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The book should be of interest not only to earth scientists, students of polar travel and exploration, and historians but to all readers who are fascinated by the great minds of science.--Henry R. Frankel, University of Missouri-Kansas City, author of The Continental Drift Controversy "Science & Education"
In this clear and comprehensive introduction to developments in geological theory during the nineteenth century, Mott T. Greene asserts that the standard accounts of nineteenth-century geology, which dwell on the work of Anglo-American scientists, have obscured the important contributions of Continental geologists; he balances this traditional emphasis with a close study of the innovations of the French, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Swiss geologists whose comprehensive theory of earth history actually dominated geological thought of the time. Greene's account of the Continental scientists places the history of geology in a new light: it demonstrates that scientific interest in the late nine...
In describing the origins of modern "science," historians often fail to appreciate or misread how the ancients understood and used significant expressions of "natural knowledge." Few read the story of the cyclops, for example, as useful advice about where to travel and settle — and where not to. Others search for "lost Egyptian wisdom" rather than see how the great pyramids of the Old Kingdom could be built with the simple tools and cumbersome mathematics of the time. Mott T. Greene reexamines the remnants of ancient life using conceptual tools seldom brought to bear on such material. The result is a fresh appraisal of what the evidence will yield about natural phenomena and modes of thought in the distant past. Greene builds on the work of modern scholars but contributes scientific precision and tenacity to debates in areas as diverse as archaeology, early art history, Egyptian fractions, Indo-Iranian religion, classical Greek verse, and Plato's "problem of knowledge."
When does history begin? What characterizes it? This brilliant and beautifully written book dissolves the logic of a beginning based on writing, civilization, or historical consciousness and offers a model for a history that escapes the continuing grip of the Judeo-Christian time frame. Daniel Lord Smail argues that in the wake of the Decade of the Brain and the best-selling historical work of scientists like Jared Diamond, the time has come for fundamentally new ways of thinking about our past. He shows how recent work in evolution and paleohistory makes it possible to join the deep past with the recent past and abandon, once and for all, the idea of prehistory. Making an enormous literature accessible to the general reader, he lays out a bold new case for bringing neuroscience and neurobiology into the realm of history.
Today we have countless scientific laws and principles that help explain our observations of the natural world. However, this was not always the case. Although individuals have long sought to understand their surroundings, it was not until around 2500 BCE that scientific activity began to assume a more prominent place in civilizations around the world. The journey from early investigation through the scientific revolution to the present day is chronicled in this absorbing volume. Readers will learn how religion helped fuel early studies in astronomy, how Stonehenge is related to the Pythagorean theorem, how the development of the scientific method affected the various branches of science, the implications of the God particle, and much more.
Marie Curie represents modern science. Her considerable lifetime achievementsincluding being the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, the only woman to win in two fields, and the only person to win in multiple sciencesare studied by schoolchildren across the globe. "Making Marie Curie "explores what went into making this icon of science. It is not a traditional biography, or one that seeks to uncover the real Marie Curie. Instead, Eva Hemmungs Wirten draws readers through major events in Marie Curie s life, tracing a career spanning two centuries and one World War, in order to paint a composite picture of her rising celebrity. In doing so, Hemmungs Wirten provides an innovative and historically grounded account of how modern science emerges in tandem with celebrity culture, through the power of print and under the influence of intellectual property."
This book, in language accessible to the general reader, investigates twelve of the most notorious, most interesting, and most instructive episodes involving the interaction between science and Christianity, aiming to tell each story in its historical specificity and local particularity. Among the events treated in When Science and Christianity Meet are the Galileo affair, the seventeenth-century clockwork universe, Noah's ark and flood in the development of natural history, struggles over Darwinian evolution, debates about the origin of the human species, and the Scopes trial. Readers will be introduced to St. Augustine, Roger Bacon, Pope Urban VIII, Isaac Newton, Pierre-Simon de Laplace, Carl Linnaeus, Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, Sigmund Freud, and many other participants in the historical drama of science and Christianity. “Taken together, these papers provide a comprehensive survey of current thinking on key issues in the relationships between science and religion, pitched—as the editors intended—at just the right level to appeal to students.”—Peter J. Bowler, Isis
"This volume, a collection of letters written by an abolitionist businessman who lived in East Tennessee prior to the Civil War, provides one of the clearest firsthand views yet published of a region whose political, social, and economic distinctions have intrigued historians for more than a century." "Between 1841 and 1846, Birdseye expressed his views and observations in letters to Gerrit Smith, a prominent New York reformer who arranged to have many of them published in antislavery newspapers such as the Emancipator and Friend of Man." "Those letters, reproduced in this book, drew on Birdseye's extensive conversations with slaveholders, nonslaveholders, and the slaves themselves. He found that East Tennesseans, on the whole, were antislavery in sentiment, susceptible to rational abolitionist appeal, and generally far more lenient toward individual slaves than were other southerners. Opposed to slavery on economic as well as moral grounds, Birdseye sought to establish a free labor colony in East Tennessee in the early 1840s and actively supported the region's abortive effort in 1842 to separate itself from the rest of the state."--[book jacket].
In Contraception And Abortion From The Ancient World To The Renaissance, Riddle showed that women in ancient times relied on herbs to regulate fertility. In this volume, he shows that this ancient knowledge was not lost, but survived in coded form.
Science: A Four Thousand Year History rewrites science's past. Instead of focussing on difficult experiments and abstract theories, Patricia Fara shows how science has always belonged to the practical world of war, politics, and business. Rather than glorifying scientists as idealized heroes, she tells true stories about real people - men (and some women) who needed to earn their living, who made mistakes, and who trampled down their rivals in their quest for success. Fara sweeps through the centuries, from ancient Babylon right up to the latest hi-tech experiments in genetics and particle physics, illuminating the financial interests, imperial ambitions, and publishing enterprises that have...