During and after the English civil wars, between 1640 and 1690, an unprecedented number of manuals teaching cryptography were published, almost all for the general public.
This book provides a comprehensive overview of the historical development of color science, told through the stories of more than 90 of the most prominent figures in the field and their contributions.
Throughout the nineteenth century, practitioners of science, writers of fiction and journalists wrote about electricity in ways that defied epistemological and disciplinary boundaries.
Figuring the Population Bomb traces the genealogy of twentieth-century demographic facts that created a mathematical panic about a looming population explosion.
Attracting philosophers, politicians, artists as well as the educated reader, Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry, first published in 1757, was a milestone in western thinking.
Although modern cell biology is often considered to have arisen following World War II in tandem with certain technological and methodological advances-in particular, the electron microscope and cell fractionation-its origins actually date to the 1830s and the development of cytology, the scientific study of cells.
Answering questions such as whether the interesting parts of science be conveyed in sermons, poems, pictures and journalism, Knight explores the history of science to show how the successes and failures of our ancestors can help us understand the position science comes to occupy now.
Reimagining Dinosaurs argues that transatlantic popular literature was critical for transforming the dinosaur into a cultural icon between 1880 and 1920
Kathleen Long explores the use of the hermaphrodite in early modern culture wars, both to question traditional theorizations of gender roles and to reaffirm those views.
Since publication of Stillman Drake's landmark volume, Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography, new and exciting information has come to light about this towering figure in the history of Western science.
The book describes the innovations that enabled botany, in the Eighteenth century, to emerge as an independent science, independent from medicine and herbalism.
A Cultural History of Chemistry in the Early Modern Age covers the period from 1500 to 1700, tracing chemical debates and practices within their cultural, social, and political contexts.
This book traces the history of how evolutionary biology transformed its understanding of females from being coy, reserved and sexually passive, to having active sexual strategies and often mating with multiple males.
In 2015 the UK became the first country in the world to legalise mitochondrial donation, a controversial germ line reproductive technology to prevent the transmission of mitochondrial disease.
Jan Wolenski ' and Sandra Lapointe Polish philosophy goes back to the 13th century, when Witelo, famous for his works in optics and the metaphysics of light, lived and worked in Silesia.
An acknowledged expert on the history of modern pharmacology and drug therapy, John Parascandola here brings together 19 of his most important papers on these subjects.
Using the "e;Parallel Lives"e; approach adopted by the Greek biographer Plutarch, noted historian of astronomy William Sheehan contrasts the lives and research careers of two famous astronomers, Percival Lowell and Edward Emerson Barnard.
The explosive debate that transformed our views about time and scientific truthOn April 6, 1922, in Paris, Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson publicly debated the nature of time.
A history of epidemic illness and political change, The Politics of Disease Control focuses on epidemics of sleeping sickness (human African trypanosomiasis) around Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika in the early twentieth century as well as the colonial public health programs designed to control them.
Through case studies, this book investigates the pictorial imaging of epidemics globally, especially from the late eighteenth century through the 1920s when, amidst expanding Western industrialism, colonialism, and scientific research, the world endured a succession of pandemics in tandem with the rise of popular visual culture and new media.
This book presents contributions from an internal symposium organized to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Specola Vaticana, or Vatican Observatory, in the Papal Palace of Castel Gandolfo.
The book is about the transition from classical to quantum mechanics, covering the historical development of this great leap, and explaining the concepts needed to understand it at a level suitable for undergraduate students.
Featuring the previously unpublished diary of Jose Maria Sobral, Under-Lieutenant of the Argentine Navy, this book provides insight on his life and his participation in Otto Nordenskjold's Swedish Antarctic Expedition of 1901-1903.
The Science of Walking recounts the story of the growing interest and investment of Western scholars, physicians, and writers in the scientific study of an activity that seems utterly trivial in its everyday performance yet essential to our human nature: walking.