A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders

A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders
Author: James Delbourgo
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2006-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780674022997

"The first book to situate early American experimental science in the context of a transatlantic public sphere, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders offers a view of the origins of American science and the cultural meaning of the American Enlightenment."--BOOK JACKET.

A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders

A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders
Author: James Delbourgo
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2006-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674022998

"The first book to situate early American experimental science in the context of a transatlantic public sphere, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders offers a view of the origins of American science and the cultural meaning of the American Enlightenment."--BOOK JACKET.

Domesticating Electricity

Domesticating Electricity
Author: Graeme Gooday
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2016-09-12
Genre: Science
ISBN: 082298170X

This is an innovative and original socio-cultural study of the history of electricity during the late Victorian and Edward periods. Gooday shows how technology, authority and gender interacted in pre-World War I Britain. The rapid take-up of electrical light and domestic appliances on both sides of the Atlantic had a wide-ranging effect on consumer habits and the division of labour within the home. Electricity was viewed by non-experts as potential threat to domestic order and welfare. This broadly interdisciplinary study relates to a website developed by the author on the history of electricity.

The Science of Abolition

The Science of Abolition
Author: Eric Herschthal
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2021-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0300236808

A revealing look at how antislavery scientists and Black and white abolitionists used scientific ideas to discredit slaveholders "While recent historical literature has shown the complicity of the early science of man in the defense of slavery, Herschthal unearths an equally long intellectual tradition of antislavery science. This innovative book is timely, when science itself is under assault."--Manisha Sinha, author of The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition In the context of slavery, science is usually associated with slaveholders' scientific justifications of racism. But abolitionists were equally adept at using scientific ideas to discredit slaveholders. Looking beyond the science of race, The Science of Abolition shows how Black and white scientists and abolitionists drew upon a host of scientific disciplines--from chemistry, botany, and geology, to medicine and technology--to portray slaveholders as the enemies of progress. From the 1770s through the 1860s, scientists and abolitionists in Britain and the United States argued that slavery stood in the way of scientific progress, blinded slaveholders to scientific evidence, and prevented enslavers from adopting labor-saving technologies that might eradicate enslaved labor. While historians increasingly highlight slavery's centrality to the modern world, fueling the rise of capitalism, science, and technology, few have asked where the myth of slavery's backwardness comes from in the first place. This book contends that by routinely portraying slaveholders as the enemies of science, abolitionists and scientists helped generate that myth.

The Oxford Illustrated History of Science

The Oxford Illustrated History of Science
Author: Iwan Rhys Morus
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 447
Release: 2017-06-09
Genre: Science
ISBN: 019164031X

The Oxford Illustrated History of Science is the first ever fully illustrated global history of science, from Aristotle to the atom bomb - and beyond. The first part of the book tells the story of science in both East and West from antiquity to the Enlightenment: from the ancient Mediterranean world to ancient China; from the exchanges between Islamic and Christian scholars in the Middle Ages to the Chinese invention of gunpowder, paper, and the printing press; from the Scientific Revolution of sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe to the intellectual ferment of the eighteenth century. The chapters that follow focus on the increasingly specialized story of science since end of the eighteenth century, covering experimental science in the laboratory from Michael Faraday to CERN; the exploration of nature, from intrepid Victorian explorers to twentieth century primatologists; the mapping of the universe, from the discovery of Uranus to Big Bang theory; the impact of evolutionary ideas, from Lamarck, Darwin, and Wallace to DNA; and the story of theoretical physics, from James Clark Maxwell to Quantum Theory and beyond. A concluding chapter reflects on how scientists have communicated their work to a wider public, from the Great Exhibition of 1851 to the internet in the early twenty-first century.

The Republic of Color

The Republic of Color
Author: Michael Rossi
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2019-08-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 022665186X

The Republic of Color delves deep into the history of color science in the United States to unearth its origins and examine the scope of its influence on the industrial transformation of turn-of-the-century America. For a nation in the grip of profound economic, cultural, and demographic crises, the standardization of color became a means of social reform—a way of sculpting the American population into one more amenable to the needs of the emerging industrial order. Delineating color was also a way to characterize the vagaries of human nature, and to create ideal structures through which those humans would act in a newly modern American republic. Michael Rossi’s compelling history goes far beyond the culture of the visual to show readers how the control and regulation of color shaped the social contours of modern America—and redefined the way we see the world.

When the Medium Was the Mission

When the Medium Was the Mission
Author: Jenna Supp-Montgomerie
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2021-02-16
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1479801488

**FINALIST, 2022 PROSE Award in Theology & Religious Studies** An innovative exploration of religion's influence on communication networks When Samuel Morse sent the words “what hath God wrought” from the US Supreme Court to Baltimore in mere minutes, it was the first public demonstration of words travelling faster than human beings and farther than a line of sight in the US. This strange confluence of media, religion, technology, and US nationhood lies at the foundation of global networks. The advent of a telegraph cable crossing the Atlantic Ocean was viewed much the way the internet is today, to herald a coming world-wide unification. President Buchanan declared that the Atlantic Telegraph would be “an instrument destined by divine providence to diffuse religion, civilization, liberty, and law throughout the world” through which “the nations of Christendom [would] spontaneously unite.” Evangelical Protestantism embraced the new technology as indicating God’s support for their work to Christianize the globe. Public figures in the US imagined this new communication technology in primarily religious terms as offering the means to unite the world and inspire peaceful relations among nations. Religious utopianists saw the telegraph as the dawn of a perfect future. Religious framing thus dominated the interpretation of the technology’s possibilities, forging an imaginary of networks as connective, so much so that connection is now fundamental to the idea of networks. In reality, however, networks are marked, at core, by disconnection. With lively historical sources and an accessible engagement with critical theory, When the Medium was the Mission tells the story of how connection was made into the fundamental promise of networks, illuminating the power of public Protestantism in the first network imaginaries, which continue to resonate today in false expectations of connection.

Science and Empire in the Atlantic World

Science and Empire in the Atlantic World
Author: James Delbourgo
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2008-09-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1135899096

Science and Empire in the Atlantic World is the first book in the growing field of Atlantic Studies to examine the production of scientific knowledge in the Atlantic world from a comparative and international perspective. Rather than focusing on a specific scientific field or single national context, this collection captures the multiplicity of practices, people, languages, and agendas that characterized the traffic in knowledge around the Atlantic world, linking this knowledge to the social processes fundamental to colonialism, such as travel, trade, ethnography, and slavery.

Common Sense

Common Sense
Author: Sophia Rosenfeld
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2011-09-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674266811

Common sense has always been a cornerstone of American politics. In 1776, Tom Paine’s vital pamphlet with that title sparked the American Revolution. And today, common sense—the wisdom of ordinary people, knowledge so self-evident that it is beyond debate—remains a powerful political ideal, utilized alike by George W. Bush’s aw-shucks articulations and Barack Obama’s down-to-earth reasonableness. But far from self-evident is where our faith in common sense comes from and how its populist logic has shaped modern democracy. Common Sense: A Political History is the first book to explore this essential political phenomenon. The story begins in the aftermath of England’s Glorious Revolution, when common sense first became a political ideal worth struggling over. Sophia Rosenfeld’s accessible and insightful account then wends its way across two continents and multiple centuries, revealing the remarkable individuals who appropriated the old, seemingly universal idea of common sense and the new strategic uses they made of it. Paine may have boasted that common sense is always on the side of the people and opposed to the rule of kings, but Rosenfeld demonstrates that common sense has been used to foster demagoguery and exclusivity as well as popular sovereignty. She provides a new account of the transatlantic Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions, and offers a fresh reading on what the eighteenth century bequeathed to the political ferment of our own time. Far from commonsensical, the history of common sense turns out to be rife with paradox and surprise.

Storm Kings

Storm Kings
Author: Lee Sandlin
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2014-03-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307473589

With 16 pages of black-and-white illustrations In Storm Kings, Lee Sandlin retraces America's fascination and unique relationship to tornadoes and the weather. From Ben Franklin's early experiments, to "the great storm debates" of the nineteenth century, to heartland life in the early twentieth century, Sandlin shows how tornado chasing helped foster the birth of meteorology, recreating with vivid descriptions some of the most devastating storms in America's history. Drawing on memoirs, letters, eyewitness testimonies, and numerous archives, Sandlin brings to life the forgotten characters and scientists that changed a nation and how successive generations came to understand and finally coexist with the spiraling menace that could erase lives and whole towns in an instant.