History of Science

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...