You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A history of the 1702 chair in chemistry at the University of Cambridge.
Painting with Fire shows how experiments with chemicals known to change visibly over the course of time transformed British pictorial arts of the long eighteenth century—and how they can alter our conceptions of photography today. As early as the 1670s, experimental philosophers at the Royal Society of London had studied the visual effects of dynamic combustibles. By the 1770s, chemical volatility became central to the ambitious paintings of Sir Joshua Reynolds, premier portraitist and first president of Britain’s Royal Academy of Arts. Valued by some critics for changing in time (and thus, for prompting intellectual reflection on the nature of time), Reynolds’s unstable chemistry also...
Texts of the past were often not monolingual but were produced by and for people with bi- or multilingual repertoires; the communicative practices witnessed in them therefore reflect ongoing and earlier language contact situations. However, textbooks and earlier research tend to display a monolingual bias. This collected volume on multilingual practices in historical materials, including code-switching, highlights the importance of a multilingual approach. The authors explore multilingualism in hitherto neglected genres, periods and areas, introduce new methods of locating and analysing multiple languages in various sources, and review terminology, theories and tools. The studies also revisi...
Throughout the nineteenth century, practitioners of science, writers of fiction and journalists wrote about electricity in ways that defied epistemological and disciplinary boundaries. Revealing electricity as a site for intense and imaginative Victorian speculation, Stella Pratt-Smith traces the synthesis of nineteenth-century electricity made possible by the powerful combination of science, literature and the popular imagination. With electricity resisting clear description, even by those such as Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell who knew it best, Pratt-Smith argues that electricity was both metaphorically suggestive and open to imaginative speculation. Her book engages with Victoria...
Compound Histories: Materials, Governance and Production, 1760-1840 offers a new view of the period during which Europe took on its modern character and globally dominant position. By exploring the intertwined realms of production, governance and materials, it places chemists and chemistry at the center of processes most closely identified with the construction of the modern world. This includes the interactive intensification of material and knowledge production; the growth and management of consumption; environmental changes, regulation of materials, markets, landscapes and societies; and practices embodied in political economy. Rather than emphasize revolutionary breaks and the primacy of innovation-driven change, the volume highlights the continuities and accumulation of incremental changes that framed historical development. Contributors are: Robert G.W. Anderson, Bernadette Bensaude Vincent, José Ramón Bertomeu Sánchez, John R.R. Christie, Joppe van Driel, Frank A.J.L. James, Christine Lehman, Lissa L. Roberts, Thomas le Roux, Elena Serrano, Anna Simmons, Marie Thébaud-Sorger, Sacha Tomic, Andreas Weber, Simon Werrett.
Selling Science in the Age of Newton explores an often ignored avenue in the popularization of science. It is an investigation of how advertisements in London newspapers (from approximately 1687 to 1727) enticed consumers to purchase products relating to science: books, lecture series, and instruments. London's readers were among the first in Europe to be exposed to regular newspapers and the advertisements contained in them. This occurred just as science began to captivate the nation's imagination due, in part, to Isaac Newton's rising popularity following the publication of his Principia (1687). This unique moment allows us to see how advertising helped shape the initial public reception o...
When Archibald Liversidge first arrived at Sydney University in 1872 as reader in Geology and Assistant in the Laboratory he had about ten students and two rooms in the main building. In 1874 he became professor of geology and mineralogy and by 1879 he had persuaded the senate to open a faculty of science. He became its first dean in 1882. In 1880 he visited Europe as a trustee of the Australian Museum and his report helped to establish the Industrial, Technological and Sanitary Museum which formed the basis of the present Powerhouse Museum's collection. Liversidge also played a major role in the setting up of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science which held its first congress in 1888. For anyone interested in Archibald Liversidge, his contribution to crystallography, mineral chemistry, chemical geology, strategic minerals policy and a wider field of colonial science.
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) was a pioneer in demography, economics and social science more generally whose ideas prompted a new 'Malthusian' way of thinking about population and the poor. On the occasion of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth, New Perspectives on Malthus offers an up-to-date collection of interdisciplinary essays from leading Malthus experts who reassess his work. Part one looks at Malthus's achievements in historical context, addressing not only perennial questions such as his attitude to the Poor Laws, but also new topics including his response to environmental themes and his use of information about the New World. Part two then looks at the complex reception of his ideas by writers, scientists, politicians and philanthropists from the period of his own lifetime to the present day, from Charles Darwin and H. G. Wells to David Attenborough, Al Gore and Amartya Sen.