In this new edition of the top-selling coursebook, seasoned historians Peter J. Bowler and Iwan Rhys Morus expand on their authoritative survey of how the development of science has shaped our world. Exploring both the history of science and its infl...

The connection between mind and brain has been one of the most persistent problems in modern Western thought; even recent advances in neuroscience haven't been able to solve it satisfactorily. Historian Larry Sommer McGrath's "Making Spirit Matter" s...

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...

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...

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...

A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason A. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppr...

Our stories of industrial innovation tend to focus on individual initiative and breakthroughs. With "Making Jet Engines in World War II", Hermione Giffard uses the case of the development of jet engines to offer a different way of understanding techn...

"Making 'Nature'" is the first book to chronicle the foundation and development of Nature, one of the world's most influential scientific institutions. Now nearing its hundred and fiftieth year of publication, Nature is the international benchmark fo...

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...