History of science

An exploration of the censorship of medical books from their proliferation in print through the prohibitions placed on them during the Counter-Reformation.

Prior to 1735, South America was terra incognita to many Europeans.

In the mid-1850s, no scientist in the British Empire was more visible than Richard Owen.

For centuries, historians have speculated about the life of Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh.

A masterful, authoritative account of the scientists and discoveries that enabled us to understand the age of the earth In 1650, Archbishop James Ussher of Armagh joined the long-running theological debate on the age of the earth by famously announcing that creation had occurred on October 23, 4004 B.

The study of the chimpanzee, one of the human species' closest relatives, has led scientists to exciting discoveries about evolution, behavior, and cognition over the past half century.

Robert Kohler shows exactly how entrepreneurial academic scientists became intimate "e;partners in science"e; with the officers of the large foundations created by John D.

Nineteenth-century chemists were faced with a particular problem: how to depict the atoms and molecules that are beyond the direct reach of our bodily senses.

In the late 1800s, "e;Arctic Fever"e; swept across the nation as dozens of American expeditions sailed north to the Arctic to find a sea route to Asia and, ultimately, to stand at the North Pole.

Empiricism today implies the dispassionate scrutiny of facts.

Located in the heart of England's Lake District, the placid waters of Thirlmere seem to be the embodiment of pastoral beauty.

Prior to the First World War, more people learned of evolutionary theory from the voluminous writings of Charles Darwin's foremost champion in Germany, Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), than from any other source, including the writings of Darwin himself.

Did Darwin see evolution as progressive, directed toward producing ever more advanced forms of life?

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the British sought to master the physical properties of the oceans; in the second half, they lorded over large portions of the oceans' outer rim.

After Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, his second declaration, after socialism, was that Cuba would become a leader in international science.

Galileo's telescopic discoveries, and especially his observation of sunspots, caused great debate in an age when the heavens were thought to be perfect and unchanging.

Given the ubiquity of environmental rhetoric in the modern world, it's easy to think that the meaning of the terms environment and environmentalism are and always have been self-evident.

A history of the unsustainable modern diet-heavy in meat, wheat, and sugar-that requires more land and resources than the planet is able to support.

This book reevaluates the changes to chymistry that took place from 1660 to 1730 through a close study of the chymist Wilhelm Homberg (1653-1715) and the changing fortunes of his discipline at the Academie Royale des Sciences, France's official scientific body.

The connection between mind and brain has been one of the most persistent problems in modern Western thought; even recent advances in neuroscience haven't been able to explain it satisfactorily.

Why do we eat?

By focusing on chromosomes, Heredity under the Microscope offers a new history of postwar human genetics.

Periodicals played a vital role in the developments in science and medicine that transformed nineteenth-century Britain.

The scientists affiliated with the early Royal Society of London have long been regarded as forerunners of modern empiricism, rejecting the symbolic and moral goals of Renaissance natural history in favor of plainly representing the world as it really was.

In November 1919, newspapers around the world alerted readers to a sensational new theory of the universe: Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.

In Inventing Chemistry, historian John C.

The Victorians, perhaps more than any Britons before them, were diggers and sifters of the past.

The discovery of the New World raised many questions for early modern scientists: What did these lands contain?

How did the fact become modernity's most favored unit of knowledge?

This ambitious book by one of the most original and provocative thinkers in science studies offers a sophisticated new understanding of the nature of scientific, mathematical, and engineering practice and the production of scientific knowledge.

Cybernetics is often thought of as a grim military or industrial science of control.

Although many of the practical and intellectual traditions that make up modern science date back centuries, the category of "e;science"e; itself is a relative novelty.

Harold C.

When we want advice from others, we often casually speak of "e;getting some feedback.

The Republic of Color delves deep into the history of color science in the United States to unearth its origins and examine the scope of its influence on the industrial transformation of turn-of-the-century America.

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.

During the nineteenth century, Britain became the first gaslit society, with electric lighting arriving in 1878.

The Society for Psychical Research was established in 1882 to further the scientific study of consciousness, but it arose in the surf of a larger cultural need.

Databases have revolutionized nearly every aspect of our lives.

In Jane Addams's Evolutionary Theorizing, Marilyn Fischer advances the bold and original claim that Addams's reasoning in her first book, Democracy and Social Ethics, is thoroughly evolutionary.

Synthesizing Hope opens up the material and social world of pharmaceuticals by focusing on an unexpected place: iThemba Pharmaceuticals.

This is not only the first global history of nineteenth-century science but the first global history of phrenology.

Today's science tells us that our bodies are filled with molecular machinery that orchestrates all sorts of life processes.

Out of the diverse traditions of medical humanism, classical philology, and natural philosophy, Renaissance naturalists created a new science devoted to discovering and describing plants and animals.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, geology-and its claims that the earth had a long and colorful prehuman history-was widely dismissedasdangerous nonsense.

In Modern Nature,Lynn K.

If the twentieth century saw the rise of "e;Big Science,"e; then the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were surely an age of thrift.

In this book, historian Maria M.

Knowledge matters, and states have a stake in managing its movement to protect a variety of local and national interests.

Discerning Experts assesses the assessments that many governments rely on to help guide environmental policy and action.