History of science

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans were fascinated with fraud.

Mount Vesuvius has been famous ever since its eruption in 79 CE, when it destroyed and buried the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

In this new edition, Arthur Fine looks at Einstein's philosophy of science and develops his own views on realism.

Today few would think of astronomy and astrology as fields related to theology.

As television emerged as a major cultural and economic force, many imagined that the medium would enhance civic education for topics like science.

The Enlightenment was the age in which the world became modern, challenging tradition in favor of reason, freedom, and critical inquiry.

The Faustian bargain-in which an individual or group collaborates with an evil entity in order to obtain knowledge, power, or material gain-is perhaps best exemplified by the alliance between world-renowned human geneticists and the Nazi state.

Probing the relationship between German political economy and everyday fiscal administration, The Disordered Police State focuses on the cameral sciences-a peculiarly German body of knowledge designed to train state officials-and in so doing offers a new vision of science and practice during the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries.

In 1799, Alexander von Humboldt and Aime Bonpland set out to determine whether the Orinoco River connected with the Amazon.

Fernando Vidal's trailblazing text on the origins of psychology traces the development of the discipline from its appearance in the late sixteenth century to its redefinition at the end of the seventeenth and its emergence as an institutionalized field in the eighteenth.

Measuring the Universe is the first history of the evolution of cosmic dimensions, from the work of Eratosthenes and Aristarchus in the third century B.

Although largely unknown today, during his lifetime Mutio Oddi of Urbino (1569-1639) was a highly esteemed scholar, teacher, and practitioner of a wide range of disciplines related to mathematics.

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.

A deep history of how Renaissance Italy and the Spanish empire were shaped by a lingering fascination with breeding.

A powerful reimagining of the world in which a young Charles Darwin developed his theory of evolution.

A transnational approach to understanding and analyzing knowledge circulation.

A look at the history of censorship, science, and magic from the Middle Ages to the post-Reformation era.

A close look at Gunter Blobel's transformative contributions to molecular cell biology.

Making sense of nature in one of the world's most contested borderlands.

The first historical study of export control regulations as a tool for the sharing and withholding of knowledge.

In the fall of 1950, newspapers around the world reported that the Italian-born nuclear physicist Bruno Pontecorvo and his family had mysteriously disappeared while returning to Britain from a holiday trip.

The first in-depth study of Japanese fermentation science in the twentieth century.

A forceful reckoning with the relationship between energy and power through the history of what was once East Asia's largest coal mine.

Sound Authorities shows how experiences of music and sound played a crucial role in nineteenth-century scientific inquiry in Britain.

Follow Nobel laureate and legendary teacher Enrico Fermi's lost course on geophysics.

An ambitious new model of experimentation that will reorient our understanding of the key features of experimental practice.

Tropical Africa was one of the last regions of the world to experience formal European colonialism, a process that coincided with the advent of a range of new scientific specialties and research methods.

John Modern offers a powerful and original critique of neurology's pivotal role in religious history.

At a time when the Manhattan Project was synonymous with large-scale science, physicist J.

The first comprehensive philosophical and historical account of the experimental foundations of Niels Bohr's practice of physics.

Self-styled adventurer, literary wit, philosopher, and statesman of science, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759) stood at the center of Enlightenment science and culture.

A novel inquiry into the sociopolitical dimensions of public medicine, Healing the Land and the Nation traces the relationships between disease, hygiene, politics, geography, and nationalism in British Mandatory Palestine between the world wars.

Few scenes capture the American experience so eloquently as that of a lonely train chugging across the vastness of the Great Plains, or snaking through tortuous high mountain passes.

Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911) was an internationally renowned botanist, a close friend and early supporter of Charles Darwin, and one of the first-and most successful-British men of science to become a full-time professional.

Eating the Enlightenment offers a new perspective on the history of food, looking at writings about cuisine, diet, and food chemistry as a key to larger debates over the state of the nation in Old Regime France.

The royal Parisian botanical garden, the Jardin du Roi, was a jewel in the crown of the French Old Regime, praised by both rulers and scientific practitioners.

The Victorian period in Britain was an "e;age of reform.

In 1935 geneticist Nikolai Timofeeff-Ressovsky, radiation physicist Karl G.

Increasingly, scholars in the humanities are calling for a reengagement with the natural sciences.

First published in 1690, The Court Midwife made Justine Siegemund (1636-1705) the spokesperson for the art of midwifery at a time when most obstetrical texts were written by men.

In a provocative reassessment of one of the quintessential figures of early modern science, Rose-Mary Sargent explores Robert Boyle's philosophy of experiment, a central aspect of his life and work that became a model for mid- to late seventeenth-century natural philosophers and for many who followed them.

References to the economy are ubiquitous in modern life, and virtually every facet of human activity has capitulated to market mechanisms.

The last decades of the Ming dynasty, though plagued by chaos and destruction, saw a significant increase of publications that examined advances in knowledge and technology.

We think with objects-we conduct our lives surrounded by external devices that help us recall information, calculate, plan, design, make decisions, articulate ideas, and organize the chaos that fills our heads.

Who are scientists?

Nothing is considered more natural than the connection between Isaac Newton's science and the modernity that came into being during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

The Paleobiological Revolution chronicles the incredible ascendance of the once-maligned science of paleontology to the vanguard of a field.

In 1524, Pope Clement VII gave two condemned criminals to his physician to test a promising new antidote.

The term mantle has inspired philosophers, geographers, and theologians and shaped artists' and mapmakers' visual vocabularies for thousands of years.

In the 1920s an international team of scientists and miners unearthed the richest evidence of human evolution the world had ever seen: Peking Man.