Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Measure of All Things
The story of the creation of the metric system in 1792 traces the endeavors of Delambre and Méchain, the backlash of superstitious contemporaries, and the mistake that drove Méchain to the brink of madness.
The Lie Detectors
The story of the lie detector takes us straight into the dark recesses of the American soul. It also leads us on a noir journey through some of the most storied episodes in American history. That is because the device we take for granted as an indicator of guilt or innocence actually tells us more about our beliefs than about our deeds. The machine does not measure deception so much as feelings of guilt or shame. As Ken Alder reveals in his fascinating and disturbing account, the history of the lie detector exposes fundamental truths about our culture: why we long to know the secret thoughts of our fellow citizens; why we believe in popular science; and why America embraced the culture of "t...
Measure of All Things
In June 1792, the cosmopolitan Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre and the scrupulous Pierre-Francois-Andre Mechain set out from Paris to calculate the length of the meter. In the bestselling tradition of "Longitude and The Map that Changed the World, " Alder has written an extraordinary and riveting tale. Illustrations.
Engineering the Revolution
Engineering the Revolution documents the forging of a new relationship between technology and politics in Revolutionary France, and the inauguration of a distinctively modern form of the “technological life.” Here, Ken Alder rewrites the history of the eighteenth century as the total history of one particular artifact—the gun—by offering a novel and historical account of how material artifacts emerge as the outcome of political struggle. By expanding the “political” to include conflict over material objects, this volume rethinks the nature of engineering rationality, the origins of mass production, the rise of meritocracy, and our interpretation of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
The Values of Precision
The Values of Precision examines how exactitude has come to occupy such a prominent place in Western culture. What has been the value of numerical values? Beginning with the late eighteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, the essays in this volume support the view that centralizing states--with their increasingly widespread bureaucracies for managing trade, taxation, and armies--and large-scale commercial enterprises--with their requirements for standardization and mass production--have been the major promoters of numerical precision. Taking advantage of the resources available, scientists and engineers have entered a symbiotic relationship with state and industry, which in turn h...
Child Victims of Homicide
This international study explores gender and familial patterns in cases of child homicide.
Conserving the Enlightenment
A study of French military engineers at a crucial point in the evolution of modern engineering.
Membership Roles in Field Research
There are a range of roles that can be played by ethnographers in field research. The choice of role will affect the type of information available to the researcher and the kind of ethnography written. The authors discuss the problems and advantages at each level of involvement and give examples of modern ethnographic studies.
Security Communities
This book argues that community can exist at the international level, and that security politics is profoundly shaped by it, with states dwelling within an international community having the capacity to develop a pacific disposition. By investigating the relationship between international community and the possibility for peaceful change, this book revisits the concept first pioneered by Karl Deutsch: 'security communities'. Leading scholars examine security communities in various historical and regional contexts: in places where they exist, where they are emerging, and where they are hardly detectable. Building on constructivist theory, the volume is an important contribution to international relations theory and security studies, attempting to understand the conjunction of transnational forces, state power and international organizations that can produce a security community.
Why France?
A diverse array of historians provide autobiographical essays in which they explore their intellectual, political, and personal engagements with France and its past.
