New Books in the History of Science
Episodes
Peter J. Bowler, "Evolution for the People: Shaping Popular Ideas from Darwin to the Present" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
09 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
From Darwin's The Origin of Species to the twenty-first century, Peter Bowler reinterprets the long Darwinian Revolution by refocussing our attention ...
Karenleigh A. Overmann, "The Material Origin of Numbers: Insights from the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East" (Gorgias Press, 2024)
28 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What are numbers, and where do they come from? Based on her groundbreaking study of material devices used for counting in the Ancient Near East, Karen...
Vera Keller, "Curating the Enlightenment: Johann Daniel Major and the Experimental Century" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
27 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How did the research universities of the Enlightenment come into being? And what debt do they owe to scholars of the previous era? Focusing on the car...
Pierre Sokolsky, "The Clock in the Sun: How We Came to Understand Our Nearest Star" (Columbia UP, 2024)
21 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On the surface of the Sun, spots appear and fade in a predictable cycle, like a great clock in the sky. In medieval Russia, China, and Korea, monks an...
Bruce Lieberman and Niles Eldredge, "Macroevolutionaries: Reflections on Natural History, Paleontology, and Stephen Jay Gould" (Columbia UP, 2024)
19 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
One of the twentieth century's great paleontologists and science writers, Stephen Jay Gould was, for Bruce S. Lieberman and Niles Eldredge, also a clo...
Patchen Barss, "The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius" (Basic Books, 2024)
18 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When he was six years old, Roger Penrose discovered a sundial in a clearing near his house. Through that machine made of light, shadow, and time, Roge...
Disability and the History of Science (Osiris, Vol 36)
18 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This volume of Osiris places disability history and the history of science in conversation to foreground disability epistemologies, disabled scienti...
Melissa B. Reynolds, "Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
17 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What do you do when you feel an itchy throat coming on? You probably head online, first to search for your symptoms and then to evaluate the informat...
Mariam Motamedi Fraser, "Dog Politics: Species Stories and the Animal Sciences" (Manchester UP, 2024)
15 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Do dogs belong with humans? Scientific accounts of dogs' 'species story,' in which contemporary dog-human relations are naturalised with reference to ...
Nancy Reddy, "The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom" (St. Martin's Press, 2025)
13 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Timely and thought-provoking, Nancy Reddy's The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom unpacks and debunks the bad id...
Rebecca Charbonneau, "Mixed Signals: Alien Communication Across the Iron Curtain" (Polity, 2024)
08 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the shadow of the Cold War, whispers from the cosmos fueled an unlikely alliance between the US and USSR. The search for extraterrestrial intellige...
Joel Whitebook, "Freud: An Intellectual Biography" (Cambridge UP, 2017)
07 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We interview Dr. Joel Whitebook, philosopher and psychoanalyst about his book Freud: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge UP, 2017). Dr. Whitebook w...
Camille Robcis, "Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
02 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On this episode, J.J. Mull interviews scholar and historian Camille Robcis. In her most recent book, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical...
Rachel Louise Moran, "Blue: A History of Postpartum Depression in America" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
02 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
New motherhood is often seen as a joyful moment in a woman’s life; for some women, it is also their lowest moment. For much of the twentieth century...
Frederick Crews, "Freud: The Making of an Illusion" (Picador, 2018)
31 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The figure of Sigmund Freud has captivated the Western imagination like few others. One hundred and twenty-five years after the publication of Studies...
Michael Bresalier, "Modern Flu: British Medical Science and the Viralisation of Influenza, 1890-1950" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023)
27 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ninety years after the discovery of human influenza virus, Modern Flu: British Medical Science and the Viralisation of Influenza, 1890—1950 (Palgr...
AI: How We Got Here in Three Powerful Tales
26 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This episode is based upon three readings: Alan Turing’s Computing Machinery and Intelligence aka The Turing Test paper. Turing starts his paper by...
Donald R. Prothero, "The Story of Earth's Climate in 25 Discoveries: How Scientists Found the Connections Between Climate and Life" (Columbia UP, 2024)
14 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Over 4.5 billion years, Earth's climate has transformed tremendously. Before our more temperate recent past, the planet swung from one extreme to anot...
Renée Bergland, "Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science" (Princeton UP, 2024)
13 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin were born at a time when the science of studying the natural world was known as natural philosophy, a pastime for p...
David J. Collins, SJ, "Disenchanting Albert the Great: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Magician" (Penn State UP, 2024)
12 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
David J Collins, SJ joins Jana Byars to talk about Disenchanting Albert the Great: the Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Magician (Penn State Press, ...
Caroline Winterer, "How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America" (Princeton UP, 2024)
10 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America (Princeton UP, 2024), Caroline Winterer, William Robertson Coe Professor of His...
Katherine C. Epstein, "Analog Superpowers: How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National Security State" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
24 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
At the beginning of the twentieth century, two British inventors, Arthur Pollen and Harold Isherwood, became fascinated by a major military question: ...
Ken Krimstein, "Einstein in Kafkaland: How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up with the Universe" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
23 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Between 1911 and 1912, Prague was home to Albert Einstein and Franz Kafka, two of the twentieth-century’s most influential minds. During this brief ...
Fiona Smyth, "Pistols in St Paul's: Science, Music, and Architecture in the Twentieth Century" (Manchester UP, 2024)
22 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
On a winter's night in 1951, shortly after Evensong, the interior of St Paul's Cathedral echoed with gunfire. This was no act of violence but a scient...
Ian Miller, "Self-Esteem: An American History" (Polity Press, 2024)
17 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
By the end of the twentieth century, the idea of self-esteem had become enormously influential. A staggering amount of psychological research and self...
Adam Bobbette, "The Pulse of the Earth: Political Geology in Java" (Duke UP, 2023)
15 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In The Pulse of the Earth: Political Geology in Java (Duke UP, 2023), Adam Bobbette tells the story of how modern theories of the earth emerged from...
Anthony Grasso, "Dual Justice: America's Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
11 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The United States incarcerates its citizens for property crime, drug use, and violent crime at a rate that exceeds any other developed nation – and ...
Stuart Anderson, "Pharmacopoeias, Drug Regulation, and Empires: Making Medicines Official in Britain's Imperial World, 1618-1968" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2024)
06 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The word "pharmacopoeia" has come to have many meanings, although it is commonly understood to be a book describing approved compositions and standard...
Jerry Brotton, "Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2024)
05 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
North, south, east and west: almost all societies use the four cardinal directions to orientate themselves, to understand who they are by projecting w...
Salem Elzway and Jason Resnikoff on Automation
04 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Salem Elzway, postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at University of Southern ...
Jonathan A. Allan, "Uncut: A Cultural Analysis of the Foreskin" (U Regina Press, 2024)
02 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The “uncut” penis is viewed by some as attractive or erotic, and by others as ugly or undesirable. Secular parents of male infants worry about whe...
Nicholas Spencer, "Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science & Religion" (Oneworld, 2024)
01 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Most things you 'know' about science and religion are myths or half-truths that grew up in the last years of the nineteenth century and remain widespr...
Peter Harrison, "Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
29 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In his famous argument against miracles, David Hume gets to the heart of the modern problem of supernatural belief. 'We are apt', says Hume, 'to imagi...
Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, "Sea Level: A History" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
21 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
News reports warn of rising sea levels spurred by climate change. Waters inch ever higher, disrupting delicate ecosystems and threatening island and c...
Lois Peters Agnew, "Fitter, Happier: The Eugenic Strain in Twentieth-Century Cancer Rhetoric" (U Alabama Press, 2024)
19 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Fitter, Happier: The Eugenic Strain in Twentieth-Century Cancer Rhetoric (U Alabama Press, 2024) is a thought-provoking exploration of the relations...
Critique, Wonder, and Chinese Anatomy, with Lan A. Li
08 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of the Blue Beryl Podcast, Dr Pierce Salguero sits down with the show’s producer, Lan A. Li, a historian of Chinese science, medicin...
Pamela O. Long on the Long, Long, Long History of Technology
07 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with MacArthur “Genius Prize” winning historian Pamela Long about her long career writing about the histo...
Kyle Falcon, "Haunted Britain: Spiritualism, Psychical Research and the Great War" (Manchester UP, 2023)
06 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Great War haunted the British Empire. Shell shocked soldiers relived the war's trauma through waking nightmares consisting of mutilated and grotes...
Paola Bertucci, "In the Land of Marvels: Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)
01 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How a journey through Italy casts light on secrets, stereotypes, and the manipulation of information in eighteenth-century science. In 1749, the celeb...
Jason A. Josephson Storm, "The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences" (U Chicago Press, 2017)
23 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Jose...
Amir Alexander, "Liberty's Grid: A Founding Father, a Mathematical Dreamland, and the Shaping of America" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
21 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Seen from an airplane, much of the United States appears to be a gridded land of startling uniformity. Perpendicular streets and rectangular fields, a...
Whitney Barlow Robles, "Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History" (Yale UP, 2023)
13 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Dive into the world of animals with Whitney Barlow Robles in her captivating new book, Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History (Yale UP, 2...
Matthew C. Ehrlich, "The Krebiozen Hoax: How a Mysterious Cancer Drug Shook Organized Medicine" (U Illinois Press, 2024)
11 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The brainchild of an obscure Yugoslav physician, Krebiozen emerged in 1951 as an alleged cancer treatment. Andrew Ivy, a University of Illinois vice p...
Jess Whatcott, "Menace to the Future: A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics" (Duke UP, 2024)
07 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Menace to the Future: A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics (Duke UP, 2024), Jess Whatcott traces the link between US disability in...
Kostas Kampourakis, "Darwin Mythology: Debunking Myths, Correcting Falsehoods" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
03 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Many historical figures have their lives and works shrouded in myth, both in life and long after their deaths. Charles Darwin (1809–82) is no excep...
Violet Moller, "The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found" (Doubleday, 2019)
02 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Violet Moller has written a narrative history of the transmission of books from the ancient world to the modern. In The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Y...
Brian Clegg, "Ten Patterns That Explain the Universe" (MIT Press, 2021)
02 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Our universe might appear chaotic, but deep down it's simply a myriad of rules working independently to create patterns of action, force, and conseque...
Elizabeth A. Williams, "Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
02 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why do we eat? Is it instinct? Despite the necessity of food, anxieties about what and how to eat are widespread and persistent. In Appetite and Its D...
Joanna Wuest, "Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
27 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Scholars often narrate the legal cases confirming LGBTQ+ rights as a huge success story. While it took 100 years to confirm the rights of Black Americ...
Cyrus Mody on the Importance of Square (as in NOT COOL) Scientists and Engineers
26 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Cyrus Mody, Professor in the History of Science, Technology, and Innovation and Director of the STS Progra...
Regina G. Kunzel, "In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
25 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the mid-twentieth century, American psychiatrists proclaimed homosexuality a mental disorder, one that was treatable and amenable to cure. Drawing ...
Noah Heringman, "Deep Time: A Literary History" (Princeton UP, 2023)
14 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Deep Time: A Literary History (Princeton UP, 2023), Noah Heringman, Curators’ Professor of English at the University of Missouri, presents a “...
Heather Murray, "Asylum Ways of Seeing: Psychiatric Patients, American Thought and Culture" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
13 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Asylum Ways of Seeing: Psychiatric Patients, American Thought and Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) by Dr. Heather Murray is a cultura...
Gavin Steingo, "Interspecies Communication: Sound and Music Beyond Humanity" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
10 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Interspecies Communication: Sound and Music Beyond Humanity (U Chicago Press, 2024), music scholar Gavin Steingo examines significant cases of at...
Edward Shanks, "The People of the Ruins" (MIT Press, 2024)
06 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In The People of the Ruins (originally published in 1920), Edward Shanks imagines England in the not-so-distant future as a neo mediaeval society wh...
Mark Walker, "Hitler's Atomic Bomb: History, Legend, and the Twin Legacies of Auschwitz and Hiroshima" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
05 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Who were the German scientists who worked on atomic bombs during World War II for Hitler's regime? How did they justify themselves afterwards? Exami...
Robert Baker, "Making Modern Medical Ethics: How African Americans, Anti-Nazis, Bureaucrats, Feminists, Veterans, and Whistleblowing Moralists Created Bioethics" (MIT Press, 2024)
02 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The little-known stories of the people responsible for what we know today as modern medical ethics. In Making Modern Medical Ethics: How African Amer...
Resonant Grains
29 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1950s, a schoolteacher named Carleen Hutchins attempted a revolution in how concert violins are made. In this episode, Craig Eley of the F...
Kirsten Moore-Sheeley, "Nothing But Nets: A Biography of Global Health Science and Its Objects" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)
24 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Distributed to millions of people annually across Africa and the global south, insecticide-treated bed nets have become a cornerstone of malaria contr...
Anton Howes, "Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation" (Princeton UP, 2020)
22 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Over the past 300 years, The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce has tried to improve British life in every way ima...
Sasha Warren, "Storming Bedlam: Madness, Mental Health, and Revolt" (Common Notions, 2024)
10 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Mental health care and its radical possibilities reimagined in the context of its global development under capitalism. The contemporary world is overs...
Monika Krause, "Model Cases: On Canonical Research Objects and Sites" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
10 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Model Cases: On Canonical Research Objects and Sites (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Dr. Monika Krause asks about the concrete material rese...
Donna Drucker, "Contraception: A Concise History" (The MIT Press, 2020)
08 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The beginning of the modern contraceptive era began in 1882, when Dr. Aletta Jacobs opened the first birth control clinic in Amsterdam. The founding o...
Alan Lightman, "Einstein's Dreams" (Vintage, 1992)
07 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Einstein’s Dreams (Vintage, 1992) by Alan Lightman, set in Albert Einstein’s “miracle year” of 1905, is a novel about the cultural interconne...
The (ir)Rational Rainbow (the DSM & the Fight to Depathologize Homosexuality)
06 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The psychological establishment has long pathologized diverse forms of sexual identity and gender expression. In the mid-century, a brave movement of ...
Pierre Sokolsky, "Clock in the Sun: How We Came to Understand Our Nearest Star" (Columbia UP, 2024)
05 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
On the surface of the Sun, spots appear and fade in a predictable cycle, like a great clock in the sky. In medieval Russia, China, and Korea, monks an...
Pandemics Perspectives 15: The Dynamic Nature of Science
02 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to Michael Gordin, Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Cont...
Peter Murray Jones, "The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England" (Boydell & Brewer, 2024)
30 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Friars are often overlooked in the picture of health care in late mediaeval England. Physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, barbers, midwives - these are...
Ann Johnson and Johannes Lenhard, "Cultures of Prediction: How Engineering and Science Evolve with Mathematical Tools" (MIT Press, 2024)
24 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A probing examination of the dynamic history of predictive methods and values in science and engineering that helps us better understand today's cultu...
Paula S. De Vos, "Compound Remedies: Galenic Pharmacy from the Ancient Mediterranean to New Spain" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2020)
23 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Compound Remedies: Galenic Pharmacy from the Ancient Mediterranean to New Spain (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020) by Dr. Paula S. De Vos examine...
Paulina Rowinska, "Mapmatics: How We Navigate the World Through Numbers" (Pan Macmillan, 2024)
19 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How does a delivery driver distribute hundreds of packages in a single working day? Why does remote Alaska have such a large airport? Where should we ...
Test Subjects
17 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Season Two erupts in our ears with a film-noir soundscape—an eerie voice utters strange and disjointed phrases and echoing footsteps lead to sirens ...
Madman in the White House?
16 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Did Woodrow Wilson's daddy issues cause World War II? And what might this teach us about our contemporary political plight? Jordan Osserman talks with...
Benjamin Breen, "Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science" (Grand Central, 2024)
14 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to Benjamin Breen about his book Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science (Gra...
Carl Elliott, "The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No" (Norton, 2024)
12 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No (Norton, 2024) is an intellectual inquiry into the moral struggle ...
Sharrona Pearl, "Do I Know You?: From Face Blindness to Super Recognition" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)
08 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Do I Know You? From Faceblindness to Super Recognition (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), Dr. Sharrona Pearl explores the fascinating catego...
Alan H. McGowan, "The Political Activism of Anthropologist Franz Boas, Citizen Scientist" (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2024)
07 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Alan McGowan delves into Franz Boas’s dual identity as both a scientist and a political activist, shedding light on how his work transcended academi...
Claire Weeda, "Ethnicity in Medieval Europe 950-1250: Medicine, Power and Religion" (Boydell and Brewer, 2021)
02 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Students in twelfth-century Paris held slanging matches, branding the English drunkards, the Germans madmen and the French as arrogant. On Crusade, ar...
The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present
02 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Eric Kandel was born in Vienna in 1929. In 1938 he and his family fled to Brooklyn, where he attended the Yeshiva of Flatbush. He studied history and ...
David S. Richeson, "Tales of Impossibility: The 2000-Year Quest to Solve the Mathematical Problems of Antiquity" (Princeton UP, 2019)
28 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
David S. Richeson's book Tales of Impossibility: The 2000-Year Quest to Solve the Mathematical Problems of Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 2019...
Bernardo Kastrup, "Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A Straightforward Summary of the 21st Century's Only Plausible Metaphysics" (Iff Books, 2024)
24 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Is reality more than the material? Raj Balkaran holds a fascinating interview with philosopher Bernardo Kastrup on this topic. At the vanguard of th...
Assaf Tamari, "God as Patient: The Medical Discourse of Lurianic Kabbalah" (Magnes Press, 2023)
20 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In a broken world, in which even God Himself is in a state of deep crisis, what is required in order to mend the rupture? How can one heal God and His...
Joanne Edge, "Onomantic Divination in Late Medieval Britain: Questioning Life, Predicting Death" (York Medieval Press, 2024)
11 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When will I die? What is the sex of my unborn child? Which of two rivals will win a duel? As today, people in the later Middle Ages approached their u...
Rustam Alexander, "Gay Lives and ‘Aversion Therapy’ in Brezhnev’s Russia, 1964–1982" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023)
06 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Rustam Alexander's Gay Lives and 'Aversion Therapy' in Brezhnev's Russia, 1964-1982 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) examines the autobiographies and dia...
Renée Bergland, "Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science" (Princeton UP, 2024)
01 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin were born at a time when the science of studying the natural world was known as natural philosophy, a pastime for p...
Stefanos Geroulanos on "The Invention of Prehistory"
26 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What does it mean to be human? What do we know about the true history of humankind? In this episode, I spoke with historian and NYU professor Stefanos...
Alexander Statman, "A Global Enlightenment: Western Progress and Chinese Science" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
25 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Alexander Statman's book A Global Enlightenment: Western Progress and Chinese Science (U Chicago Press, 2023) is a revisionist history of the idea ...
Jessica Cox, "Confinement: The Hidden History of Maternal Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Britain" (The History Press, 2023)
21 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Covering a fascinating period of population growth, high infant mortality and deep social inequality, rapid medical advances and pseudoscientific quac...
Coreen McGuire, "Measuring Difference, Numbering Normal: Setting the Standards for Disability in the Interwar Period" (Manchester UP, 2020)
20 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Measurements, and their manipulation, have been underestimated as crucial historical forces motivating and guiding the way we think about disability. ...
Miriam Piilonen, "Theorizing Music Evolution: Darwin, Spencer, and the Limits of the Human" (Oxford UP, 2024)
15 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What did historical evolutionists such as Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer have to say about music? What role did music play in their evolutionary t...
Kevin Lambert, "Symbols and Things: Material Mathematics in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021)
15 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The stereotype of the solitary mathematician is widespread, but practicing users and producers of mathematics know well that our work depends heavily ...
Annaliese Jacobs Claydon, "Arctic Circles and Imperial Knowledge: The Franklin Family, Indigenous Intermediaries, and the Politics of Truth" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
15 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 1845 an expedition led by Sir John Franklin vanished in the Canadian Arctic. The enduring obsession with the Franklin mystery, and in particular In...
Rasmus Winther, "Our Genes: A Philosophical Perspective on Human Evolutionary Genomics" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
14 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Situated at the intersection of natural science and philosophy, Our Genes: A Philosophical Perspective on Human Evolutionary Genomics (Cambridge Un...
Stewart Lawrence Sinclair, "Space Rover" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
13 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 1971, the first lunar rover arrived on the moon. The design became an icon of American ingenuity and the adventurous spirit and vision many equated...
James McElvenny, "A History of Modern Linguistics: From the Beginnings to World War II" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)
09 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ingrid Piller speaks with James McElvenny about his new book A History of Modern Linguistics: From the Beginnings to World War II (Edinburgh UP, ...
Huaping Lu-Adler, "Kant, Race, and Racism: Views from Somewhere" (Oxford UP, 2023)
01 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Kant scholars have paid relatively little attention to his raciology. They assume that his racism, as personal prejudice, can be disentangled from his...
Claudia de Rham, "The Beauty of Falling: A Life in Pursuit of Gravity" (Princeton UP, 2024)
01 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Claudia de Rham has been playing with gravity her entire life. As a diver, experimenting with her body's buoyancy in the Indian Ocean. As a pilot, soa...
Stefanos Geroulanos, "The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins" (Liveright, 2024)
31 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Books about the origins of humanity dominate bestseller lists, while national newspapers present breathless accounts of new archaeological findings an...
Matthew H. Hersch, "Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle" (MIT Press, 2023)
30 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle (MIT Press, 2023), Dr. Matthew Hersch challenges the existing narrative of the most significant hum...
Maarten Couttenier, "Anthropology and Race in Belgium and the Congo (1839-1922)" (Routledge, 2023)
24 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Maarten Couttenier's Anthropology and Race in Belgium and the Congo (1839-1922) (Routledge, 2023) examines the history of Belgian physical anthropo...