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.

The Source Book contains 75 excerpts from the writings of Western mathematics from the thirteenth to the end of the eighteenth century. The selection has been confined to pure mathematics or to those fields of applied mathematics that had a direct bearing on the development of pure mathematics.

The authors range from Al-Khwarizmi (a Latin translation of whose work was much used in Europe), Viète, and Oresme, to Newton, Euler, and Lagrange. The selections are grouped in chapters on arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and analysis. All the excerpts are translated into English. Some of the translations have been newly made by Mr. and Mrs. Struik; if a translation was already available it has been used, but in every such case it has been checked against the original and amended or corrected where it seemed necessary. The editor has taken considerable pains to put each selection in context by means of introductory comments and has explained obscure or doubtful points in footnote wherever necessary.

The Source Book should be particularly valuable to historians of science, but all who are concerned with the origins and growth of mathematics will find it interesting and useful.

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.

In this collection JoAnn Scurlock assembles and translates medical texts that provided instructions for ancient doctors and pharmacists. Scurlock unpacks the difficult, technical vocabulary that describes signs and symptoms as well as procedures and plants used in treatments. This fascinating material shines light on the development of medicine in the ancient Near East, yet these tablets were essentially inaccessible to anyone without an expertise in cuneiform. Scurlock’s work fills this gap by providing a key resource for teaching and research.

Features:

• Accessible translations and transliterations for both specialists and non-specialists
• Texts include a range of historical periods and regions
• Therapeutic, pharmacological, and diagnostic texts

Technological advance is the key driving force behind economic growth, argues Richard Nelson. Investments in physical and human capital contribute to growth largely as handmaidens to technological advance. Technological advance needs to be understood as an evolutionary process, depending much more on ex post selection and learning than on ex ante calculation. That is why it proceeds much more rapidly under conditions of competition than under monopoly or oligopoly.

Nelson also argues that an adequate theory of economic growth must incorporate institutional change explicitly. Drawing on a deep knowledge of economic and technological history as well as the tools of economic analysis, Nelson exposes the intimate connections among government policies, science-based universities, and the growth of technology. He compares national innovation systems, and explores both the rise of the United States as the world’s premier technological power during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century and the diminishing of that lead as other countries have largely caught up.

Lucid, wide-ranging, and accessible, the book examines the secrets of economic growth and why the U.S. economy has been anemic since the early 1970s.

How can human beings, who are liable to error, possess knowledge? The skeptic finds this question impossible to answer. If we can err, then it seems the grounds on which we believe do not rule out that we are wrong. Most contemporary epistemologists agree with the skeptic that we can never believe on grounds that exclude error. Sources of Knowledge moves beyond this predicament by demonstrating that some major problems of contemporary philosophy have their roots in the lack of a metaphysical category that is fundamental to our self-understanding: the category of a rational capacity for knowledge.

Andrea Kern argues that we can disarm skeptical doubt by conceiving knowledge as an act of a ratio­nal capacity. This enables us to appreciate human fallibility without falling into skepticism, for it allows us to understand how we can form beliefs about the world on grounds that exclude error. Knowledge is a fundamental capacity of the human mind. Human beings, as such, are knowers. In this way, Sources of Knowledge seeks to understand knowledge from within our self-understanding as knowers. It develops a metaphysics of the human mind as existing through knowledge of itself, which knowledge—as the human being is finite—takes the form of a capacity.

Regaining the concept of a rational capacity for knowledge, Kern makes a powerful and original contribution to philosophy that reinvigorates the tradition of Aristotle and Kant—thinkers whose relevance for contemporary epistemology has yet to be fully appreciated.

In this extensive inquiry into the sources of modern selfhood, Charles Taylor demonstrates just how rich and precious those resources are. The modern turn to subjectivity, with its attendant rejection of an objective order of reason, has led—it seems to many—to mere subjectivism at the mildest and to sheer nihilism at the worst. Many critics believe that the modern order has no moral backbone and has proved corrosive to all that might foster human good. Taylor rejects this view. He argues that, properly understood, our modern notion of the self provides a framework that more than compensates for the abandonment of substantive notions of rationality.

The major insight of Sources of the Self is that modern subjectivity, in all its epistemological, aesthetic, and political ramifications, has its roots in ideas of human good. After first arguing that contemporary philosophers have ignored how self and good connect, the author defines the modern identity by describing its genesis. His effort to uncover and map our moral sources leads to novel interpretations of most of the figures and movements in the modern tradition. Taylor shows that the modern turn inward is not disastrous but is in fact the result of our long efforts to define and reach the good. At the heart of this definition he finds what he calls the affirmation of ordinary life, a value which has decisively if not completely replaced an older conception of reason as connected to a hierarchy based on birth and wealth. In telling the story of a revolution whose proponents have been Augustine, Montaigne, Luther, and a host of others, Taylor’s goal is in part to make sure we do not lose sight of their goal and endanger all that has been achieved. Sources of the Self provides a decisive defense of the modern order and a sharp rebuff to its critics.

For most of our existence, humans have manipulated stone into tools that are essential for survival. Generally resistant to degradation, stone tools comprise a large portion of the material culture found at archaeological sites worldwide. Recovery of stone tools during archaeological excavation indicates the location where they were discarded, often tied to where they were used. “Sourcing” refers to attempts to determine the origin of the raw materials used to produce these tools. Knowing the beginning and end points of a tool’s use-life, as well as the likely paths it took between those two locations, can offer insight into trade and procurement patterns. The scholars gathered in this volume employ a variety of unique approaches to real-life contexts in multiple geographic regions. These studies illustrate the numerous, robust options available to archaeologists and researchers today, as well as the problems that must be faced and resolved.

Part 1 of the book explores technological approaches to sourcing in conjunction with innovative survey strategies. The chapters describe a particular method while often offering suggestions for improving the chemical analysis. Part 2 focuses on region-specific and methodological sourcing applications. In a concluding review, Michael D. Glascock critiques each of the chapters and presents his views, developed across 40 years of work in the field, on sourcing raw materials. Broadly, these contributions demonstrate how knowledge of lithic sources, geologic processes, the nature of variation, and regional availability can provide a more thorough understanding of past peoples.

Originally issued in hardcover in 1996 by Garland Publishing, this important reference work is now available in paperback for a wider audience. A distinguished team of contributors has compiled entries on 140 significant South American feature films from the silent era until 1994. The entries discuss each film's subject matter, critical reception, and social and political contexts, as well as its production, distribution, and exhibition history, including technical credits. The entries are grouped by country and arranged chronologically. Both fiction and documentary films (some no longer in existence) are included, as well as extensive title, name, and subject indexes and glossaries of film and foreign terms.

This book fills the crucial need for a single volume that gives broad coverage and synthesizes findings for both the general reader and the specialist. This collection of twenty-two essays from fifteen well-known scholars presents linguistic research on the indigenous languages of South America, surveying past research, providing data and analysis gathered from past and current research, and suggesting prospects for future investigation.

Of interest not only to linguists but also to anthropologists, historians, and geographers, South American Indian Languages offers a wide perspective, both temporal and regional, on an area noted for its enormous linguistic diversity and for the lack of knowledge of its indigenous languages. An invaluable source book and reference tool, its appearance is especially timely when exploitation of the rich natural resources in a number of areas in South America must surely result in the demise and/or acculturation of some indigenous groups.

These Texas stories are among the best produced by the state's writers in the mid-twentieth century. Selected above all for their artistic excellence and their narrative mastery, they also present a vital picture of the Southwest in microcosm, as revealed in its largest state.

Texas and Texas writing moved from a Southern orientation in the 1940s—reflected here in works by William Goyen, William Humphrey, and others—to the strong Southwestern flavor of stories by such authors as Larry McMurtry and A. C. Greene to, finally, urban or Sunbelt Texas, mirrored in the edgy, sometimes experimental prose of Doug Crowell, William Harrison, and Peter LaSalle.

Here are stories by such celebrated authors as Paul Horgan and William A. Owens, as well as startling, in some cases previously unpublished work by writers like Harryette Mullen, Naomi Shihab Nye, Pat Ellis Taylor, and Thomas Zigal. A few stories may already be favorites—Larry McMurtry's "There Will Be Peace in Korea," Amado Muro's "Cecilia Rosas." Many others have become classics, such as Vassar Miller's poignantly autobiographical "Pact," Hughes Rudd's hilarious record of grade school fieldtrips, R. E. Smith's gripping story of a Houstonian's life-changing encounter with nature, and Dave Hickey's astonishing account of an old cowboy's imprisonment . . . in a bathtub.

Bill Brett, James Crumley, Linda West Eckhardt, Robert Flynn, Mary Gray Hughes, Carolyn Osborn—all are represented here by stories guaranteed to banish stereotypes and boredom and to enlarge one's vision of the Lone Star State. Anyone who thinks that oil wells and big hair define Texas will find out differently in the dazzling short fiction presented in South by Southwest.

Ege focuses on composers like Florence Price, Nora Holt, and Margaret Bonds not as anomalies but as artists within an expansive cultural flowering. Overcoming racism and sexism, Black women practitioners instilled others with the skill and passion to make classical music while Race women like Maude Roberts George, Estella Bonds, Neota McCurdy Dyett, and Beulah Mitchell Hill built and fostered institutions central to the community. Ege takes readers inside the backgrounds, social lives, and female-led networks of the participants while shining a light on the scene’s audiences, supporters, and training grounds. What emerges is a history of Black women and classical music in Chicago and the still-vital influence of the world they created.

A riveting counter to a history of silence, South Side Impresarios gives voice to an overlooked facet of the Black Chicago Renaissance.

Archaeologists are continually faced with a pervasive problem: How can cultures, and the interactions among cultures, be differentiated in the archaeological record? This issue is especially difficult in peripheral areas, such as El Salvador, Honduras, and southern Guatemala in the New World. Encompassing zones that are clearly Mayan in language and culture, especially during the Classic period, this area also includes zones that seem to be non-Mayan. The Southeast Maya Periphery examines both aspects of this territory. For the Maya, emphasis is on two sites: Quirigua, Guatemala, and Copan, Honduras. For the non-Maya zone, information is presented on a variety of sites and subregions—the Lower Motagua Valley in Guatemala; the Naco, Sula, and Comayagua valleys and the site of Playa de los Muertos in Honduras; and the Zapotitan Valley and the sites of Cihuatan and Santa Leticia in El Salvador.

Spanning over two thousand years of prehistory, from the Middle Preclassic through the Classic and the poorly understood Postclassic, the essays in this volume address such topics as epigraphy and iconography, architecture, site planning, settlement patterns, and ceramics and include basic information on chronology. Copan and Quirigua are treated both individually and in comparative perspective.

This significant study was the first to attempt to deal with the Periphery as a coherent unit. Unique in its comparative presentation of Copan and Quirigua and in the breadth of information on non-Maya sites in the area, The Southeast Maya Periphery consists largely of previously unpublished data. Offering a variety of approaches to both old and new problems, this volume attempts, among other things, to reassess the relationships between Copan and Quirigua and between Highland and Lowland ceramic traditions, to analyze ceramics by neutron activation, and to define the nature of the apparently non-Mayan cultures in the region. This book will be of major interest not only to Mayanists and Mesoamerican archaeologists but also to others interested in the processes of ethnic group boundary formation and maintenance.

Hewitt emphasizes the process by which women forged and reformulated their activist identities from Reconstruction through the U.S. declaration of war against Spain in April 1898, the industrywide cigar strike of 1901, and the emergence of progressive reform and labor militancy. She also recasts our understanding of southern history by demonstrating how Tampa's triracial networks alternately challenged and re-inscribed the South's biracial social and political order.

When the first European explorers reached the southern shores of North America in the early seventeenth century, they faced a solid forest that stretched all the way from the Atlantic coast to eastern Texas and Oklahoma. The ways in which they and their descendants used—and abused—the forest over the next nearly four hundred years form the subject of The Southern Forest.

In chapters on the explorers, pioneers, lumbermen, boatbuilders, and foresters, Laurence Walker chronicles the constant demands that people have made on forest resources in the South. He shows how the land's very abundance became its greatest liability, as people overhunted the animals, clearcut the forests, and wore out the soil with unwise farming practices—all in a mistaken belief that the forest's bounty (including new ground to be broken) was inexhaustible.

With the advent of professional forestry in the twentieth century, however, the southern forest has made a comeback. A professional forester himself, Walker speaks from experience of the difficulties that foresters face in balancing competing interests in the forest. How, for example, does one reconcile the country's growing demand for paper products with the insistence of environmental groups that no trees be cut? Should national forests be strictly recreational areas, or can they support some industrial logging? How do foresters avoid using chemical pesticides when the public protests such natural management practices as prescribed burning and tree cutting?

This personal view of the southern forest adds a new dimension to the study of southern history and culture. The primeval southern forest is gone, but, with careful husbandry on the part of all users, the regenerated southern forest may indeed prove to be the inexhaustible resource of which our ancestors dreamed.