What is time made of? We might balk at such a question, and reply that time is not made of anything – it is an abstract and universal phenomenon. In "Making Time", Yulia Frumer upends this assumption, using changes in the conceptualization of time in...

Uncovering strange plots by early British anthropologists to use scientific status to manipulate the stock market, "Anthropologists in the Stock Exchange" tells a provocative story that marries the birth of the social sciences with the exploits of gl...

Since the founding in 1660 of the Royal Society, London, scientists engaging in experimental research have sought to establish a base for exploratory work in communities and their political institutions. This connection between science and the nation...

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europeans raised a number of questions about the nature of reality and found their answers to be different from those that had satisfied their forebears. They discounted tales of witches, trolls, magic...

First published in 1951, Enrico Fermi's "Elementary Particles" continues to guide physicists and scholars. Fermi's descriptions of the then-known particle universe and its nascent conceptual framework allow readers to glimpse the foundations of the f...

In the second half of the nineteenth century, American cities began to go dark. Hulking new buildings overspread blocks, pollution obscured the skies, and glass and smog screened out the health-giving rays of the sun. Doctors fed anxities about these...

With the overwhelming amount of new information that bombards us each day, it is perhaps difficult to imagine a time when the widespread availability of the printed word was a novelty. In early nineteenth-century Britain, print was not novel – Gutenb...

"Climate is a rather elusive entity", wrote Helmut Landsberg in 1950 as he sorted out some twenty or so competing definitions. This volume of "Osiris" explores the complexities in understanding what climate means from a historical perspective. The vo...