New Histories of Science, Technology, and Medicine

The metaphor of the Scientific Revolution, Moran argues, can be expanded to make sense of alchemy and other so-called pseudo-sciences—by including a new framework in which “process can count as an object, in which making leads to learning, and in which the messiness of conflict leads to discernment.“

Jacob and Stewart examine the profound transformation that began in 1687. From the year when Newton published his Principia to the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, science gradually became central to Western thought and economic development. The book aims at a general audience and examines how, despite powerful opposition on the Continent, a Newtonian understanding gained acceptance and practical application.

Democratic or authoritarian, every society needs clean air and water; every state must manage its wildlife and natural resources. In this provocative, comparative study, Paul R. Josephson asks to what extent the form of a government and its economy—centrally planned or market, colonial or post-colonial—determines how politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, engineers, and industrialists address environmental and social problems presented by the transformation of nature into a humanized landscape.

In A Cultural History of Modern Science in China, Benjamin Elman has retold the story of the Jesuit impact on late imperial China, circa 1600–1800, and the Protestant era in early modern China from the 1840s to 1900 in a concise and accessible form ideal for the classroom.

Bowler doesn’t minimize the hostility of many of the faithful toward evolution, but he reveals the less well-known existence of a long tradition within the churches that sought to reconcile Christian beliefs with evolution by finding reflections of the divine in scientific explanations for the origin of life.

Alexander shows how popular stories about mathematicians are really morality tales about their craft as it relates to the world. In the eighteenth century, he says, mathematicians were idealized as child-like, eternally curious; by the nineteenth century, brilliant mathematicians became Romantic heroes like poets, artists, and musicians.

In 2001 an international panel of climate scientists declared that the world was warming at a rate without precedent during at least the last two millennia. How scientists reached that conclusion is the story Weart tells in The Discovery of Global Warming. The award-winning book is now revised and expanded to reflect the latest science.

As the twentieth century ended, computers, the Internet, and nanotechnology were central to modern American life. Yet the physical advances underlying these applications are poorly understood and underappreciated by U.S. citizens. In this overview, Cassidy views physics through America’s engagement with the political events of a tumultuous century.