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...

Databases have revolutionized nearly every aspect of our lives. Information of all sorts is being collected on a massive scale, from Google to Facebook and well beyond, to produce new knowledge. But as the amount of information in databases explodes,...

Phrenology was the most popular mental science of the Victorian age. From American senators to Indian social reformers, this new mental science found supporters around the globe".Materials of the Mind" tells the story of how phrenology changed the wo...

In the years after the Revolutionary War, the fledgling republic of America was viewed by many Europeans as a degenerate backwater, populated by subspecies weak and feeble. Chief among these naysayers was the French Count and world-renowned naturalis...

In this book, historian Maria M. Portuondo takes us to sixteenth-century Spain, where she identifies a community of natural philosophers and biblical scholars. They shared what she calls the "Spanish Disquiet" – a preoccupation with the perceived sho...

Georg Forster (1754-1794) was in many ways self-taught and rarely had two cents to rub together, but he became one of the most dynamic figures of the Enlightenment: a brilliant writer, naturalist, explorer, illustrator, translator – and a revolutiona...

If the twentieth century saw the rise of "Big Science", then the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were surely an age of thrift. As Simon Werrett's new history shows, frugal early modern experimenters transformed their homes into laboratories as t...

Context and situation always matter in both human and animal lives. Unique insights can be gleaned from conducting scientific studies from within human communities and animal habitats".Inside Science" is a novel treatment of this distinctive mode of...