History

In these essays, Andrew Cunningham is concerned with issues of identity - what was the identity of topics, disciplines, arguments, diseases in the past, and whether they are identical with (more usually, how they are not identical with) topics,...

The Monster in the Machine tracks the ways in which human beings were defined in contrast to supernatural and demonic creatures during the time of the Scientific Revolution. Zakiya Hanafi recreates scenes of Italian life and culture from the late...

"An essential perspective for those seeking a serious introduction to early geological science and a fundamental point of departure for future research.... No other book has this scope and conceptual focus."-Kenneth L. Taylor, University of Oklahoma In...

This is the second volume of the complete edition of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin. For the first time full authoritative texts of Darwin's letters are available, edited according to modern textual editorial principles and practice. The letters in...

Popular science readers embrace epics the sweeping stories that claim to tell the history of all the universe, from the cosmological to the biological to the social. And the appeal is understandable: in writing these works, authors such as E. O. Wilson...

Though underexplored in contemporary scholarship, the Victorian attempts to turn aesthetics into a science remains one of the more fascinating aspects of that era. As mind and emotion were increasingly understood in terms of biology, aesthetic experience...

Much like Vladimir Lenin, his onetime rival for the leadership of the Bolshevik party during its formative years, Alexander Bogdanov (1873-1928) was a visionary. In two science fiction novels set on Mars, Bogdanov imagined a future in which the workers...

From December 1811 to February 1812, massive earthquakes shook the middle Mississippi Valley, collapsing homes, snapping large trees midtrunk, and briefly but dramatically reversing the flow of the continent's mightiest river. For decades, people puzzled...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780226211695Author Philip BallFormat PaperbackPage Count 480Imprint University of Chicago PressPublisher The University of Chicago Press

When we think of sites of animal research that symbolize modernity, the first places that come to mind are grand research institutes in cities and near universities that house the latest in equipment and technologies, not the surroundings of the bird's...

Get the straight, scientific story on things like astrology, ghosts, spontaneous human combustion, psychic surgery, and ESP. You hear about these fantastic happenings every day on television and in the supermarket tabloids. Is any of this true or are...

Mount Vesuvius has been famous ever since its eruption in 79 CE, when it destroyed and buried the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. But less well-known is the role it played in the science and culture of early modern Italy, as Sean Cocco reveals...

Cultural accounts of scientific ideas and practices have increasingly come to be welcomed as a corrective to previous-and still widely held-theories of scientific knowledge and practices as universal. The editors caution, however, against the temptation...

The Grand Contraption tells the story of humanity's attempts through 4,000 years of written history to make sense of the world in its cosmic totality, to understand its physical nature, and to know its real and imagined inhabitants. No other book has...

This classic work in the philosophy of physical science is an incisive and readable account of the scientific method. Pierre Duhem was one of the great figures in French science, a devoted teacher, and a distinguished scholar of the history and...

During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Londoners were enthralled by a strange fluid called electricity. In examining this period, Iwan Morus moves beyond the conventional focus on the celebrated Michael Faraday to discuss other electrical...

This volume not only offers an intellectual biography of one of the most important biologists and social thinkers of the twentieth century but also illuminates the development of evolutionary studies in Russia and in the West. Theodosius Dobzhansky...

Shen Gua (1031 1095) is a household name in China, known as a distinguished renaissance man and the author of Brush Talks from Dream Brook, an old text whose remarkable "scientific" discoveries make it appear curiously ahead of its time. In this first...

The most prominent naturalist in Britain before Charles Darwin, Richard Owen made empirical discoveries and offered theoretical innovations that were crucial to the proof of evolution. Among his many lasting contributions to science was the first clear...

The Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century has often been called a decisive turning point in human history. It represents, for good or ill, the birth of modern science and modern ways of viewing the world. In What Galileo Saw, Lawrence Lipking...

The emergence of biology as a distinct science in the eighteenth century has long been a subject of scholarly controversy. Michel Foucault, on the one hand, argued that its appearance only after 1800 represented a fundamental rupture with the natural...

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europeans raised a number of questions about the nature of reality and found their answers to be different from those that had satisfied their forebears. They discounted tales of witches, trolls, magic,...

In 1969, Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill began looking outward to space colonies as the new frontier for humanity's expansion. A decade later, Eric Drexler, an MIT-trained engineer, turned his attention to the molecular world as the place where...

This is one of the most important studies in decades on Johannes Kepler, among the towering figures in the history of astronomy. Drawing extensively on Kepler's correspondence and manuscripts, James Voelkel reveals that the strikingly unusual style of...

For over three millennia, most people could understand the universe only in terms of myth, religion, and philosophy. Between 1920 and 1970, cosmology transformed into a branch of physics. With this remarkably rapid change came a theory that would finally...

How do ideas become accepted by the scientific community? How and why do scientists choose among empirically equivalent theories? In this pathbreaking book translated from the Italian, Marcello Pera addresses these questions by exploring the politics,...

This core textbook gathers an international team of historians to present a comprehensive account of the central themes in the histories of Britain, British America, and the British Caribbean seen in Atlantic perspective. This collection of individual...

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, located in the western suburbs of Chicago, has stood at the frontier of high-energy physics for forty years. "Fermilab" is the first history of this laboratory and of its powerful accelerators told from the point of...

How do scientists persuade colleagues from diverse fields to cross the disciplinary divide, risking their careers in new interdisciplinary research programs? Why do some attempts to inspire such research win widespread acclaim and support, while others...

The story of life's splendid drama has captivated generations of the general public, just as it has intrigued biologists, especially those who began to try to solve evolutionary puzzles in the years immediately after the publication of Darwin's Origin of...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780143109365Author Frank WilczekFormat PaperbackPage Count 480Imprint Penguin USAPublisher Penguin Putnam IncWeight(grams) 459gDimensions(mm) 212mm * 140mm...

In 1905, eight men from the California Academy of Sciences set sail from San Francisco for a scientific collection expedition in the Galapagos Islands, and by the time they were finished in 1906, they had completed one of the most important expeditions...

In these articles John Henry argues on the one hand for the intimate relationship between religion and early modern attempts to develop new understandings of nature, and on the other hand for the role of occult concepts in early modern natural philosophy...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780884024163Author Yota BatsakiFormat HardbackPage Count 406Imprint Dumbarton Oaks Research Library & CollectionPublisher Dumbarton Oaks Research Library &...

Was Darwin really inspired by Galapagos finches? Did Einstein's wife secretly contribute to his theories? Did Franklin fly a kite in a thunderstorm? Did a falling apple lead Newton to universal gravity? Did Galileo drop objects from the Leaning Tower of...

A translation of selected non-English texts included in Volume 13 is available in paperback. Since this supplementary paperback includes only select portions of Volume 13, it is not recommended for purchase without the main volume. Every document in The...

In 1990, NASA began developing Mission to Planet Earth (MTPE), an initiative aimed at using satellites to study the planet's environment from space. With the Earth Observing System (EOS) as its technological cornerstone, MTPE's main goal was to better...

As the sheer volume of his correspondence indicates, 1862 was a very productive year for Darwin. This was not only the case in his published output (two botanical papers and a book on the pollination mechanisms of orchids), but more particularly in the...

"There is very little reference material on black scientists in the US and even less that includes black women scientists. This book fills a void . . . " -Choice" . . . a valuable new survey of a social group almost universally neglected by chroniclers...

Few people have done as much to change how we view the world as Charles Darwin. Yet On the Origin of Species is more cited than read, and parts of it are even considered outdated. In some ways, it has been consigned to the nineteenth century. In The...