History of science Books
The University of Chicago Press Friending the Past The Sense of History in the
Book SynopsisLiu takes our concern with the fleeting and virtual nature of our relationships today and gives it a historical angle, drawing examples from past societies and their media forms and revealing new ways of seeing history in the continual overwriting and changing of our programming languages.Trade Review"Friending the Past is argued with Alan Liu's characteristic power, and exhibits the high level of creative abstraction that I think of as the signature asset of Romanticists, including Liu. This book is thoughtfully engaged with a breadth of research and is a brilliant observation of our digital milieu, its overarching logics, and underlying conditions."--Lisa Gitelman, New York University
£90.25
The University of Chicago Press Friending the Past The Sense of History in the
Book SynopsisLiu takes our concern with the fleeting and virtual nature of our relationships today and gives it a historical angle, drawing examples from past societies and their media forms and revealing new ways of seeing history in the continual overwriting and changing of our programming languages.Trade Review"Friending the Past is argued with Alan Liu's characteristic power, and exhibits the high level of creative abstraction that I think of as the signature asset of Romanticists, including Liu. This book is thoughtfully engaged with a breadth of research and is a brilliant observation of our digital milieu, its overarching logics, and underlying conditions."--Lisa Gitelman, New York University
£29.70
The University of Chicago Press The Outward Mind
Book Synopsis
£31.00
The University of Chicago Press Science Incarnate Historical Embodiments of
Book SynopsisWe have specific images of the kinds of bodies that house great minds. Focusing on the 17th century to the present, this book examines how intellectuals have sought to establish the value and authority of their ideas through public displays of their private life.
£24.00
The University of Chicago Press The Strategy of Life Teleology and Mechanics in
Book Synopsis
£34.20
The University of Chicago Press Airs Appearance Literary Atmosphere in British
Book SynopsisThe author enlists her readers in pursuit of the elusive concept of atmosphere in literary works. In this title, she shows how diverse conceptions of air in the eighteenth century converged in British fiction, producing the modern literary sense of atmosphere and moving novelists to explore the threshold between material and immaterial worlds.Trade Review"Air's Appearance is witty as well as elegant. The subject is original, the research breathtakingly wide-ranging, and the language lyrically clear. Its suggestiveness alone opens up so many new interpretive possibilities, so many new ways of historical thinking, so many new perceptions of air in text and air around. It makes you think and see differently." (Cynthia Wall, University of Virginia)"
£42.75
The University of Chicago Press The Practical Imagination The German Sciences of
Book SynopsisDrawing on the work of Foucault and Bourdieu, this book sets out to illuminate the practical imagination as it was exhibited in the transformation of the political and social sciences during 19th-century Germany. Using information from many sources, it examines the learned disciplines of the time.
£30.40
The University of Chicago Press Colonialism and Science Saint Domingue and the
Book SynopsisSaint Domingue (Haiti) was the world's richest colony in the eighteenth century and home to an active society of science - one of only three in the world at that time. This study of the colon raises questions about the relationship between science and society that historians of the colonial experience are grappling with today.Trade Review"That one book can successfully address topics of such importance and bring them to rare clarity, coupled with an unprecedented use of archives, means that it is a major book and its author needs to be placed in the first tier of his generation's European historians." - Eighteenth-Century Studies "By deftly weaving together imperialism and science in the story of French colonialism, [McClellan]... brings to light the history of an almost forgotten colony." - Journal of Modern History "McClellan has produced an impressive case study offering excellent surveys of Saint Domingue's colonial history and its history of science." - Isis"
£28.00
The University of Chicago Press Visions of Cell Biology
Book SynopsisAlthough 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. By 1924, with the publication of Edmund Vincent Cowdry's General Cytology, the discipline had stretched beyond the bounds of purely microscopic observation to include the chemical, physical, and genetic analysis of cells. Inspired by Cowdry's classic, watershed work, this book collects contributions from cell biologists, historians, and philosophers of science to explore the history and current status of cell biology. Despite extraordinary advances in describing both the structure and function of cells, cell biology tends to be overshadowed by molecular biology, a field that developed contemporaneously. This book remedies that unjust disparity through an investigation of cel
£37.05
The University of Chicago Press Darwins Evolving Identity
Book Synopsis
£41.80
The University of Chicago Press Air Apparent Hoe Meteorologists Learned to Map
Book SynopsisPresenting the story of the weather map, this book traces its history; discusses debates among scientists on the enigma of storms and global change; explains strategies for mapping the upper atmosphere and forecasting disaster; and exposes the efforts to detect and control air pollution.
£24.00
The University of Chicago Press Science in Translation
Book SynopsisIn this work, Scott Montgomery explores the roles that translation has played in the development of Western science from antiquity to the end of the 20th century. It presents case histories of science in translation from a variety of disciplines and cultural contexts, both Western and non-Western.Trade Review"[A] book of great richness, as much for its examples as for its ideas, which keenly illustrate the development of knowledge across languages and epochs. It is a book to read and reread. Its subject is important; it is ours, it is our history." - Andre Clas, Meta: Journal des Traducteurs; "[T]his book... seems to stand alone on the shelf. A good thing, therefore, that it is so full of good things, both in the content and the prose." - William R. Everdell, MAA Online; "An impressive work.... By reminding us of the role of diverse cultures in the elevation of science within a particular nation or civilization, the book makes a substantial contribution to the postmodern worldview that emphasizes multiculturalism." - Choice
£30.40
The University of Chicago Press The Moral Meaning of Nature Nietzsches Darwinian
Book SynopsisWhat, if anything, does biological evolution tell us about the nature of religion, ethical values, or even the meaning and purpose of life? The Moral Meaning of Nature sheds new light on these enduring questions by examining the significance of an earlierand unjustly neglecteddiscussion of Darwin in late nineteenth-century Germany. We start with Friedrich Nietzsche, whose writings staged one of the first confrontations with the Christian tradition using the resources of Darwinian thought. The lebensphilosophie, or life-philosophy, that arose from his engagement with evolutionary ideas drew responses from other influential thinkers, includingFranz Overbeck, Georg Simmel, and Heinrich Rickert. These critics all offered cogent challenges to Nietzsche's appropriation of the newly transforming biological sciences, his negotiation between science and religion, and his interpretation of the implications of Darwinian thought. They also each proposed alternative ways of making sense of Niet
£26.00
The University of Chicago Press A Cultural History of Heredity
Book SynopsisIt was only around 1800 that heredity began to enter debates among physicians, breeders, and naturalists. Soon thereafter it evolved into one of the most fundamental concepts of biology. In this book, the authors offer a succinct cultural history of the scientific concept of heredity.Trade Review"A Cultural History of Heredity is an enormously interesting and persuasive book that will speak not only to historians of science but also to biologists and general social and intellectual historians interested in the interface between the nitty-gritty of biology and the backdrop of social and cultural affairs." (Frederick B. Churchill, Indiana University)"
£76.00
The University of Chicago Press Culture and the Course of Human Evolution
Book SynopsisAn argument for the role of culture in human evolution, arguing that the leaps we made can only really be understood if we explore the role of culture in their development.
£24.00
The University of Chicago Press Hayek and the Evolution of Capitalism
Book SynopsisHayek used arguments from evolution to build his view of capitalism; Beck analyzes them and finds them wantingincomplete, inaccurate, and failing to understand the science.
£33.25
The University of Chicago Press The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe
Book SynopsisA history of the development of the concept of the human body as an integrated whole susceptible to damage but also available for treatment, largely in the wake of the catastrophic injuries seen in WWI.
£91.00
The University of Chicago Press The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe
Book SynopsisA history of the development of the concept of the human body as an integrated whole susceptible to damage but also available for treatment, largely in the wake of the catastrophic injuries seen in WWI.
£31.00
The University of Chicago Press The Forgotten Sense Meditations on Touch
Book SynopsisA series of belles lettres-style reflections on touch and its role in our life, art, and culture.
£76.00
The University of Chicago Press The Forgotten Sense Meditations on Touch
Book SynopsisA series of belles lettres-style reflections on touch and its role in our life, art, and culture.
£24.00
University of Chicago Press Dreamers Visionaries and Revolutionaries in the
Book SynopsisThe third in a series of collections of brief lives of prominent scientists, this one focuses on the life sciences and thus features some major names, from Darwin to Crick to Goodall.
£98.80
University of Chicago Press Alchemy Tried in the Fire
Book SynopsisUsing the previously misunderstood interactions between Robert Boyle, widely known as "the father of chemistry," and George Starkey, an alchemist and the most prominent American scientific writer before Benjamin Franklin, as their guide, William R. Newman and Lawrence M.Trade Review"This is the history of science at its best: erudite, wide-ranging, and convincingly iconoclastic." - Anthony Grafton; "This book will be read by historians of chemistry, but it ought to be read much more widely, by historians of science more generally, of course, but also by anyone interested in the processes of intellectual change and in the problem of understanding practice." - Pamela H. Smith, American Historical Review"
£33.41
The University of Chicago Press This Land Is Your Land
Book SynopsisField biology is enjoying a resurgence due to several factors, the most important being the realization that there is no ecology, no conservation, and no ecosystem restoration without an understanding of the basic relationships between species and their environmentsan understanding gleaned only through field-based natural history. With this resurgence, modern field biologists find themselves asking fundamental existential questions such as: Where did we come from? What is our story? Are we part of a larger legacy? In This Land Is Your Land, seasoned field biologist Michael J. Lannoo answers these questions and more in a tale rooted in the people and institutions of the Midwest. It is a story told from the ground up, a rubber bootbased natural history of field biology in America. Lannoo illuminates characters such as John Wesley Powell, William Temple Hornaday, and Olaus and Adolph Muriehomegrown midwestern field biologists who either headed east to populate major research centers or went west to conduct their fieldwork along the frontier. From the pioneering work of Victor Shelford, Henry Chandler Cowles, and Aldo Leopold to contemporary insights from biologists such as Jim Furnish and historians such as William Cronon, Lannoo's unearthing of Americanand particularly midwesternfield biologists reveals how these scientists influenced American ecology, conservation biology, and restoration ecology, and in turn drove global conservation efforts through environmental legislation and land set-asides. This Land Is Your Land reveals the little-known legacy of midwestern field biologists, whose ethos and discoveries have enabled us to preserve and understand not just their land, but all lands.
£26.00
The University of Chicago Press Technology
Book Synopsis
£31.00
The University of Chicago Press Greening the Alliance The Diplomacy of NATOs
Book Synopsis
£30.40
The University of Chicago Press Seeing Green The Use and Abuse of American
Book Synopsis
£26.00
The University of Chicago Press Make It Rain
Book SynopsisAn accessible history of the sad and hilarious history of attempts to make it rain, snow, or hail on commandTrade Review"Make it Rain is a comprehensive history of American efforts to control the weather and the hubris of those who promised to tame hurricanes and conquer drought. Harper's account not only tells this fascinating story, it offers valuable historical context for those who are grappling with the challenges of climate change today."--Brian Balogh "cohost of Backstory with the American History Guys "
£28.00
The University of Chicago Press Discerning Experts
Book SynopsisEvaluates expert assessments used by governments for advice on the science, economics, and policy options available to confront large-scale environmental problems
£31.00
The University of Chicago Press Osiris Volume 33 Science and Capitalism
Book SynopsisThe historical relationship between science and capitalism has long stood as a central question in science studies, at least since its foundations in the 1930s. Taking inspiration from the recent surge of scholarly interest in the history of capitalism, as well as from renewed attention to political economy by historians of science and technology, this Osiris volume revisits this classic quandary, foregrounding the entanglements between these two powerful and unruly historical forces and tracing the diverse ways they mutually shaped each other. Key attention is paid to the practices of knowledge work that enable both scientific and capitalistic action and to the diversity of global sites and circuits in which science/capitalism have been performed. The assembled papers excavate an array of tangled nodes at the science/capitalism nexus, spanning from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first, from Nevada to Central Asia to Japan, from microbiology to industrial psychology to public he
£27.00
The University of Chicago Press Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins
Book SynopsisOver the course of human history, the sciences, and biology in particular, have often been manipulated to cause immense human suffering. By investigating the past, this book features contributors who hope to better prepare us to discern ideological abuse of science when it occurs in the future.
£96.90
The University of Chicago Press Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins
Book SynopsisOver the course of human history, the sciences, and biology in particular, have often been manipulated to cause immense human suffering. By investigating the past, this book features contributors who hope to better prepare us to discern ideological abuse of science when it occurs in the future.
£38.00
The University of Chicago Press Biology Takes Form Animal Morphology and the
Book SynopsisThis study argues that morphology was integral to the life sciences of the 19th century. It traces the development of morphological research in German universities and illuminates significant institutional as well as intellectual changes in 19th-century German biology.Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Abbreviations 1: Situating Morphology Pt. 1: Morphology and Physiology 2: The Study of Form before 1850 3: Rearranging the Sciences of Animal Life, 1845-1870 Pt. 2: Evolutionary Morphology, 1860-1880 4: Descent and the Laws of Development 5: Evolutionary Morphology at Jena 6: Evolution and Morphology among the Zoologists, 1860-1880 7: Evolutionary Morphology in Anatomy: Carl Gegenbaur and His School Pt. 3: Morphology and Biology, 1880-1900 8: The Kompetenzkonflikt within the Evolutionary Morphological Program 9: New Approaches to Form, 1880-1900: Rhetoric, Research, and Rewards 10: Morphology, Biology, and the Zoological Professoriate 11: Morphology and Disciplinary Development: Observations and Reflections App. 1. Anatomy and Zoology Professors, 1810-1918, by Birthdate App. 2. Professorships in Zoology, 1810-1918 App. 3. Professorships in Anatomy, 1810-1918 Archival Sources Bibliography Index
£117.80
The University of Chicago Press Biology Takes Form Animal Morphology and the
Book SynopsisThis study argues that morphology was integral to the life sciences of the 19th century. It traces the development of morphological research in German universities and illuminates significant institutional as well as intellectual changes in 19th-century German biology.
£42.75
The University of Chicago Press Foundations of Paleoecology Classic Papers with
Book Synopsis
£113.00
The University of Chicago Press Foundations of Paleoecology
Book Synopsis
£49.40
University of Chicago Press The Highlands Controversy Constructing
Book Synopsis
£57.00
The University of Chicago Press Synthesizing Hope
Book Synopsis
£68.40
The University of Chicago Press Synthesizing Hope
Book Synopsis
£24.00
The University of Chicago Press Jane Addamss Evolutionary Theorizing
Book Synopsis"This book tells the story of how Jane Addams, during her first decade at Hull House, used social evolutionary thinking to develop a method of ethical deliberation. Addams presented her method for addressing the most troubling social problems of the era in Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), a foundational text of classical American pragmatism."--Trade Review"Marilyn Fischer serves as a time-traveling tour guide who takes us on a journey that reveals the genesis and meaning behind Jane Addams's first monograph. Fischer's detective work, tracking Addams' allusions, paraphrases, and quotes, reveals her connection to the wider world of social evolutionary theory and helps us better understand and appreciate the work as a historical text. Her erudite study of Addams's prose and its connection to other theorists of the time help us decode the lost meanings of Addams's work. You'll never read Democracy and Social Ethics the same way again."--Cathy Moran Hajo, director, The Jane Addams Papers Project "Prominent Progressive Era social activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Addams was also an intellectual of the first order. In this groundbreaking book, Marilyn Fischer probes deeply Addams's contributions to a central debate of her day: What implications did Darwin's theory of evolution have for social theory? Fischer deftly traces the influence of contemporary debates on the development of Addams's original social evolutionary theory. As Fischer brilliantly argues, in 1902, Adams presented that theory to the world in her first book, Democracy and Social Ethics."--Louise W. Knight, author of Jane Addams: Spirit in Action "Fischer's beautifully written book is a model of scholarship, offering an unparalleled view into the scientific and literary contexts of Addams's early work. In demonstrating that Democracy and Social Ethics must be read against the background of evolutionary theories of social change, Fischer has fundamentally transformed our understanding of this book and its inception."--Trevor Pearce, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
£37.05
The University of Chicago Press The Culture of Feedback Ecological Thinking in
Book SynopsisWhen we want advice, we often casually speak of reaching out to others to get some feedback. But how many of us give a thought to what this phrase actually means? The idea of feedback actually dates to World War II, when the term was developed to describe the dynamics of self-regulating systems, which correct their actions by feeding their effects back into the system. For example, antiaircraft weapons systems could learn to predict how planes might try to evade them and adjust their firing patterns accordingly. By the early 1970s, feedback had evolved to become the governing trope for a counterculture that was reoriented and reinvigorated by ecological thinking. The Culture of Feedback digs deep into a dazzling variety of left-of-center experiences and attitudes from this misunderstood period, bringing us a new look at the wild side of the 1970s. Belgrad shows us how ideas from systems theory were taken up by the counterculture and the environmental movement, eventually influencing a
£64.60
The University of Chicago Press The Culture of Feedback
Book Synopsis
£24.00
The University of Chicago Press Acolytes of Nature Defining Natural Science in
Book SynopsisIn the early eighteenth century, the modern German word that would later mean science, naturwissenschaft, was not even included in dictionaries. By 1850, however, the term was in use everywhere. This title follows the emergence of this important new category within German-speaking Europe.Trade Review"Denise Phillips's study is a worthy addition to the long and continually growing body of excellent scholarship on the history of German science." (Nicolaas Rupke, Gottingen University)"
£999.99
The University of Chicago Press Beyond the Laboratory Scientists as Political
Book Synopsis
£76.00
The University of Chicago Press Time Travelers
Book SynopsisThe Victorians, perhaps more than any Britons before them, were diggers and sifters of the past. Though they were not the first to be fascinated by history, the intensity and range of Victorian preoccupations with the past was unprecedented and of lasting importance. They paved the way for many of our modern disciplines, discovered the primeval monsters we now call the dinosaurs, and built many of Britain's most important national museums and galleries. To a large degree, they created the perceptual frameworks through which we continue to understand the past. Out of their discoveries, new histories emerged, giving rise to new debates, while seemingly well-known pasts were thrown into confusion by new tools and methods of scrutiny. If in the eighteenth century the study of the past had been the province of a handful of elites, new technologies and economic development in the nineteenth century meant that the past, in all its brilliant detail, was for the first time the property of t
£24.00
The University of Chicago Press Inventing Chemistry
Book SynopsisFocuses on Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738), a Dutch medical and chemical professor whose work reached a wide, educated audience and became the template for chemical knowledge in the eighteenth century. This title reveals how Boerhaave restructured and reinterpreted various practices from diverse chemical traditions - including craft chemistry.Trade Review"Herman Boerhaave was famous in the eighteenth century as the man who taught Europe chemistry, though he has been little studied since. John C. Powers has finally given him his due. In a work of meticulous and imaginative scholarship, he has shown how Boerhaave built his reputation by organizing chemistry for the purpose of pedagogy. In Boerhaave's classroom, as Powers shows, chemistry shrugged off its alchemical heritage and emerged as a science of the Enlightenment." (Jan Golinski, University of New Hampshire)"
£76.00
The University of Chicago Press Osiris Volume 34 Presenting Futures Past Science
Book SynopsisThe role of fiction in both understanding and interpreting the world has recently become an increasingly important topic for many of the human sciences.This volume ofOsirisfocuses on the relationship between a particular genre of storytellingscience fiction (SF), told through a variety of mediaand the history of science. The protagonists of these two enterprises have a lot in common. Both SF and the history of science are oriented towards the (re)construction of unfamiliar worlds; both are fascinated by the ways in which natural and social systems interact; both are critically aware of the different ways in which the social (class, gender, race, sex, species) has inflected the experience of the scientific. Taking a global approach,Presenting Futures Pastexamines the ways in which SF can be used to investigate the cultural status and authority afforded to science at different times and in different places. The essays consider the role played by SF in the history of specific scientifi
£28.00
The University of Chicago Press Loving Faster than Light
Book SynopsisSuitable for those interested in popular science, this title focuses on the popular reception of relativity in Britain and demonstrates how abstract science came to be entangled with class politics, media technology, changing sex relations, crime, cricket, and cinematography in the British imagination during the 1920s.Trade Review"Loving Faster than Light is a very well-written, insightful examination of one of the essential problems of the history of science - how does elite, esoteric knowledge get read, used, modified, and owned by those outside the professional scientific community? Katy Price focuses on one of the defining scientific ideas of the twentieth century - relativity - and skillfully demonstrates the many genres and styles through which it was adopted and changed. An excellent book that brings together a number of disciplinary approaches." (Matthew Stanley, New York University)"
£42.75
The University of Chicago Press Shaping Science Organizations Decisions and
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Vertesi takes us on a mission. Based on extraordinary access among the research teams of interplanetary spacecraft, she makes a convincing case that organizational differences make a difference in the types of knowledge produced by these scientists. The analysis is solid, the argument bold, and the writing lively."-- "David Stark, Columbia University"Table of ContentsPreface IntroductionPart 1: Orders Chapter 1: The Context Chapter 2: The Integrators Chapter 3: The Resolutions Chapter 4: The Collective Chapter 5: The EnvironmentPart 2: Outcomes Chapter 6: The Science Chapter 7: The Spacecraft Chapter 8: The Data Chapter 9: The Personalities Chapter 10: The Iterative Loop Conclusion Postscript: Methodological Reflections Acknowledgments Appendix: Acronym and Technical Dictionary Notes References Index
£38.00
