History of Science

At the time of its publication, How Language Began received high acclaim for capturing the fascinating history of mankind''s most incredible creati...

A gripping history of one of the United States' most controversial Cold War intelligence operations.Project Paperclip brought hundreds of German sc...

A biography of the gifted ornithologist, animal painter, and writer whose extensive depictions of birds are still considered a monumental achieveme...

In the voluminous literature on Thomas Jefferson, little has been written about his passionate interest in science. This new and original study of ...

In Shaping Science, Janet Vertesi draws on a decade of immersive ethnography with NASA's robotic spacecraft teams to create a comparative account o...

Poisonous Skies explores how scientists and policymakers came to grasp the danger fossil fuels posed to the global environment by looking at the fi...

Nikola Tesla, a Serbian-American, invented the radio, the induction motor, the neon lamp and the remote control. His breakthrough came in alternati...

Griffins, Cyclopes, Monsters, and Giants--these fabulous creatures of classical mythology continue to live in the modern imagination through the vi...

We are facing a world food crisis of unparalleled proportions. Our reliance on unsustainable dietary choices and agricultural systems is causing pr...

Chemists in the nineteenth century were faced with a particular problem: how to depict the atoms and molecules beyond the direct reach of our bodil...

There are few fields of science that carbon-14 has not touched. A radioactive isotope of carbon, it stands out for its unusually long half-life. Be...

A compelling history of science from 1900 to the present day, this is the first book to survey modern developments in science during a century of u...

In the years after the Revolutionary War, the fledgling republic of America was viewed by many Europeans as a degenerate backwater, populated by su...

From December 1811 to February 1812, massive earthquakes shook the middle Mississippi Valley, collapsing homes, snapping large trees midtrunk, and ...

The connection between mind and brain has been one of the most persistent problems in modern Western thought; even recent advances in neuroscience ...

From December 1811 to February 1812, massive earthquakes shook the middle Mississippi Valley, collapsing homes, snapping large trees mid-trunk, and...

The connection between mind and brain has been one of the most persistent problems in modern Western thought; even recent advances in neuroscience ...

The Victorians, perhaps more than any Britons before them, were diggers and sifters of the past. Though they were not the first to be fascinated by...

Explorer, scientist, writer, and humanist, Alexander von Humboldt was the most famous intellectual of the age that began with Napoleon and ended wi...

Between 1608 and 1610 the canopy of the night sky changed forever, ripped open by an object created almost by accident: a cylinder with lenses at b...

From molecules to stars, much of the cosmic canvas can be painted in brushstrokes of primary color: the protons, neutrons, and electrons we know so...

Audubon was not the father of American ornithology. That honorific belongs to Alexander Wilson, whose encyclopedic American Ornithology established...

A foundational work on historical and social studies of quantificationWhat accounts for the prestige of quantitative methods? The usual answer is t...

The debate over scientists' social responsibility is a topic of great controversy today. Peter J. Kuznick here traces the origin of that debate to ...