New Books in the History of Science
Episodes
Jimena Canales, "Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science" (Princeton UP, 2020)
16 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Science may be known for banishing the demons of superstition from the modern world. Yet just as the demon-haunted world was being exorcized by the en...
D. Bilak and T. Nummedal, "Furnace and Fugue. A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s 'Atalanta fugiens' (1618)" (U Virginia Press, 2020)
21 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1618, on the eve of the Thirty Years’ War, the German alchemist and physician Michael Maier published Atalanta fugiens, an intriguing and complex...
Boel Berner, "Strange Blood: The Rise and Fall of Lamb Blood Transfusion in 19th-Century Medicine and Beyond" (Transcript Verlag, 2020)
12 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the mid-1870s, the experimental therapy of lamb blood transfusion spread like an epidemic across Europe and the USA. Doctors tried it as a cure for...
Kat Arney, "Rebel Cell: Cancer, Evolution, and the New Science of Life's Oldest Betrayal" (Benbella Books, 2020)
09 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Cancer exists in nearly every animal and has afflicted humans as long as our species has walked the earth. In Rebel Cell: Cancer, Evolution, and the N...
M. del Pilar Blanco and J. Page, "Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America" (U Florida Press, 2020)
02 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America (University of Florida Press 2020), a collection edited by María del Pilar Blanco...
Steven Shapin, "The Scientific Revolution" (U Chicago Press, 2018)
26 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
“There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” With this provocative and apparently paradoxical claim, Steve...
David Bressoud, "Calculus Reordered: A History of the Big Ideas" (Princeton UP, 2019)
24 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Calculus Reordered: A History of the Big Ideas (Princeton UP, 2019) takes readers on a remarkable journey through hundreds of years to tell the story ...
Emily Pawley, "The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
11 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The nostalgic mist surrounding farms can make it hard to write their history, encrusting them with stereotypical rural virtues and unrealistically sep...
Joshua Nall, "News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy, 1860-1910" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2019)
06 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re hearing an awful lot about the fraught relationship between science and media. In his book, News from M...
Anton Howes, "Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation" (Princeton UP, 2020)
04 Aug 2020
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...
Mark Anderson, "From Boas to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism and American Anthropology" (Stanford UP, 2019)
17 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Mark Anderson’s From Boas to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism and American Anthropology (Stanford University Press) is at once a story about US anthr...
Luz María Hernández Sáenz, "Carving a Niche: The Medical Profession in Mexico 1800-1870" (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2018)
16 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In Carving a Niche: The Medical Profession in Mexico 1800-1870 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018), Luz María Hernández Sáenz follows the tra...
Elizabeth A. Williams, "Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
15 Jul 2020
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...
David Kaiser, "Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
13 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
David Kaiser is a truly unique scholar: he is simultaneously a physics researcher and a historian of science whose writing beautifully melds the past ...
Sabine Hildebrandt, "The Anatomy of Murder: Ethical Transgressions and Anatomical Science during the Third Reich" (Berghahn, 2017)
09 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Of the many medical specializations to transform themselves during the rise of National Socialism, anatomy has received relatively little attention fr...
Allison Bigelow, "Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World" (UNC Press 2020)
06 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Historians of Latin America have long appreciated the central role of mining and metallurgy in the region. The Spanish Empire in particular was create...
He Bian, "Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Culture in Early Modern China" (Princeton UP, 2020)
02 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
He Bian’s new book Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Culture in Early Modern China (Princeton University Press, 2020) is a beautiful cultural histor...
Lee McIntyre, "The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience" (MIT Press, 2019)
24 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
What can explain the success of science as an endeavor for getting closer to truth? Does science simply represent a successful methodology, or is it s...
Ashley E. Kerr, "Sex, Skulls, and Citizens: Gender and Racial Science in Argentina (1860-1910)" (Vanderbilt UP, 2020)
22 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Analyzing a wide variety of late-nineteenth-century sources, Sex, Skulls, and Citizens: Gender and Racial Science in Argentina (1860-1910) (Vanderbil...
Henry M. Cowles, "The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey" (Harvard UP, 2020)
17 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The idea of a single scientific method, shared across specialties and teachable to ten-year-olds, is just over a hundred years old. For centuries prio...
Matthew Duncombe, "Ancient Relativity: Plato, Aristotle, Stoics and Skeptics" (Oxford UP, 2020)
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
As a matter of basic metaphysics, we classify individuals in terms of their relations to other things – for example, a parent is a parent of someone...
Controlling the Scientific Narrative: Randomized Controlled Trials and The Manipulation of “Control”
03 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Modern science uses the “randomized controlled trial”—whereby people are randomly allocated either the drug or a placebo—as a gold standard to...
Lee Vinsel, "Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019)
30 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Cars are among our most ubiquitous technologies; one could say that the cultural lore of the postwar United States is written in tire marks. But as mu...
G. Clinton Godart, "Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine: Evolutionary Theory and Religion in Modern Japan" (U Hawaii Press, 2017)
30 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine. Evolutionary Theory and Religion in Modern Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2017), G. Clinton Godart (Associate P...
Maurice Finocchiaro, "On Trial for Reason: Science, Religion, and Culture in the Galileo Affair" (Oxford UP, 2019)
26 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In his new book On Trial for Reason: Science, Religion, and Culture in the Galileo Affair (Oxford University Press, 2019), Maurice Finocchiaro shows t...
Amy Shira Teitel, "Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight Before NASA" (Bloomsbury, 2016)
21 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Amy Shira Teitel talks about Apollo and the community of people who are deeply attached to space history. Teitel is a spaceflight historian and the cr...
Alistair Sponsel, "Darwin’s Evolving Identity: Adventure, Ambition, and the Sin of Speculation" (U Chicago Press, 2018)
14 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Alistair Sponsel talks about Darwin’s experiences on HMS Beagle and his early career as a naturalist. His close reading of Darwin’s journals a...
Michael F. Robinson, "The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture" (U Chicago Press, 2006)
07 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Radio host Kevin Fox interviews Michael F. Robinson about the history of American Arctic exploration, the subject of his book, The Coldest Crucible: A...
Daniel Kennefick, "No Shadow of Doubt: The 1919 Eclipse that Confirmed Einstein’s Theory of Relativity" (Princeton UP, 2019)
17 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Daniel Kennefick talks about resistance to relativity theory in the early twentieth century and the huge challenges that faced British astronomers who...
Lydia Barnett, "After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019)
08 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Many centuries before the emergence of the scientific consensus on climate change, people began to imagine the existence of a global environment: a na...
Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, "Nature, Empire, And Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World" (Stanford UP, 2006)
03 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the late 1500s, the mines of Potosí –a mountain in southern Bolivia — produced 60% of the world’s silver. It was a place of great wealth and...
E. Jones-Imhotep and T. Adcock, "Made Modern: Science and Technology in Canadian History" (UBC Press, 2018)
10 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Science and technology have shaped not only economic empires and industrial landscapes, but also the identities, anxieties, and understandings of peop...
Jason Smith, "To Master the Boundless Sea: The US Navy, the Marine Environment, and the Cartography of Empire" (UNC Press, 2018)
06 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Jason Smith discusses the US Navy’s role in exploring and charting the ocean world. Smith is an assistant professor of history at Southern Connectic...
J. Yates and C. N. Murphy, "Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019)
14 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Standards are crucial to the way we live—just look around you. A no. 2 pencil, perhaps? That arrived in an 8x8.5x20 shipping container? Standards al...
Margaret E. Schotte, "Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill, 1550-1800" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019)
14 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Throughout the Age of Exploration, European maritime communities bent on colonial and commercial expansion embraced the complex mechanics of celestial...
Han F. Vermeulen, "Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment" (U Nebraska Press, 2015)
11 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The history of anthropology has been written from multiple viewpoints, often from perspectives of gender, nationality, theory, or politics. Winner of ...
Jamie L. Pietruska, "Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America" (U Chicago Press, 2017)
30 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
A fortune teller, cotton prophet, and a weather forecaster walk into a bar—probably a more common occurrence than you might think in the Gilded Age ...
David Lindsay Roberts, "Republic of Numbers: Unexpected Stories of Mathematical Americans through History" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019)
17 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The institutional history of mathematics in the United States comprises several entangled traditions—military, civil, academic, industrial—each of...
Lucas Richert, “Strange Trips: Science, Culture, and the Regulation of Drugs” (McGill-Queens UP, 2018)
11 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Strange Trips isn’t only the title of Dr. Lucas Richert’s new book; it’s also a good description of the journey substances take from the black m...
Erika Milam, "Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America" (Princeton UP, 2019)
04 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Erika Milam talks about the scientific search for human nature, a project that captured the attention of paleontologists, anthropologists, and primato...
Charles King, "Gods of the Upper Air: How A Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century" (Doubleday, 2019)
04 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
American anthropologists consider Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead to be foundational figures, but outside the academy few people know the...
Davide Crippa, The Impossibility of Squaring the Circle in the 17th Century" (Birkhäuser, 2019)
28 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
From 1667 to 1676, a pivotal controversy played out among several mathematical luminaries of the time, partly in the proceedings of the Royal Society ...
David Philip Miller, "The Life and Legend of James Watt" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2019)
13 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
For all of his fame as one of the seminal figures of the Industrial Revolution, James Watt is a person around whom many misconceptions congregate. In ...
Andrew Wright Hurley, "Ludwig Leichhardt’s Ghosts: The Strange Career of a Traveling Myth" (Camden House, 2018)
09 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Andrew Wright Hurley talks about the life and afterlife of the Prussian explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, a man whose reputation has shifted to reflect the ...
Violet Moller, "The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found" (Doubleday, 2019)
31 Jul 2019
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...
Vanessa Heggie, "Higher and Colder: A History of Extreme Physiology and Exploration" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
26 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Vanessa Heggie talks about the history of biomedical research in extreme environments. Heggie is a Fellow of the Institute for Global Innovation at th...
Tita Chico, "The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment" (Stanford UP, 2018)
22 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Can science be seductive? According to Tita Chico, the answer is a resounding yes. In her new book, The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge a...
John D. Hawks, "Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story" (National Geographic, 2017)
19 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
John D. Hawks talks about new developments in paleoanthropology – the discovery of a new hominid species Homo Naledi in South Africa, the Neandertha...
Robin Scheffler, “A Contagious Cause: The American Hunt for Cancer Viruses and the Rise of Molecular Medicine" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
04 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Could cancer be a contagious disease? Although this possibility might seem surprising to many of us, it has a long history. In fact, efforts to develo...
Philip W. Clements, "Science in an Extreme Environment: The American Mount Everest Expedition" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2018)
28 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Historian of Science Philip W. Clements discusses the 1963 American Mount Everest Expedition. His book, Science in an Extreme Environment: The America...
Daniel Nemser, "Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico" (U Texas Press, 2017)
28 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Daniel Nemser’s Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico(University of Texas Press, 2017) examines the long history...
Matthew Edney, "Cartography: The Ideal and Its History" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
25 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Over the past four decades, the volumes published in the landmark History of Cartography series have both chronicled and encouraged scholarship about ...
David Munns, "Engineering the Environment: Phytotrons and the Quest for Climate Control in the Cold War" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2017)
24 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
“Phytotron” is such a great name for something that is, when you look at it, a high-tech greenhouse. But don’t sell it short! The phytotron was ...
David Munns, "Engineering the Environment: Phytotrons and the Quest for Climate Control in the Cold War" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2017)
24 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
“Phytotron” is such a great name for something that is, when you look at it, a high-tech greenhouse. But don’t sell it short! The phytotron was ...
Terence Keel, "Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science" (Stanford UP, 2018)
17 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
We often think of scientific racism as a pseudo-science of a bygone age, yet in both academic population genetics and popular ancestry testing, the sp...
Karin Rosemblatt, "The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States, 1910–1950" (UNC Press, 2018)
09 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Karin Rosemblatt’s new book, The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States, 1910–1950 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018...
Nikolai Krementsov, "With and Without Galton: Vasilii Florinskii and the Fate of Eugenics in Russia" (Open Book Publishers, 2018)
02 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
With and Without Galton: Vasilii Florinskii and the Fate of Eugenics in Russia (Open Book Publishers, 2018), Professor Nikolai Krementsov’s recent h...
Lukas Engelmann, "Mapping AIDS: Visual Histories of an Enduring Epidemic" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
17 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
What role do visual media play in establishing a medical phenomenon? Who mobilizes these representations, and to what end? In Mapping AIDS: Visual His...
Robert A. Voeks, "The Ethnobotany of Eden: Rethinking the Jungle Medicine Narrative" (U Chicago Press, 2018)
04 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Jungle medicine: it's everywhere, from chia seeds to ginseng tea to CBD oil. In the US, what was once the province of counter culture has moved squar...
Gregory Dawes, "Galileo and the Conflict between Religion and Science" (Routledge, 2016)
18 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Open conflict between religion and science may not be inevitable, but a germ of discord resides in some of the fundamental commitments of both; in thi...
Geraldine Heng, "The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
26 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press 2018), Geraldine Heng collects a remarkable array of medieval approac...
Joy Lisi Rankin, "A People’s History of Computing in the United States" (Harvard UP, 2018).
19 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
We know, perhaps too well, the innovation-centric history of personal computing. Yet, computer users were not necessarily microelectronics consumers f...
Adrienne Mayor, "Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology" (Princeton UP, 2018)
06 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The first robot to walk the earth was a bronze giant called Talos. This wondrous machine was created not by the MIT Robotics Lab, but by Hephaestus, t...
Dagmar Herzog, "Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe" (U Wisconsin Press, 2018)
25 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In her new book, Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018), Dagmar Herzog...
Nicholas Bauch, "Geography of Digestion: Biotechnology and the Kellogg Enterprise" (U California Press, 2017)
11 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
While most people in the US are familiar with the ubiquitous Kellogg cereal brand, few know how it relates to US geography, science and technology aro...
Megan Finn, "Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters" (MIT Press, 2018)
08 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Megan Finn's Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters (MIT Press, 2018) is a fascinating examination of how informa...
Audra J. Wolfe, "Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018)
27 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Audra J. Wolfe, is a Philadelphia-based writer, editor and historian. Her book Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science(J...
Brian Crim, "Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2017)
21 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In his new book, Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), Brian Crim, Associate Professo...
Suman Seth, "Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
19 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Suman Seth's new book Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018)provides a n...
Howard Chiang, "After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China" (Columbia UP, 2018)
17 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Howard Chiang’s new book is a masterful study of the relationship between sexual knowledge and Chinese modernity. After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, ...
Paola Bertucci, "Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France" (Yale UP, 2018)
06 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Paola Bertucci's Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (Yale University Press, 2018) is an innovative new look...
Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers, "The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War" (U Chicago Press, 2018)
28 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The prologue to The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War (University of Chicago Press, 2018) beg...
Michael E. Staub, “The Mismeasure of Minds: Debating Race and Intelligence Between Brown and The Bell Curve” (UNC Press, 2018)
21 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision required desegregation of America’s schools, but it also set in motion an agonizing multi-decade deb...
Daniel Stolz, “The Lighthouse and the Observatory: Islam, Science, and Empire in Late Ottoman Egypt” (Cambridge UP, 2018)
05 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Both a history of science and a history of Islam, The Lighthouse and the Observatory: Islam, Science, and Empire in Late Ottoman Egypt (Cambridge Univ...
Caitlin C. Rosenthal, “Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management” (Harvard UP, 2018)
31 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The familiar narrative of American business development begins in the industrial North, where paternalistic factory owners, committed to a kind of Pro...
Hugh Cagle, “Assembling the Tropics: Science and Medicine in Portugal’s Empire, 1450-1700” (Cambridge UP, 2018)
22 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Assembling the Tropics: Science and Medicine in Portugal’s Empire, 1450-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2018) by Hugh Cagle is an exciting analysi...
Yulia Frumer, “Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan” (U Chicago Press, 2018)
17 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Yulia Frumer’s new book follows roughly three hundred years of transformations in how time was conceptualized, measured, and materialized in Japan. ...
Robert A. Wilson, “The Eugenic Mind Project” (MIT Press, 2017)
15 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
For most of us, eugenics — the “science of improving the human stock” — is a thing of the past, commonly associated with Nazi Germany and gove...
Theodore M. Porter, “Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity” (Princeton UP, 2018)
11 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity (Princeton University Press, 2018), Theodore Porter uncovers the unfamiliar origin...
Dániel Margócsy, et al., “The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions” (Brill, 2018)
11 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions (Brill, 2018) is a masterful...
Cameron B. Strang, “Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850” (UNC Press, 2018)
03 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Cameron Strang’s Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850 (University of North Carolina Pre...
Hilary A. Smith, “Forgotten Disease: Illnesses Transformed in Chinese Medicine” (Stanford UP, 2017)
25 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Hilary A. Smith’s new book examines the evolution of a Chinese disease concept, foot qi (jiao qi) from its documented origins in the fourth century ...
Megan Raby, “American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science” (UNC Press, 2017)
18 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
American science and empire have a long mutual history. In American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science (University of North Carolina...
Andrew J. Hogan, “Life Histories of Genetic Disease: Patterns and Prevention in Postwar Medical Genetics” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2016)
13 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
How did clinicians learn to see the human genome? In Life Histories of Genetic Disease (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Andrew J. Hogan makes t...
Rebecca Reich, “State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature and Dissent After Stalin” (Northern Illinois UP, 2018)
10 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In her new book, State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature and Dissent After Stalin (Northern Illinois University Press, 2018), Rebecca Reich argues t...
Dagmar Herzog, “Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes” (Cambridge UP, 2017)
07 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
‘Create two, three—many Freuds!’ That, Dagmar Herzog shows, was the forgotten slogan of the Cold War. With Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an...
Pablo Gomez, “The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic” (UNC Press, 2017).
24 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Pablo Gomez‘s The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) exa...
Eli Maor, “Music by the Numbers: From Pythagoras to Schoenberg” (Princeton UP, 2018)
18 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Most of us have heard of the math-music connection, but Eli Maor’s Music by the Numbers: From Pythagoras to Schoenberg (Princeton University Press, ...
Christopher G. White, “Other Worlds: Spirituality and the Search for Invisible Dimensions” (Harvard UP, 2018)
04 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In the modern world, we often tend to view the scientific and the spiritual as diametrically opposed adversaries; we see them as fundamentally irrecon...
Joanna Radin, “Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood” (U Chicago Press, 2017)
04 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Whether through the anxiety of mutually assured destruction or the promise of decolonization throughout Asia and Africa, Cold War politics had a pecul...
Londa Schiebinger, “Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World” (Stanford UP, 2017)
27 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Londa Schiebinger‘s new book Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford University Pres...
Joy Rohde, “Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research During the Cold War” (Cornell UP, 2013)
27 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research During the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2013), Joy Rohde discusses th...
Lisa Walters, “Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science, and Politics” (Cambridge UP, 2014)
12 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
As a 17th-century noblewoman who became the first duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish has often been viewed ...
Kyla Schuller, “The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century” (Duke UP, 2017)
01 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Beginning with a discussion about Black Lives Matter may seem like an unlikely place to start a book about nineteenth century science and culture. How...
Lydia Kang, “Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything” (Workman Publishing Company, 2017)
22 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
What won’t we try in our quest for perfect health, beauty, and the fountain of youth? Well, just imagine a time when doctors prescribed morphine f...
Martha Few, “For All Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala” (U Arizona Press, 2015)
18 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Martha Few’s For All Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala (University of Arizona Press, 2015) describe...
Sigrid Schmalzer, et. al., “Science for the People: Documents from America’s Movement of Radical Scientists (UMass Press, 2018)
23 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
“What is needed now is not liberal reform or withdrawal, but a radical attack, a strategy of opposition. Scientific workers must develop ways to put...
James Delbourgo, “Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane” (Allen Lane, 2017)
09 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
James Delbourgo‘s new book Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane (Allen Lane, 2017) tells the fascinatingly complex and contro...
Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs, “Jonas Salk: A Life” (Oxford UP, 2015)
29 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Polio was a scourge that terrified generations of people throughout the United States and the rest of the world until Jonas Salk’s vaccine provided ...
Jason Josephson-Storm, “The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences” (U. Chicago, 2017)
21 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
We tend to think of ourselves—our modern selves–as disenchanted. We have traded magic, myth, and spirits for science, reason, and logic. But this ...