From the Bible’s “Canst thou raise leviathan with a hook?” to Captain Ahab’s “From Hell’s heart I stab at thee!,” from the trials of Job to the legends of Sinbad, whales have breached in the human imagination as looming figures of terror, power, confusion, and mystery.
In the twentieth century, however, our understanding of and relationship to these superlatives of creation underwent some astonishing changes, and with The Sounding of the Whale, D. Graham Burnett tells the fascinating story of the transformation of cetaceans from grotesque monsters, useful only as wallowing kegs of fat and fertilizer, to playful friends of humanity, bellwethers of environmental devastation, and, finally, totems of the counterculture in the Age of Aquarius. When Burnett opens his story, ignorance reigns: even Nature was misclassifying whales at the turn of the century, and the only biological study of the species was happening in gruesome Arctic slaughterhouses. But in the aftermath of World War I, an international effort to bring rational regulations to the whaling industry led to an explosion of global research—and regulations that, while well-meaning, were quashed, or widely flouted, by whaling nations, the first shot in a battle that continues to this day. The book closes with a look at the remarkable shift in public attitudes toward whales that began in the 1960s, as environmental concerns and new discoveries about whale behavior combined to make whales an object of sentimental concern and public adulation.
A sweeping history, grounded in nearly a decade of research, The Sounding of the Whale tells a remarkable story of how science, politics, and simple human wonder intertwined to transform the way we see these behemoths from below.
The two main aims of this book are to increase the general availability of classical contributions to animal biology and to present the development of thought in this field in the words of those who produced it.
The first of these aims is realized by assembling in one volume works previously scattered and, in some cases, rather rare.
The second object, that of tracing the principal patterns of development in the field, is made possible through the selection of appropriate materials and the inclusion of brief critical comments indicating the historical position of each work and its author.
The phenomenal growth of modern astronomy, including the invention of the coronagraph and major developments in telescope design and photographic technique, is unparalleled in many centuries. Theories of relativity, the concept and measurement of the expanding universe, the location of sun and planets far from the center of the Milky Way, the exploration of the interiors of stars, the pulsation theory of Cepheid variation, and investigations of interstellar space have profoundly altered the astronomer's approach.
These fundamental discoveries are reported in papers by such eminent scientists as Albert Einstein, Sir Arthur S. Eddington, Henry Norris Russell, Sir James Jeans, Meghnad Saha, Otto Struve, Fred L. Whipple, Bernard Lyot, Jan H. Oort, and George Ellery Hale. The Source Book's 69 contributions represent all fields of astronomy. For example, there are reports on the equivalence of mass and energy (E = mc²) of the special theory of relativity; building the 200-inch Palomar telescope; the scattering of galaxies suggesting a rapidly expanding universe; stellar evolution; and the Big Bang and Steady State theories of the universe's origin.
When at the beginning of this century, new instrumentation in astronomy came together with innovative concepts in physics, a science was born that has yielded not only staggering quantities of information about the universe but an elegant and useful conception of its origins and behavior. This volume in Harvard’s distinguished series of Source Books serves to record the achievements of this science and illuminate its brief history by bringing together the major contributions through the year 1975.
The volume is organized to trace the development of the basic ideas of astrophysics. The 132 selections document chronologically the changing answers to such fundamental questions as: How did the solar system originate? What makes the stars shine? What lies in the vacuous space between the stars? Are the spiral nebulae distant “island universes”? Will the universe expand forever? The articles range from Hale’s popular piece in Harper’s Magazine to the tensor calculus of Schwarzschild and Einstein. They include Chamberlain and Moulton’s account of the collision hypothesis; Edwin Hubble’s identification of the Crab Nebula with the supernova of 1054; Ralph Fowler’s work on the application of degenerate gas statistics to white dwarfs; and Jan Oort’s detection of galactic rotation. The complexity and richness of twentieth-century astrophysics is felt in these selections and a sense of discovery is provided in reading, in the words of the pioneer scientist, accounts of the first observations of the cosmic rays, the Van Allen belts, the Martian volcanoes and canyons, pulsars, interstellar hydrogen, cosmic magnetic fields, quasars and the remnant background of the primeval big bang.
About half of the papers are printed in their entirety and the others in careful abridgment. Editors Kenneth Lang and Owen Gingerich provide substantial commentary that describes related developments before, during and after the selected research. Works by Heinrich Vogt, Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker, Karl Schwarzschild, Albert Einstein, Aleksandr Friedman and many others appear for the first time in translation.
The growing interdependence of the sciences was one of the outstanding characteristics of the first half of the twentieth century. "Inevitably," Dr. Leicester points out, "this expanded vision led to closer contacts among chemists of every speciality, and also with scientists in other fields. Physics and physical chemistry were applied to organic compounds, and new substances that could not have been foreseen by the older theories were prepared. Reaction mechanisms were generalized. New borderline sciences sprang up. Chemical physics and biochemistry became sciences in their own right. Chemistry thus became a link between physics and biology."
A continuation of A Source Book in Chemistry, 1400-1900 (HUP, 1952), this volume contains selections from ninety classic papers in all branches of chemistry -- papers upon which contemporary research and practices are based.
The topics include such chemical techniques as microanalysis, polarography, hydrogen ion concentration, chromatography, electrophoresis, and the use of the ultramicroscope, the ultracentrifuge, and radioactive tracers; modern structural theories, with emphasis on crystal structure, radioactive decay, isotopes, molecular structure, the applications of quantum mechanics to chemistry, thermodynamics, electrolytes, and kinetics; the more recent studies on artificial radioactivity and the transuranium elements; organic chemistry, with reference to general synthetic methods, polymers, the structure of proteins, nucleic acids, alkaloids, steroids, and carotenoids; and biochemistry, including the concept of hormones and vitamins, separation of enzymes and viruses, metabolism of fats, proteins and carbohydrates, and energy production.
The Source Book serves as an introduction to present-day chemistry and can also be used as supplementary reading in general chemistry courses, since, in many instances, the papers explain the circumstances under which a particular discovery was made--information that is customarily lacking in textbooks. Although the selections are classified into the usual branches of the science, it will be apparent to the reader how the discoveries in any one branch were taken up and incorporated into others.
An understanding of the developments in classical analysis during the nineteenth century is vital to a full appreciation of the history of twentieth-century mathematical thought. It was during the nineteenth century that the diverse mathematical formulae of the eighteenth century were systematized and the properties of functions of real and complex variables clearly distinguished; and it was then that the calculus matured into the rigorous discipline of today, becoming in the process a dominant influence on mathematics and mathematical physics.
This Source Book, a sequel to D. J. Struik’s Source Book in Mathematics, 1200–1800, draws together more than eighty selections from the writings of the most influential mathematicians of the period. Thirteen chapters, each with an introduction by the editor, highlight the major developments in mathematical thinking over the century. All material is in English, and great care has been taken to maintain a high standard of accuracy both in translation and in transcription. Of particular value to historians and philosophers of science, the Source Book should serve as a vital reference to anyone seeking to understand the roots of twentieth-century mathematical thought.
This remarkable volume presents a panorama of geographical writings from Hesiod to Humboldt, from the beginnings of geographical thought in the Western world to the emergence of topical specialization. It includes a wealth of material from non-Western sources, particularly Moslem and Chinese, that has not been collected before.
The selections are arranged chronologically, and contain geographical theory, descriptions of terrestrial phenomena by early observers, and excerpts from major voyages of discovery. Some are obvious classics: Socrates on the nature of the Earth, Ezekiel’s description of the commerce of Tyre, Columbus’s first glimpse of the West Indies, Buffon on the history of the Earth, and Kant’s geographical lectures. Yet more commonly, George Kish provides a sense of the discovery with such finds as the ambassador’s report to the Caliph of Baghdad on the lands and customs of the Norsemen, the study of the Tartar Empire by John of Monte Corvino, Archbishop of Peking, and Jefferson’s private memo to Alexander von Humboldt seeking information on the American West.
Each section is highlighted by a brief but engagingly written introduction by the editor. Throughout, the unique cultural and professional perspective of Kish is very much in evidence.
Since 1900, the science of geology has grown in a spectacular fashion. Not only have field studies been undertaken throughout vast areas of the earth’s surface previously unexplored or only superficially surveyed, but recent discoveries in physics, chemistry, and biology have provided geologists with new techniques of observation and experimentation, and radically new concepts and theories have been developed. This book presents source literature for the most important contributions to this remarkable expansion of geological knowledge. One of the world’s most distinguished geologists provides excerpts from sixty-five articles by sixty-three authors, selected with the advice of more than a score of leading scientists from all parts of the globe. Among the subjects discussed in this comprehensive volume are the constitution of the earth’s interior, the causes of earthquakes, radioactive timekeepers, the interpretation of submarine features and deep-sea cores, the origin and entrapment of petroleum, and crystal structure. Included are articles which led directly to the development of theories of paleomagnetism, metamorphism, cryopedology, and isostasy.
Source Book in Geology, 1900–1950 makes available several papers previously to be found in the libraries of only a few universities, and eight articles translated into English for the first time, of which four are by leading Soviet geologists.
Covering the general fields of mathematics, astronomy, mathematical geography, physics, chemistry and chemical technology, geology and meteorology, biology, medicine, and physiological psychology, the present collection surveys the field of Greek scientific achievement over a thousand-year period.
Many Greek scientific treatises were written and read by cultivated people who did not regard themselves as specialists. These works should appeal today to those readers who wish to understand not only the foundations of modern science, but also a vital element of the humanistic tradition.
Modern scholarship has exposed the intrinsic importance of medieval science and confirmed its role in preserving and transmitting Greek and Arabic achievements. This Source Book offers a rare opportunity to explore more than ten centuries of European scientific thought. In it are approximately 190 selections by about 85 authors, most of them from the Latin West. Nearly half of the selections appear here for the first time in any vernacular translation.
The readings, a number of them complete treatises, have been chosen to represent “science” in a medieval rather than a modern sense. Thus, insofar as they are relevant to medieval science, selections have been drawn from works on alchemy, astrology, logic, and theology. Most of the book, however, reflects medieval understanding of, and achievements in, the mathematical, physical, and biological sciences. Critical commentary and annotation accompany the selections. An appendix contains brief biographies of all authors.
This book will be an indispensable resource for students and scholars in the history of science.
This is a source book unique in its scope, clarity, and general interest. Its 116 excerpts range in time from Epicurus (ca. 300 B.C.) to the turn of the present century and sometimes, when continuity requires, a little beyond (as to K. S. Lashley, 1929). It includes excerpts from Kepler (1604) on the inverted retinal image, Descartes (1650) on the soul's interaction with the machine of the body, Newton (1675) on the seven colors of the spectrum, Locke (1700) on association of ideas, Whytt (1751) on the spinal reflex, Weber (1834) on Weber's law, Darwin (1859) on evolution, Sechenov (1863) on reflexology, Hughlings Jackson (1884) on nervous dissolution, William James (1890) on associationism, Thorndike, Pavlov, Wertheimer, Watson, and 70 other great figures in the history of psychology.
Arranged by topic rather than in the usual strict chronological order, each of the first fourteen chapters traces the development of one important subject in experimental and quantitative psychology. The final chapter discusses the history of thinking about the nature of psychology itself. The editors provide an introduction to each chapter and each excerpt, indicating the significance of the content to follow and establishing historical continuity.
Soybeans and Their Products was first published in 1972. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
This is the report of a comprehensive study designated to identify and measure empirically the forces, interrelationships, and processes which shape the behavior of the total soybean market. The research focused on the years from 1946 to 1967, a period when the soybean economy developed from its small beginnings to its present magnitude. Soybeans are now the leading oilseed in world trade; soybean oil is the most prominent among the many edible oils available in the world; and soybean meal stands first in importance in world markets for high-protein livestock feeds. As a top cash crop in U.S. agriculture soybeans are rivaled only by corn.
Much of the remarkable surge in soybean and related markets in recent years can be explained and analyzed by using the concepts of demand growth and commodity substitution developed in this book. In addition to serving the specific interests of commodity experts, the study will be useful to econometricians and price analysts as an example of empirical investigation of a major agricultural and industrial raw material.
The research was carried out through close cooperation between the University of Minnesota's Department of Agricultura and Applied Economics and the Economic and Statistical Analysis Division of the Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Space Commerce relates the story of private enterprise’s unsteady rise to prominence as a major influence on world space policy and research. The first space race proved the technological and military prowess of the two superpowers; but since the 1970s that contest has been supplanted by a multinational struggle to command the commercial opportunities of space.
The commercial space age was born in 1965 when Early Bird, the first commercial communications satellite, went into orbit. With characteristic ingenuity, American industrialists began to dream of garnering billions of dollars per year from space-based products and services. In the microgravity of space, they hoped, hitherto unavailable drugs could be produced that would revolutionize medicine; in the high vacuum of space, crystals of extreme purity could be grown in orbital laboratories, both for biological research and for application in the manufacture of advanced microcircuits.
John McLucas covers the broad sweep of space commerce, both the vision and the reality: the construction of communications satellites and their ground control stations; the sale and leasing of communications services; remote sensing and measurement of earth’s processes; navigation by satellites, serving ships, airplanes, and automobiles; the design and deployment of space laboratories for scientific research and product development; and life science experiments to determine the effects of space habitation on humans.
Drawing on his considerable expertise, McLucas brings a sober perspective to his assessment of the technological accomplishments as well as the challenges still faced by industry in space. He incorporates into his discussion an illuminating analysis of the economic and political impact of space commerce and its rapidly changing international character.
A Telegraph Best Science Book of the Year
“A witty yet in-depth exploration of the prospects for human habitation beyond Earth…Spacefarers is accessible, authoritative, and in the end, inspiring.”
—Richard Panek, author of The Trouble with Gravity
It’s been over fifty years since Apollo 11 landed on the moon. So why is there so little human presence in space? Will we ever reach Mars? And what will it take to become a multiplanet species? While many books have speculated on the possibility of living beyond the Earth, few have delved into the practical challenges.
A wry and compelling take on the who, how, and why of near-future colonies in space, Spacefarers introduces us to the engineers, scientists, planners, dreamers, and entrepreneurs who are striving right now to make life in space a reality. While private companies such as SpaceX are taking the lead and earning profits from human space activity, Christopher Wanjek is convinced this is only the beginning. From bone-whittling microgravity to eye-popping profits, the risks and rewards of space settlement have never been so close at hand. He predicts we will have hotels in low-earth orbit, mining and tourism on the Moon, and science bases on Mars—possibly followed (gravity permitting) by full blown settlements.
“Nerdily engaging (and often funny)…Technology and science fiction enthusiasts will find much here to delight them, as Wanjek goes into rich detail on rocketry and propulsion methods, including skyhooks and railguns to fling things into orbit…He is a sensible skeptic, yet also convinced that, in the long run, our destiny is among the stars.”
—The Guardian
“If the events of this year have had you daydreaming about abandoning the planet entirely, [Spacefarers] is a geekily pleasurable survey of the practicalities and challenges.”
—The Telegraph
“The best book I’ve read on space exploration since Isaac Asimov.”
—Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic
These reports, at the forefront of relativity theory when they were written, in particular the geometrical aspects of spacetime theory, were the result of the Alfred Schild Memorial Lecture Series presented at the University of Texas at Austin beginning in 1977. Each article is a self-contained summary of an important area of contemporary gravitational physics, while the book as a whole provides an overview of a wide variety of the problems of general relativity and gravitation.
Spanish Second Language Acquisition provides a panoramic overview of previous studies on the acquisition of Spanish as a second or foreign language, the theoretical approaches used in these studies, and the effects of various pedagogical approaches on the development of Spanish interlanguage systems. Barbara Lafford and Rafael Salaberry have compiled the first volume to provide a comprehensive critical overview of the research done and data compiled on how adults acquire Spanish as a second language. Major scholars in the field of SLA have contributed chapters having to do with a wide range of "products" (phonology, tense/aspect, subjunctive, clitics, lexicon, discourse/pragmatics) and "processes" (generative, cognitive and sociocultural theories) involved in the acquisition process-concluding with a discussion of the effects of instruction on Spanish interlanguage development.
While being an invaluable reference tool for undergraduate and graduate programs that focus on the acquisition of Spanish as a second language, due to the extraordinary range of the review research on theoretical and methodological issues, this is also an extremely useful volume for second language theoreticians and practitioners involved in all aspects of the pedagogy of other second languages. It is the editors' desire that students, teachers, program administrators and scholars alike will benefit from the insights that the contributors bring to the myriad issues that language professionals confront.
Are humans too good at adapting to the earth’s natural environment? Every day, there is a net gain of more than 200,000 people on the planet—that’s 146 a minute. Has our explosive population growth led to the mass extinction of countless species in the earth’s plant and animal communities?
Jeffrey K. McKee contends yes. The more people there are, the more we push aside wild plants and animals. In Sparing Nature, he explores the cause-and-effect relationship between these two trends, demonstrating that nature is too sparing to accommodate both a richly diverse living world and a rapidly expanding number of people. The author probes the past to find that humans and their ancestors have had negative impacts on species biodiversity for nearly two million years, and that extinction rates have accelerated since the origins of agriculture. Today entire ecosystems are in peril due to the relentless growth of the human population. McKee gives a guided tour of the interconnections within the living world to reveal the meaning and value of biodiversity, making the maze of technical research and scientific debates accessible to the general reader. Because it is clear that conservation cannot be left to the whims of changing human priorities, McKee takes the unabashedly neo-Malthusian position that the most effective measure to save earth’s biodiversity is to slow the growth of human populations. By conscientiously becoming more responsible about our reproductive habits and our impact on other living beings, we can ensure that nature’s services will make our lives not only supportable, but also sustainable for this century and beyond.
How, asks James E. Strick, could spontaneous generation--the idea that living things can suddenly arise from nonliving materials--come to take root for a time (even a brief one) in so thoroughly unsuitable a field as British natural theology? No less an authority than Aristotle claimed that cases of spontaneous generation were to be observed in nature, and the idea held sway for centuries. Beginning around the time of the Scientific Revolution, however, the doctrine was increasingly challenged; attempts to prove or disprove it led to important breakthroughs in experimental design and laboratory techniques, most notably sterilization methods, that became the cornerstones of modern microbiology and sped the ascendancy of the germ theory of disease.
The Victorian debates, Strick shows, were entwined with the public controversy over Darwin's theory of evolution. While other histories of the debates between 1860 and 1880 have focused largely on the experiments of John Tyndall, Henry Charlton Bastian, and others, Sparks of Life emphasizes previously understudied changes in the theories that underlay the debates. Strick argues that the disputes cannot be understood without full knowledge of the factional infighting among Darwinians themselves, as they struggled to create a socially and scientifically viable form of "Darwinian" science. He shows that even the terms of the debate, such as "biogenesis," usually but incorrectly attributed to Huxley, were intensely contested.
Nearly a decade ago, Johanna Drucker cofounded the University of Virginia’s SpecLab, a digital humanities laboratory dedicated to risky projects with serious aims. In SpecLab she explores the implications of these radical efforts to use critical practices and aesthetic principles against the authority of technology based on analytic models of knowledge.
Inspired by the imaginative frontiers of graphic arts and experimental literature and the technical possibilities of computation and information management, the projects Drucker engages range from Subjective Meteorology to Artists’ Books Online to the as yet unrealized ’Patacritical Demon, an interactive tool for exposing the structures that underlie our interpretations of text. Illuminating the kind of future such experiments could enable, SpecLab functions as more than a set of case studies at the intersection of computers and humanistic inquiry. It also exemplifies Drucker’s contention that humanists must play a role in designing models of knowledge for the digital age—models that will determine how our culture will function in years to come.
Charles Darwin struggled to explain how forty thousand bees working in the dark, seemingly by instinct alone, could organize themselves to construct something as perfect as a honey comb. How do bees accomplish such incredible tasks? Synthesizing the findings of decades of experiments, The Spirit of the Hive presents a comprehensive picture of the genetic and physiological mechanisms underlying the division of labor in honey bee colonies and explains how bees’ complex social behavior has evolved over millions of years.
Robert Page, one of the foremost honey bee geneticists in the world, sheds light on how the coordinated activity of hives arises naturally when worker bees respond to stimuli in their environment. The actions they take in turn alter the environment and so change the stimuli for their nestmates. For example, a bee detecting ample stores of pollen in the hive is inhibited from foraging for more, whereas detecting the presence of hungry young larvae will stimulate pollen gathering. Division of labor, Page shows, is an inevitable product of group living, because individual bees vary genetically and physiologically in their sensitivities to stimuli and have different probabilities of encountering and responding to them.
A fascinating window into self-organizing regulatory networks of honey bees, The Spirit of the Hive applies genomics, evolution, and behavior to elucidate the details of social structure and advance our understanding of complex adaptive systems in nature.
Spiritual Information is a collection of one hundred essays that explore a portion of the vast interdisciplinary approaches to the study of science and religion. Individually and together, the essays show how the study of ourselves, our planet, and the universe helps us understand our place as spiritual beings within God’s universe.
The book is a tribute to Sir John Templeton and his pioneering commitment toward new research that results in “one hundredfold more spiritual information than humankind has ever possessed before.” It begins with essays that reflect on Sir John’s principal domains of interest and expertise: free-enterprise based finance and accelerating spiritual progress.
Themes of the sections are:
•Science-Religion DialogueCould the $50 purchase of an ancient coin by a Rutgers astronomer have unlocked the mystery of the Christmas Star? For years, scientists have looked, with little success, to astronomical records for an explanation of the magical star that guided the Magi to Christ’s manger. Intrigued by the image he found on the latest addition to his coin collection, Michael Molnar thought there might be more to learn by looking, instead, at the teachings of ancient astrologers.
Molnar argues in his book that the Star of Bethlehem was not a star at all, but rather a regal portent centering around the planet Jupiter that was eclipsed by the moon. He bases this theory on the actual beliefs of astrologers, such as the Magi, who lived around the time of Christ. Molnar found some intriguing clues to the mystery while researching the meaning of astrological symbols he found an ancient coin, which bore the image of Aries looking back at a star. He found that Aries was a symbol of Judea at the time, and that ancient astrologers believed that a new king would be born when the moon passed in front of Jupiter. Molnar wondered, could the coin have been issued as a response to the Great Messianic Portent, the Star of Bethlehem?
To match the story of the appearance of the Christmas star, Molnar also knew the event had to happen when Jupiter was “in the east.” Using these criteria and a computer program, he was able to chart an eclipse of Jupiter in Aries on April 17, 6 B.C., a day when Jupiter was precisely “in the east,” which confirmed his theory. Moreover, he found that a Roman astrologer described the conditions of that day as fitting the birth of a “divine and immortal” person.
According to Harvard University Professor Owen Gingerich, “this is the most original and important contribution of the entire 20th century” about the Magi’s star. Using clues from astronomy, astrology, and history, Molnar has created a provocative, fascinating theory on the Christmas Star. He weaves together an intriguing scientific detective story which resolves one of the world’s greatest mysteries: The Star of Bethlehem at the birth of Christ.
Could the $50 purchase of an ancient coin by a Rutgers astronomer have unlocked the mystery of the Christmas Star? For years, scientists have looked, with little success, to astronomical records for an explanation of the magical star that guided the Magi to Christ’s manger. Intrigued by the image he found on the latest addition to his coin collection, Michael Molnar thought there might be more to learn by looking, instead, at the teachings of ancient astrologers.
Molnar argues in his book that the Star of Bethlehem was not a star at all, but rather a regal portent centering around the planet Jupiter that was eclipsed by the moon. He bases this theory on the actual beliefs of astrologers, such as the Magi, who lived around the time of Christ. Molnar found some intriguing clues to the mystery while researching the meaning of astrological symbols he found an ancient coin, which bore the image of Aries looking back at a star. He found that Aries was a symbol of Judea at the time, and that ancient astrologers believed that a new king would be born when the moon passed in front of Jupiter. Molnar wondered, could the coin have been issued as a response to the Great Messianic Portent, the Star of Bethlehem?
To match the story of the appearance of the Christmas star, Molnar also knew the event had to happen when Jupiter was “in the east.” Using these criteria and a computer program, he was able to chart an eclipse of Jupiter in Aries on April 17, 6 B.C., a day when Jupiter was precisely “in the east,” which confirmed his theory. Moreover, he found that a Roman astrologer described the conditions of that day as fitting the birth of a “divine and immortal” person.
According to Harvard University Professor Owen Gingerich, “this is the most original and important contribution of the entire 20th century” about the Magi’s star. Using clues from astronomy, astrology, and history, Molnar has created a provocative, fascinating theory on the Christmas Star. He weaves together an intriguing scientific detective story which resolves one of the world’s greatest mysteries: The Star of Bethlehem at the birth of Christ.
Throughout the four hundred thousand years that humanity has been collecting fossils, sea urchin fossils, or echinoids, have continually been among the most prized, from the Paleolithic era, when they decorated flint axes, to today, when paleobiologists study them for clues to the earth’s history.
In The Star-Crossed Stone, Kenneth J. McNamara, an expert on fossil echinoids, takes readers on an incredible fossil hunt, with stops in history, paleontology, folklore, mythology, art, religion, and much more. Beginning with prehistoric times, when urchin fossils were used as jewelry, McNamara reveals how the fossil crept into the religious and cultural lives of societies around the world—the roots of the familiar five-pointed star, for example, can be traced to the pattern found on urchins. But McNamara’s vision is even broader than that: using our knowledge of early habits of fossil collecting, he explores the evolution of the human mind itself, drawing striking conclusions about humanity’s earliest appreciation of beauty and the first stirrings of artistic expression. Along the way, the fossil becomes a nexus through which we meet brilliant eccentrics and visionary archaeologists and develop new insights into topics as seemingly disparate as hieroglyphics, Beowulf, and even church organs.
An idiosyncratic celebration of science, nature, and human ingenuity, The Star-Crossed Stone is as charming and unforgettable as the fossil at its heart.
Starring the Text: The Place of Rhetoric in Science Studies firmly establishes the rhetorical analysis of science as a respected field of study. Alan G. Gross, one of rhetoric’s foremost authorities, summarizes the state of the field and demonstrates the role of rhetorical analysis in the sciences. He documents the limits of such analyses with examples from biology and physics, explores their range of application, and sheds light on the tangled relationships between science and society. In this deep revision of his important Rhetoric of Science, Gross examines how rhetorical analyses have a wide range of application, effectively exploring the generation, spread, certification, and closure that characterize scientific knowledge. Gross anchors his position in philosophical rather than in rhetorical arguments and maintains there is rhetorical criticism from which the sciences cannot be excluded.
Gross employs a variety of case studies and examples to assess the limits of the rhetorical analysis of science. For example, in examining avian taxonomy, he demonstrates that both taxonomical and evolutionary species are the product of rhetorical interactions. A review of Newton’s two formulations of optical research illustrates that their only significant difference is rhetorical, a difference in patterns of style, arrangement, and argument. Gross also explores the range of rhetorical analysis in his consideration of the “evolution of evolution” of Darwin’s notebooks. In his analysis of science and society, he explains the limits of citizen action in executive, judicial, and legislative democratic realms in the struggle to prevent, ameliorate, and provide adequate compensation for occupational disease. By using philosophical, historical, and psychological perspectives, Gross concludes, rhetorical analysis can also supplement other viewpoints in resolving intellectual problems.
Starring the Text, which includes fourteen illustrations, is an updated, readable study geared to rhetoricians, historians, philosophers, and sociologists interested in science. The volume effectively demonstrates that the rhetoric of science is a natural extension of rhetorical theory and criticism.
Listen to a short interview with Robert PaarlbergHost: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane
Heading upcountry in Africa to visit small farms is absolutely exhilarating given the dramatic beauty of big skies, red soil, and arid vistas, but eventually the two-lane tarmac narrows to rutted dirt, and the journey must continue on foot. The farmers you eventually meet are mostly women, hardworking but visibly poor. They have no improved seeds, no chemical fertilizers, no irrigation, and with their meager crops they earn less than a dollar a day. Many are malnourished.
Nearly two-thirds of Africans are employed in agriculture, yet on a per-capita basis they produce roughly 20 percent less than they did in 1970. Although modern agricultural science was the key to reducing rural poverty in Asia, modern farm science—including biotechnology—has recently been kept out of Africa.
In Starved for Science Robert Paarlberg explains why poor African farmers are denied access to productive technologies, particularly genetically engineered seeds with improved resistance to insects and drought. He traces this obstacle to the current opposition to farm science in prosperous countries. Having embraced agricultural science to become well-fed themselves, those in wealthy countries are now instructing Africans—on the most dubious grounds—not to do the same.
In a book sure to generate intense debate, Paarlberg details how this cultural turn against agricultural science among affluent societies is now being exported, inappropriately, to Africa. Those who are opposed to the use of agricultural technologies are telling African farmers that, in effect, it would be just as well for them to remain poor.
The process of nation-building in Latin America transformed the relations between the state, the economy, and nature. Between 1760 and 1940, the economies of most countries in the Spanish Caribbean came to depend heavily on the export of plant products, such as coffee, tobacco, and sugar. After the mid-nineteenth century, this model of export-led economic growth also became a central tenet of liberal projects of nation-building. As international competition grew and commodity prices fell over this period, Latin American growers strove to remain competitive by increasing agricultural production. By the turn of the twentieth century, their pursuit of export-led growth had generated severe environmental problems, including soil exhaustion, erosion, and epidemic outbreaks of crop diseases and pests.
This book traces the history of the intersections between nature, economy, and nation in the Spanish Caribbean through a history of the agricultural and botanical sciences. Growers and governments in Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Colombia, and Costa Rica turned to scientists to help them establish practical and ideological control over nature. They hoped to use science to alleviate the pressing environmental and economic stresses, without having to give up their commitment to export-led growth. Starting from an overview of the relationship among science, nature, and development throughout the export boom of 1760 to 1930, Stuart McCook examines such topics as the relationship between scientific plant surveys and nation-building, the development of a "creole science" to address the problems of tropical agriculture, the ecological rationalization of the sugar industry, and the growth of technocratic ideologies of science and progress. He concludes with a look at how the Great Depression of the 1930s changed the paradigms of economic and political development and the role of science and nature in these paradigms.
Despite their twin positions as two of North America’s most iconic Italian neighborhoods, South Philly and Toronto’s Little Italy have functioned in dramatically different ways since World War II. Inviting readers into the churches, homes, and businesses at the heart of these communities, Staying Italian reveals that daily experience in each enclave created two distinct, yet still Italian, ethnicities.
As Philadelphia struggled with deindustrialization, Jordan Stanger-Ross shows, Italian ethnicity in South Philly remained closely linked with preserving turf and marking boundaries. Toronto’s thriving Little Italy, on the other hand, drew Italians together from across the wider region. These distinctive ethnic enclaves, Stanger-Ross argues, were shaped by each city’s response to suburbanization, segregation, and economic restructuring. By situating malleable ethnic bonds in the context of political economy and racial dynamics, he offers a fresh perspective on the potential of local environments to shape individual identities and social experience.
With the overwhelming amount of new information that bombards us each day, it is perhaps difficult to imagine a time when the widespread availability of the printed word was a novelty. In early nineteenth-century Britain, print was not novel—Gutenberg’s printing press had been around for nearly four centuries—but printed matter was still a rare and relatively expensive luxury. All this changed, however, as publishers began employing new technologies to astounding effect, mass-producing instructive and educational books and magazines and revolutionizing how knowledge was disseminated to the general public.
This interdisciplinary collection of essays explores in-depth a topic previously neglected by scholars: John Steinbeck's early continuing preoccupation with ecology and marine biology and the effect of that interest on his writings. Written by scholars from various disciplines, the essays offer a dynamic contribution to the study of John Steinbeck by considering his writings from an environmental perspective. They reveal Steinbeck as a prophet that was ahead of his time and supremely relevant to our own.
“The principal authority for the general treatment of the history of coal, and of iron and steel, in
Alabama is the work of Miss Ethel Armes. The Story of Coal and Iron in Alabama is a comprehensive
and scholarly work portraying in attractive style the growth of the mineral industries in its
relation to the development of the state and of the South, in preparation of which the author spent
more than five years.”
—Thomas McAdory Owen, History of Alabama and Dictionary of Alabama Biography
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