History

Quantum theory is one of the great achievements of twentieth century physics. Born at the very beginning of the century, it attained a definitive form by 1932, yet continued to evolve throughout the century. Its applications remain fully a part of modern...

Having a phrenological 'head reading' was one of the most significant fads of the nineteenth century - a means for better knowing oneself and a guide for self-improvement. Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) had a lifelong yet long overlooked interest in...

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...

Beginning with World War II, missiles transformed the art of war. For the first time, cities of warring nations were vulnerable to sudden, unannounced, long-distance attacks. At the same time, rockets made possible one of the great triumphs of the modern...

Blood is messy, dangerous, and charged with meaning. By following it as it circulates through people and institutions, Jenny Bangham explores the intimate connections between the early infrastructures of blood transfusion and the development of human...

On April 13, 1970, some 205,000 miles from Earth, an explosion rocked the moon-bound Apollo 13, taking our both engines of the command module and crippling the life-support system. Guided by the ground crew in Huston, the crew took refuge in the lunar...

Pictures from the past powerfully shape current views of the world. In books, television programs, and websites, new images appear alongside others that have survived from decades ago. Among the most famous are drawings of embryos by the Darwinist Ernst...

Psychedelics, neuroscience, and historical biography come together when a journalist finds a lost photograph of Aldous Huxley and uncovers a hidden side of the celebrated author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception. Allene Symons had no inkling...

Winner of the Outstanding Manuscript Award from Phi Alpha Theta, this work explains how nationhood emerges by viewing countries as cultural artifacts, a product of "invented traditions." In the case of France, scholars sharply disagree, not only over the...

The great biologist Louis Pasteur suppressed 'awkward' data because it didn't support the case he was making. John Snow, the 'first epidemiologist' was doing nothing others had not done before. Gregor Mendel, the supposed 'founder of genetics' never...

Using the previously misunderstood interactions between Robert Boyle, widely known as "the father of chemistry," and George Starkey, an alchemist and the most prominent American scientific writer before Benjamin Franklin, as their guide, William R...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781434478207Author J Arthur ThomsonFormat HardbackPage Count 476Imprint Wildside PressPublisher Wildside PressWeight(grams) 1039gDimensions(mm) 254mm *...

Although the product of a self-proclaimed consensus politics, the British Empire was always based on communications supremacy and the knowledge of the atmosphere. Using the metaphor of a thread of five pieces representing the categories science,...

In 1984, Noel Swerdlow and Otto Neugebauer argued that Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) explained planetary motion by using mathematical devices and astronomical models originally developed by Islamic astronomers in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries...

How the classic mirror test served as a portal for scientists to explore questions of self-awarenessSince the late eighteenth century, scientists have placed subjects-humans, infants, animals, and robots-in front of mirrors in order to look for signs of...

How Cold War America came to attribute human evolutionary success to our species' unique capacity for murderAfter World War II, the question of how to define a universal human nature took on new urgency. Creatures of Cain charts the rise and precipitous...

Although historians have suggested for some time that we move away from the assumption of a necessary clash between science and religion, the conflict narrative persists in contemporary discourse. But why? And how do we really know what people actually...

Robert P. Crease looks at questions about when a scientific discovery becomes accepted fact, who decides this and how citizens should interact with the scientific process. He answers by introducing the world's greatest thinkers and explaining how they...

This collection shifts the focus from collective memory to individual memory, by incorporating new performative approaches to identity, place and becoming. Drawing upon cultural geography, the book provides an accessible framework to approach key aspects...

This book tries to look at human thought and action from a scientific perspective, and in the process, acquaints the reader with essential concepts about science and its history. It takes a broad look at our present troubles without overlooking some...

Through films that alternate between containment, order, and symmetry on the one hand, and obsession, explosiveness, and a lack of control on the other, Chantal Akerman has gained a reputation as one of the most significant filmmakers working today. Her...

From the start, the Soviet human space program had an identity crisis. Were cosmonauts heroic pilots steering their craft through the dangers of space, or were they mere passengers riding safely aboard fully automated machines? Tensions between Soviet...

Thomas Jefferson was the only president who could read and understand Newton's Principia. Benjamin Franklin is credited with establishing the science of electricity. John Adams had the finest education in science that the new country could provide,...

Jacopo Zabarella's two treatises On Methods and On Regressus (1578) are among the most important Renaissance discussions of how scientific knowledge should be acquired, arranged, and transmitted. They belong to a lively debate about the order in which...

In this wide-ranging book, Brian Davies discusses the basis for scientists' claims to knowledge about the world. He looks at science historically, emphasizing not only the achievements of scientists from Galileo onwards, but also their mistakes. He...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781571313539Author Shawn OttoFormat PaperbackPage Count 514Imprint Milkweed EditionsPublisher Milkweed Editions

We know it simply as "the pill," yet its genesis was anything but simple. Jonathan Eig's masterful narrative revolves around four principal characters: the fiery feminist Margaret Sanger, who was a champion of birth control in her campaign for the rights...

This book is a history of nuclear weapons. From their initial theoretical development at the start of the twentieth century to the recent tests in North Korea, Jeremy Bernstein seeks to describe the basic science of nuclear weaponry at each point in the...

Niels Bohr was a central figure in quantum physics, well known for his work on atomic structure and his contributions to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. In this book, philosopher of science Slobodan Perovic explores the way Bohr...

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.This book breaks new ground by situating animals and their diseases at the very heart of modern medicine. In demonstrating their historical significance as subjects and shapers of medicine, it offers...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780684863009Author John MaddoxFormat PaperbackPage Count 452Imprint TouchstonePublisher Simon & SchusterWeight(grams) 571gDimensions(mm) 216mm * 140mm * 25mm

The book offers a history of the agricultural sciences in Nazi Germany. It analyzes scientific practice under the Nazi regime, Nazi agricultural policy and autarkic strategies as well as expansion policy in Eastern Europe. It also offers new insights...

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...

Eyes on the Universe is an illustrated history of the telescope, beginning with pre-telescopic observatories and the refractors of Galileo, Lippershey and Digges, and ending with the most modern instruments including - of course - the Hubble Space...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781476754352Author Peter WatsonFormat PaperbackPage Count 576Imprint Simon & SchusterPublisher Simon & SchusterWeight(grams) 544gDimensions(mm) 226mm *...

In this compelling history of the co-ordinated, transnational defence of medical experimentation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Rob Boddice explores the experience of vivisection as humanitarian practice. He captures the rise of the...

Perhaps never in history has society been so fascinated with a single machine as when, in early modern Europe, the clock evolved into a major cultural image, widely used in literature, science, and especially Cartesian philosophy. Yet in England, there...

Inside NASA explores how an agency praised for its planetary probes and expeditions to the moon became notorious for the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger and a series of other malfunctions. Using archival evidence as well as in-depth interviews...

With over 150 alphabetically arranged entries about key scientists, concepts, discoveries, technological innovations, and learned institutions, the Oxford Guide to Physics and Astronomy traces the history of physics and astronomy from the Renaissance to...

In the seventeenth century the microscope opened up a new world of observation, and, according to Catherine Wilson, profoundly revised the thinking of scientists and philosophers alike. The interior of nature, once closed off to both sympathetic...