economics have had upon...

Every document in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein appears in the language in which it was written, and this supplementary paperback volume presents the English translations of all non-English materials. This translation does not include notes or...

By the end of the eighteenth century, the French dominated the world of science. And although science and politics had little to do with each other directly, there were increasingly frequent intersections. This is a study of those transactions between...

From the 1770s through the 1820s the French scientific community predominated in the world to a degree that no other scientific establishment did in any period prior to the Second World War. In his classic Science and Polity in France: The End of the Old...

From humble beginnings as a small desert laboratory in Tucson, Arizona, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Carnegie Institution's Department of Plant Biology has evolved into a thriving international center of plant molecular biology that...

Following on from the success of his two previous books, Remarkable Mathematicians and Remarkable Physicists, Ioan James now profiles 38 remarkable biologists from the last 400 years. The emphasis is on their varied life-stories, not on the details of...

The Correspondence of Charles Darwin provides, for the first time, the full, authoritative texts of all known and available letters to and from Charles Darwin, the originator of the theory of evolution by natural selection. The letters are accompanied by...

This book is offers a broad, comparative survey of a booming field within the history of science: the history, generation, use, and function of images in scientific practice. It explores every aspect of visuality in science, arguing for the concept of...

This is the story of the author's unique scientific journey with one of the most remarkable men of 20th century science. The journey begins in Sri Lanka, the author's native country, with his childhood acquaintance with Fred Hoyle's writings. The action...

This fascinating book assembles human stories about physicists and mathematicians. Remarkably, these stories cluster around some general themes having to do with the interaction between scientists, and with the impact of historic events - such as the...

In 1887, the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) was originally founded as the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt (PTR) in Berlin in order to promote basic research in physics. It subsequently developed into the largest research center...

Since the mid-1820s, a series of lectures has been delivered each year over the Christmas period in the world-famous Faraday Lecture Theatre at The Royal Institution of Great Britain by prominent scientists, addressed specifically to an audience of...

We are swamped with information and each day seems to bring new discoveries that must be considered. Never before in the history of science have so many scientists been as active as today. It has become a major problem for the expert just to keep up with...

Andrew Cooper presents the first systematic study of Kant's account of natural history. Cooper contends that Kant made a decisive contribution to one of the most explosive and understudied revolutions in the history of science: the addition of time to...

A generation or two before Socrates, thinkers classified the world's organisms into three categories: plants, animals, and man. However, Aristotle recognized that some organisms, such as sponges and sea-fans, share properties of both plants and animals...

Today, the concept of noise is employed to characterize random fluctuations in general. Before the twentieth century, however, noise only meant disturbing sounds. In the 1900s-50s, noise underwent a conceptual transformation from unwanted sounds that...

Scientists regularly employ historical narrative as a rhetorical tool in their communication of science, yet there's been little reflection on its effects within scientific communities and beyond. Science Between Myth and History begins to unravel these...

'Highly Recommended' CHOICE A fascinating account of the experimental innovations and theoretical breakthroughs in nuclear physics in the period between the two world wars told through the lives and personalities of the physicists who made them. ...

This book presents eight papers about important historiographical issues as debated in the history of science in Islamicate societies, the history of science and philosophy of medieval Latin Europe and the history of mathematics as an academic discipline...

Uncovers a powerful relationship between pathology and money: beginning in the nineteenth century, the severity of mental illness was measured against a patient's economic productivity. Madness and Enterprise reveals the economic norms embedded within...

** A Cultural History of Chemistry: Volumes 1-6 is a 2023 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title **A Cultural History of Chemistry in the Modern Age covers the period from 1914 to the present. The impact of chemistry and the chemical industry on science,...

** A Cultural History of Chemistry: Volumes 1-6 is a 2023 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title **A Cultural History of Chemistry in the Nineteenth Century covers the period from 1815 to 1914 and the birth of modern chemistry. The elaboration of atomic...

** A Cultural History of Chemistry: Volumes 1-6 is a 2023 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title **A Cultural History of Chemistry in the Eighteenth Century covers the period from 1700 to 1815. Setting the progress of science and technology in its cultural...

** A Cultural History of Chemistry: Volumes 1-6 is a 2023 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title **A Cultural History of Chemistry in the Early Modern Age covers the period from 1500 to 1700, tracing chemical debates and practices within their cultural,...

** A Cultural History of Chemistry: Volumes 1-6 is a 2023 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title **A Cultural History of Chemistry in the Middle Ages covers the period from 600 to 1500 in European and Islamic cultures. Arabic theories and terminology for the...

Volumes 1-6 selected as a 2023 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title This open access book A Cultural History of Chemistry in Antiquity covers the period from 3000 BCE to 600 CE, ranging across the civilizations of the Mediterranean and Near East. Over...

The first book to map William James's preoccupation with medical ideas, concerns, and values across the breadth of his work. William James is known as a nineteenth-century philosopher, psychologist, and psychical researcher. Less well-known is how his...

"Warmly recommended. It is that rare achievement, a lively book which at the same time takes the fullest possible advantage of scholarly knowledge."-Charles C. Gillespie, New York Times Book ReviewBook InformationISBN 9780226808406Author Stephen...

This is not only the first global history of nineteenth-century science but the first global history of phrenology. Phrenology was the most popular mental science of the Victorian age. From American senators to Indian social reformers, this new mental...

In recent decades game theory - the mathematics of rational decision-making by interacting individuals - has assumed a central place in our understanding of capitalist markets, the evolution of social behavior in animals, and even the ethics of altruism...

Explores both the Enlightenment as a geographical phenomenon and the place of geography in the Enlightenment. From disciplinary and topical perspectives, contributors consider the many ways in which the world of the long 18th century was brought to view...

Leading gender and science scholar Sarah S. Richardson charts the untold history of the idea that a woman's health and behavior during pregnancy can have long-term effects on her descendants' health and welfare. The idea that a woman may leave a...

Francois Delaporte's Chagas Disease chronicles Brazilian medicine's encounter with a disease, an insect, and a history of discovery. Between 1909 and 1911, Carlos Chagas described an infection (pathogenic trypanosome), its intermediate host, and the...

Examining the history of phrenology and physiognomy, Beauty and the Brain proposes a bold new way of understanding the connection between science, politics, and popular culture in early America. Between the 1770s and the 1860s, people all across the...

In the spring of 1919, two British solar eclipse expeditions confirmed the correctness of general relativity theory and propelled Albert Einstein to instant celebrity. Before this major turning point, the majority of Einstein's writings published in this...

Every document in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein appears in the language in which it was written, and this supplementary paperback volume presents the English translations of all non-English materials. This translation does not include notes or...

Adaptive optics is the most revolutionary breakthrough in astronomy since Galileo pointed his telescope skyward nearly four hundred years ago. It is critical technology that will enable astronomers to answer challenging questions about the universe. Over...