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...

A good book may have the power to change the way we see the world, but a great book actually becomes part of our daily consciousness, pervading our thinking to the point that we take it for granted, and we forget how provocative and challenging its i...

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...

Enlightenment inquiries into the weather sought to impose order on a force that had the power to alter human life and social conditions".British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment" reveals how a new sense of the national climate emerged in the...

In today's academe, the fields of science and literature are considered unconnected, one relying on raw data and fact, the other focusing on fiction. During the period between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, however, the two fields were not so...

Why do aircraft fly? How do their wings support them? In the early years of aviation, there was an intense dispute between British and German experts over the question of why and how an aircraft wing provides lift. The British, under the leadership o...

In the late fifteenth century, clocks acquired minute hands. A century later, second hands appeared. But it wasn't until the 1850s that instruments could recognize a tenth of a second, and, once they did, the impact on modern science and society was...

"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...

Much like Vladimir Lenin, his onetime rival for the leadership of the Bolshevik party during its formative years, Alexander Bogdanov (1873-1928) was a visionary. In two science fiction novels set on Mars, Bogdanov imagined a future in which the worke...

Triangles abounded in the intellectual culture of early modern Europe – the Christian Trinity was often mapped as a triangle, for instance, and perspective, a characteristic artistic technique, is based on a triangular theory of vision. Renaissance a...