History

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...

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...

An important study for understanding the complex interconnections between basic science and its sources of economic support in the period between the two world wars. The focus of the study is on the Institute for Theoretical Physics (later renamed the...

This book questions the traditional 'grand narratives' of science and religion in the seventeenth century. The binary oppositions underlying the story - between reason and faith, between knowledge and authority, between scripture and the light of nature...

The science of botany underwent a dramatic change in the late nineteenth century. A reform movement originating in Germany took the traditionally destructive approach to the study of plant structure and physiology and transformed it into a study of plant...

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...

Originally published in 1987, this important synthesis represented the first effort by modern scholars to convey the variety of ways in which medieval scientists and natural philosophers used mathematics and mathematical modes of thought to describe...

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...

Science and the Enlightenment is a general history of eighteenth-century science covering both the physical and life sciences. It places the scientific developments of the century in the cultural context of the Enlightenment and reveals the extent to...

This assembly of lectures, each on a major aspect of the development of biochemistry, should appeal to anyone with an interest in the history of science and the nature of living things. Seven of the eight lectures are by eminent biochemists and describe...

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...

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...

When Newton died in 1727 he left a library of some 2,100 volumes. This was largely a collection of books regarded by him as a set of working tools - several of the well-thumbed surviving items are evidence of this. The books Newton owned are of...

The Disappearance of the Social in American Social Psychology is a critical conceptual history of American social psychology. In this challenging work, John Greenwood demarcates the original conception of the social dimensions of cognition, emotion and...

Charles Babbage was a key figure of a great era of British history. Best remembered for his pioneering Difference and Analytical Engines, forerunners of the modern computer, Babbage was also an active reformer of science and society. Among his friends...

When Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz first arrived in Paris in 1672 he was a well-educated, sophisticated young diplomat who had yet to show any real sign of his latent mathematical abilities. Over his next four crowded, formative years, which Professor...

Sir Roderick Murchison (1792-1871) was a giant of the imperial age. His career was tied intimately to the expansion of the political, economic and scientific realm of the British Empire. A founding father of geological science and geographical...

One of the founding fathers of organic chemistry and also a great teacher, the German scientist Justus von Liebig transformed scientific education, medical practice, and agriculture in Great Britain. William H. Brock's fresh interpretation of Liebig's...

Michael Faraday (1791-1867) was one of the most important men of science in nineteenth century Britain. His discoveries of electro-magnetic rotations (1821) and electro-magnetic induction (1831) laid the foundations of the modern electrical industry. His...

Between 1100 and 1600, the emphasis on reason in the learning and intellectual life of Western Europe became more pervasive and widespread than ever before in the history of human civilization. Of crucial significance was the invention of the university...