Chinese medicine has a long history in the United States, with written records dating back to the American colonial period. In this intricately crafted history, Tamara Venit Shelton chronicles the dynamic systems of knowledge, therapies, and materia...

Harold C. Urey (1893-1981) was one of the most famous American scientists of the twentieth century. Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1934 for his discovery of deuterium and heavy water, Urey later participated in the Manhattan Project and NASA's lunar expl...

Volume 1 of this critical edition includes a note on the text from the Humboldt in English team, an introduction by editors Vera M. Kutzinski and Ottmar Ette, a preface to the first edition by Alexander von Humboldt, and the translation of Volumes 1...

Volume 2 of this critical edition includes the translation of Volumes 3 and 4 of the second, revised French edition of Alexander von Humboldt's "Essai politique sur le royaume de de Nouvelle Espagne" from 1825 to 1827 as well as notes, supplements, i...

Many of us view the world of science as a firm bastion of knowledge, with each new discovery and further illumination adding to an unshakable foundation of natural truths. "Weak Knowledge" aims to rattle our faith, not in core certainties of scientif...

In a world increasingly shut in by the iron-clad determinism of Victorian physics, the Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882, ­ tasked itself with finding scientific evidence for phenomena science had all but denied. The point was not to re...

The role of fiction in both understanding and interpreting the world has recently become an increasingly important topic for many of the human sciences. This volume of "Osiris" focuses on the relationship between a particular genre of storytelling –...

The debate over scientists' social responsibility is a topic of great controversy today. Peter J. Kuznick here traces the origin of that debate to the 1930s and places it in a context that forces a reevaluation of the relationship between science and...

In 1910, Mary Acworth Evershed (1867-1949) sat on a hill in southern India staring at the moon as she grappled with apparent mistakes in Dante's "Divine Comedy". Was Dante's astronomy unintelligible? Or was he, for a man of his time and place, as ins...

Today's science tells us that our bodies are filled with molecular machinery that orchestrates all sorts of life processes. When we think, microscopic "channels" in our brain cells' membranes open and close; when we run, tiny "motors" in our muscle c...