History

The thirteen original essays in this book examine the status and development of the sciences in the eighteenth century. The last generation has seen a revolution in the methodology adopted by historians of science: The development of science is no longer...

A collection of twenty original essays on the history of science and mathematics. The topics covered embrace the main themes of Whiteside's scholarly work, emphasising Newtonian topics: mathematics and astronomy to Newton; Newton's manuscripts; Newton's...

The history of the Royal Society in the nineteenth century is published as a full-length account for the first time in this book. Dr Marie Boas Hall has meticulously explored this fascinating period, using the Royal Society's own records. In 1800 the...

This book is a study of the astronomical culture of sixteenth-century Europe. It examines, in particular, the ways in which members of the nascent international astronomical community shared information, attracted patronage and respect for their work,...

Dubbed 'Darwin's Bulldog' for his combative role in the Victorian controversies over evolutionary theory, Thomas Huxley has been widely regarded as the epitome of the professional scientist who emerged in the nineteenth century from the restrictions of...

This book challenges the traditional historiography of the Scientific Revolution, probably the single most important unifying concept in the history of science. Usually referring to the period from Copernicus to Newton (roughly 1500 to 1700), the...

Renaissance and Revolution is a collection of fifteen essays which opens up alternative perspectives on some of the problems seen to be associated with the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The topics treated include the...

Between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries, there was created under the Yi Dynasty in Korea a remarkable series of astronomical instruments, star-charts and clocks. The present volume is the result of close collaboration between four...

Historians have long recognized that the rebirth of science in twelfth-century Europe flowed from a search for ancient scientific texts. But this search presupposes knowledge and interest; we only seek what we know to be valuable. The emergence of...

During the 1930s, psychologists Gordon Allport, Gardner Murphy, and Lois Barclay Murphy emerged from the fields of social and personality psychology to challenge the neo-behavioralist status quo in American social science. Willing to experiment with the...

Modern chemistry, so alarming, so necessary, so ubiquitous, became a mature science in nineteenth-century Europe. As it developed, often from a lowly position in medicine or in industry, so chemists established themselves as professional men; but...

Psychologists on the March argues that the Second World War had a profound impact on the modern psychological profession in America. Before the war, psychology was viewed largely as an academic discipline, drawing its ideology and personnel from the...

Psychologists on the March argues that the Second World War had a profound impact on the modern psychological profession in America. Before the war, psychology was viewed largely as an academic discipline, drawing its ideology and personnel from the...

This innovative collection of original essays focuses on the ways in which geography, gender, race, and religion influenced the reception of Darwinism in the English-speaking world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although studies of...

This book compares resistance to technology across time, nations, and technologies. Three post-war examples - nuclear power, information technology, and biotechnology - are used in the analysis. The focus is on post-1945 Europe, with comparisons made...

Focusing on the two seventeenth-century pioneers of microscopic dicovery, the Dutchmen Jan Swammerdam and Antoni van Leewenhoek, Ruestow demonstrates that their uneasiness with their social circumstances spurred their discoveries. Though arguing that...

During the 1930s, psychologists Gordon Allport, Gardner Murphy, and Lois Barclay Murphy emerged from the fields of social and personality psychology to challenge the neo-behavioralist status quo in American social science. Willing to experiment with the...

This collection of original essays by his former graduate students and colleagues honors Richard S. Westfall, a highly influential scholar in the history of the physical sciences and their relations with religion. The book is divided into three parts...

This book is about the influence of varying theological conceptions of contingency and necessity on two versions of the mechanical philosophy in the seventeenth century. Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) and Rene Descartes (1596-1650) both believed that all...

This is a study of the nature and role of science in the exploration of the Canadian Arctic. It covers the century that began with the British Royal Naval expeditions of 1818 and ended with the Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913-18. Professor Levere...

Probably the most celebrated controversy in all of the history of science was that between Newton and Leibniz over the invention of the calculus. The argument ranged far beyond a mere priority dispute and took on the character of a war between two...

William Whiston succeeded Sir Isaac Newton as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge in 1703. Like his predecessor, Whiston presents an interesting combination of the scientific and the theological mind, but whereas Newton carefully concealed the...

Transformation and Tradition in the Sciences presents a sampling of work in the history of science by colleagues and former students and associates of I. Bernard Cohen, one of the most influential figures in the rise of the history of science as a...

The discovery of high-temperature superconductivity was hailed as a major scientific breakthrough, inducing an unprecedented excitement and expectation among the scientific community and in the international press. This book sets this research...

This is the first book in any language to attempt a comprehensive discussion of the relations between government, technology and science in Philip II's Spain. In histories of early-modern European technology and science, Spain has consistently been...

Charles Babbage (1791-1871) is today remembered mainly for his attempt to complete his difference and analytical engines, the principles of which anticipate the major ideas of the modern digital computer. This book describes the evolution of Babbage's...

The greatest ambition of any moderately successful nineteenth-century French scientist was to become a member of the Academy of Sciences. Science under Control is the first major study, in any language, of this elite institution, in a period which began...

The founding of the Nobel Prize in 1901 confirmed the internationalisation of science. The workings of the Nobel institution rested on an international community of scientists who forwarded candidates for the prizes. Along with the candidates and...

This book illuminates the role of technological stagnation in the decline of the American electric utility industry in the late 1960s and 1970s. Unlike other interpreters of the industry's woes, Professor Hirsh argues that a long and successful history...

Science, Vine and Wine in Modern France examines the role of science in the civilization of wine in modern France. Viticulture, the science of the vine itself, and oenology, the science of winemaking, are its subjects. Together they can boast of at least...

Focusing on the two seventeenth-century pioneers of microscopic dicovery, the Dutchmen Jan Swammerdam and Antoni van Leewenhoek, Ruestow demonstrates that their uneasiness with their social circumstances spurred their discoveries. Though arguing that...

This book explores the origins of the American intelligence testing movement. It follows the life and work of Henry Herbert Goddard, America's first intelligence tester and author of the most popular American eugenics tract, The Kallikak Family. The...

Where did we come from? Before there was life there had to be something to live on - a planet, a solar system. During the past 200 years, astronomers and geologists have developed and tested several different theories about the origin of the solar system...

The Morals of Measurement is a contribution to the social histories of quantification and electrical technology in nineteenth-century Britain, Germany and France. It shows how the advent of commercial electrical lighting stimulated the industrialization...

Jacob Berzelius (1779-1848), one of the world's leading scientists in the first half of the nineteenth century, dominated the field of chemistry, animated the cultural life of his native Sweden, and served for three decades as perpetual secretary of the...

According to received historiography, the fundamental issue in eighteenth-century optics was whether light could be understood as the emission of particles, or as the motion of waves in a subtle medium. Moreover, the emission theory of light was supposed...

The founding of the Nobel Prize in 1901 confirmed the internationalisation of science. The workings of the Nobel institution rested on an international community of scientists who forwarded candidates for the prizes. Along with the candidates and...

This book examines four medical innovations that epitomize the pitfalls of progress: DES, a synthetic estrogen prescribed to millions of women to prevent miscarriages, which produced devastating side effects; the artificial heart; the 1976 swine flu...

When Western missionaries introduced modern chemistry to China in the 1860s, they called this discipline hua-hsueh, literally, 'the study of change'. In this first full-length work on science in modern China, James Reardon-Anderson describes the...

Where the Truth Lies is an absorbing account of a case of suspected fraud involving the tragic career of the molecular biologist Franz Moewus that illustrates all that can go wrong in scientific knowledge-making. Jan Sapp follows Moewus' meteoric flight...