History of Science

The Hill Times: Best Books of 2017Successful Canadians write about failure, and how it got them where they are today. What does it mean to fail? To...

Once considered marginal members of the animal world (at best) or vile and offensive creatures (at worst), insects saw a remarkable uptick in their...

Humanity has always looked to the stars, but it hasnt been until relatively recently that we have managed to travel into space. Carolyn Collins Pet...

In 1816, the climate went berserk. The winter brought extreme cold, and torrential rains unleashed massive flooding in Asia. Western Europe and Nor...

An ambitious, landmark history of the Scientific Revolution, from the age of Columbus to the age of Cook In 1492 Columbus set out across the Atlant...

Riley propelled entomology from a collector's parlor hobby of the nineteenth century to the serious study of insects in the Modern Age.   This defi...

Freshwater scarcity is a critical challenge, with social, economic, political and environmental consequences. Water crises in Australia have alread...

People have been visiting and living in the Victorian Grampians, also known as Gariwerd, for thousands of generations. They have both witnessed and...

Traditional scholarship on how ancient civilizations emerged is outmoded and new insights call for revision. According to the well-established p...

In Scientific Americans, Susan Branson explores the place of science and technology in American efforts to achieve cultural independence from Europ...

What difference does it make who pays for science? Some might say none. If scientists seek to discover fundamental truths about the world, and the...

Sixty years ago, cars and aeroplanes were deathtraps waiting to happen. Today, both are safer than they were, thanks in part to a pioneering US Air...

Have you ever heard of a four-footed bird? Can you really teach a dog to read? Where would you find a kangaroo crossed with a lion? In this brilli...

The planets fascinate us, and naturally we care about our own Earth, and things like how well we can forecast the weather and whether climate is re...

The nineteenth century seems to have been full of hysterical women - or so they were diagnosed. Where are they now? The very disease no longer exis...

Object Lessons ... is a grand tour of the latest obsession of an indefatigable collector. For the last decade ... George Loudon has gathered some 2...

This volume brings together the letters of the great Victorian naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) during his famous travels of 1854-62 in...

An engaging look at how we have learned to live with innovation and new technologies through history. People have had trouble adapting to new te...

When a ship's surgeon during a routine episode of bloodletting noticed that the sailors' blood was brighter in the tropics than in the north, he hy...

How did the human brain evolve? Why did it evolve as it did? What is mans place in evolution? In the final decades of the nineteenth century, these...

In this essential and illuminating history of Western science, Bill Mesler and H. James Cleaves II seek to answer the most crucial question in scie...

The period 1650 to 1790 was such a turbulent one for Scottish seafarers that much of this fast-flowing narrative reads like Treasure Island. Colour...

Léon Rosenfeld (1904-1974) was a remarkable, many-sided physicist of exceptional erudition. He was at the center of modern physics and was well-kno...

What happened to the European mind between 1605, when an audience watching Macbeth at the Globe might believe that regicide was such an aberration ...

The figure of Dai Zhen (17241777) looms large in modern Chinese intellectual history. Dai was a mathematical astronomer and influential polymath wh...

Distinguished historian Benjamin A Elman's collective volume on the history of science in imperial China, brings together over 30 years of historic...