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The Life and Science of Harold C. Urey
Matthew Shindell
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Harold C. Urey (1893–1981), whose discoveries lie at the foundation of modern science, was one of the most famous American scientists of the twentieth century. Born in rural Indiana, his evolution from small-town farm boy to scientific celebrity made him a symbol and spokesman for American scientific authority. Because he rose to fame alongside the prestige of American science, the story of his life reflects broader changes in the social and intellectual landscape of twentieth-century America. In this, the first ever biography of the chemist, Matthew Shindell shines new light on Urey’s struggles and achievements in a thoughtful exploration of the science, politics, and society of the Cold War era.
 
From Urey’s orthodox religious upbringing to his death in 1981, Shindell follows the scientist through nearly a century of American history: his discovery of deuterium and heavy water earned him the Nobel Prize in 1934, his work on the Manhattan Project helped usher in the atomic age, he initiated a generation of American scientists into the world of quantum physics and chemistry, and he took on the origin of the Moon in NASA’s lunar exploration program. Despite his success, however, Urey had difficulty navigating the nuclear age. In later years he lived in the shadow of the bomb he helped create, plagued by the uncertainties unleashed by the rise of American science and unable to reconcile the consequences of scientific progress with the morality of religion.
 
Tracing Urey’s life through two world wars and the Cold War not only conveys the complex historical relationship between science and religion in the twentieth century, but it also illustrates how these complexities spilled over into the early days of space science. More than a life story, this book immerses readers in the trials and triumphs of an extraordinary man and his extraordinary times.
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Alchemical Laboratory Notebooks and Correspondence
George Starkey
University of Chicago Press, 2004
George Starkey—chymistry tutor to Robert Boyle, author of immensely popular alchemical treatises, and probably early America's most important scientist—reveals in these pages the daily laboratory experimentation of a seventeenth-century alchemist.

The editors present in this volume transcriptions of Starkey's texts, their translations, and valuable commentary for the modern reader. Dispelling the myth that alchemy was an irrational enterprise, this remarkable collection of laboratory notebooks and correspondence reveals the otherwise hidden methodologies of one of the seventeenth century's most influential alchemists.
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Gehennical Fire
The Lives of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution
William Newman
Harvard University Press, 1994

Reputed to have performed miraculous feats in New England—restoring the hair and teeth to an aged lady, bringing a withered peach tree to fruit—Eirenaeus Philalethes was also rumored to be an adept possessor of the alchemical philosophers’ stone. That the man was merely a mythical creation didn’t diminish his reputation a whit—his writings were spectacularly successful, read by Leibniz, esteemed by Newton and Boyle, voraciously consumed by countless readers. Gehennical Fire is the story of the man behind the myth, George Starkey.

Though virtually unknown today and little noted in history, Starkey was America’s most widely read and celebrated scientist before Benjamin Franklin. Born in Bermuda, he received his A.B. from Harvard in 1646 and four years later emigrated to London, where he quickly gained prominence as a “chymist.” Thanks in large part to the scholarly detective work of William Newman, we now know that this is only a small part of an extraordinary story, that in fact George Starkey led two lives. Not content simply to publish his alchemical works under the name Eirenaeus Philalethes, “A Peaceful Lover of Truth,” Starkey spread elaborate tales about his alter ego, in effect giving him a life of his own.

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Gehennical Fire
The Lives of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution
William R. Newman
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Both the quest for natural knowledge and the aspiration to alchemical wisdom played crucial roles in the Scientific Revolution, as William R. Newman demonstrates in this fascinating book about George Starkey (1628-1665), America's first famous scientist. Beginning with Starkey's unusual education in colonial New England, Newman traces out his many interconnected careers—natural philosopher, alchemist, chemist, medical practitioner, economic projector, and creator of the fabulous adept, "Eirenaeus Philalethes." Newman reveals the profound impact Starkey had on the work of Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Samuel Hartlib, and other key thinkers in the realm of early modern science.
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Chemical Demonstrations, Volume 1
A Handbook for Teachers of Chemistry
Bassam Z. Shakhashiri
University of Wisconsin Press, 1983

    The demonstrations capture interest, teach, inform, fascinate, amaze, and perhaps, most importantly, involve students in chemistry. Nowhere else will you find books that answer, "How come it happens? . . . Is it safe? . . . What do I do with all the stuff when the demo is over?"
    Shakhashiri and his collaborators offer 282 chemical demonstrations arranged in 11 chapters. Each demonstration includes seven sections: a brief summary, a materials list, a step-by-step account of procedures to be used, an explanation of the hazards involved, information on how to store or dispose of the chemicals used, a discussion of the phenomena displayed and principles illustrated by the demonstration, and a list of references.

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Chemical Demonstrations, Volume 5
A Handbook for Teachers of Chemistry
Bassam Z. Shakhashiri
University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

Color and light are the focus of this long-awaited fifth volume in the Chemical Demonstrations series, which describes demonstrations that effectively communicate science to both students and general audiences. Using full color illustrations, the book provides meticulous instructions for safely demonstrating colorful phenomena and illustrating scientific principles. A rich introductory section explores the science of color and light, outlines the chemical processes of vision, and explains what happens when visual information enters the human eye and is perceived by the brain. With more than fifty demonstrations and multiple procedures included, this volume offers abundant opportunities to arouse and sustain interest in science for both classroom and public presentations.

Each demonstration includes:
•    a brief description of the demonstration
•    a materials list
•    a step-by-step account of procedures to be used
•    an explanation of the potential hazards involved
•    information on safely storing and disposing the chemicals used
•    a full discussion of the phenomena displayed and principles illustrated
•    a list of references.

Created by acclaimed chemists and science educators Bassam Shakhashiri and his collaborators Rodney Schreiner and Jerry Bell, these demonstrations make an impressive addition to the earlier volumes, which have been lauded for guiding teachers and scientists in effectively communicating science. Like all volumes in the series, Volume 5 communicates chemistry using pedagogical knowledge to enhance the effectiveness of demonstrations to all audiences.

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Hydrogen
The Essential Element
John S. Rigden
Harvard University Press, 2003

Seduced by simplicity, physicists find themselves endlessly fascinated by hydrogen, the simplest of atoms. Hydrogen has shocked, it has surprised, it has embarrassed, it has humbled--and again and again it has guided physicists to the edge of new vistas where the promise of basic understanding and momentous insights beckoned. The allure of hydrogen, crucial to life and critical to scientific discovery, is at the center of this book, which tells a story that begins with the big bang and continues to unfold today.

In this biography of hydrogen, John Rigden shows how this singular atom, the most abundant in the universe, has helped unify our understanding of the material world from the smallest scale, the elementary particles, to the largest, the universe itself. It is a tale of startling discoveries and dazzling practical benefits spanning more than one hundred years--from the first attempt to identify the basic building block of atoms in the mid-nineteenth century to the discovery of the Bose-Einstein condensate only a few years ago. With Rigden as an expert and engaging guide, we see how hydrogen captured the imagination of many great scientists--such as Heisenberg, Pauli, Schrödinger, Dirac, and Rabi--and how their theories and experiments with this simple atom led to such complex technical innovations as magnetic resonance imaging, the maser clock, and global positioning systems. Along the way, we witness the transformation of science from an endeavor of inspired individuals to a monumental enterprise often requiring the cooperation of hundreds of scientists around the world.

Still, any biography of hydrogen has to end with a question: What new surprises await us?

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Radium and the Secret of Life
Luis A. Campos
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Before the hydrogen bomb indelibly associated radioactivity with death, many chemists, physicians, botanists, and geneticists believed that radium might hold the secret to life. Physicists and chemists early on described the wondrous new element in lifelike terms such as “decay” and “half-life,” and made frequent references to the “natural selection” and “evolution” of the elements. Meanwhile, biologists of the period used radium in experiments aimed at elucidating some of the most basic phenomena of life, including metabolism and mutation.

From the creation of half-living microbes in the test tube to charting the earliest histories of genetic engineering, Radium and the Secret of Life highlights previously unknown interconnections between the history of the early radioactive sciences and the sciences of heredity. Equating the transmutation of radium with the biological transmutation of living species, biologists saw in metabolism and mutation properties that reminded them of the new element. These initially provocative metaphoric links between radium and life proved remarkably productive and ultimately led to key biological insights into the origin of life, the nature of heredity, and the structure of the gene. Radium and the Secret of Life recovers a forgotten history of the connections between radioactivity and the life sciences that existed long before the dawn of molecular biology.
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Silicide Technology for Integrated Circuits
Lih J. Chen
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2004
Silicide Technology for Integrated Circuits focuses on the task of developing and applying metal silicide technology as it emerges from the scientific to the prototype and manufacturing stages and provides guidance on the application of the latest emerging technology.
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Image and Reality
Kekulé, Kopp, and the Scientific Imagination
Alan J. Rocke
University of Chicago Press, 2010

Nineteenth-century chemists were faced with a particular problem: how to depict the atoms and molecules that are beyond the direct reach of our bodily senses. In visualizing this microworld, these scientists were the first to move beyond high-level philosophical speculations regarding the unseen. In Image and Reality, Alan Rocke focuses on the community of organic chemists in Germany to provide the basis for a fuller understanding of the nature of scientific creativity. 

Arguing that visual mental images regularly assisted many of these scientists in thinking through old problems and new possibilities, Rocke uses a variety of sources, including private correspondence, diagrams and illustrations, scientific papers, and public statements, to investigate their ability to not only imagine the invisibly tiny atoms and molecules upon which they operated daily, but to build detailed and empirically based pictures of how all of the atoms in complicated molecules were interconnected. These portrayals of “chemical structures,” both as mental images and as paper tools, gradually became an accepted part of science during these years and are now regarded as one of the central defining features of chemistry.  In telling this fascinating story in a manner accessible to the lay reader, Rocke also suggests that imagistic thinking is often at the heart of creative thinking in all fields.

Image and Reality is the first book in the Synthesis series, a series in the history of chemistry, broadly construed, edited by Angela N. H. Creager, John E. Lesch, Stuart W. Leslie, Lawrence M. Principe, Alan Rocke, E.C. Spary, and Audra J. Wolfe, in partnership with the Chemical Heritage Foundation.

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Floating Gold
A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris
Christopher Kemp
University of Chicago Press, 2012

A fascinating natural history of an incredibly curious substance.

“Preternaturally hardened whale dung” is not the first image that comes to mind when we think of perfume, otherwise a symbol of glamour and allure. But the key ingredient that makes the sophisticated scent linger on the skin is precisely this bizarre digestive by-product—ambergris. Despite being one of the world’s most expensive substances (its value is nearly that of gold and has at times in history been triple it), ambergris is also one of the world’s least known. But with this unusual and highly alluring book, Christopher Kemp promises to change that by uncovering the unique history of ambergris.

A rare secretion produced only by sperm whales, which have a fondness for squid but an inability to digest their beaks, ambergris is expelled at sea and floats on ocean currents for years, slowly transforming, before it sometimes washes ashore looking like a nondescript waxy pebble. It can appear almost anywhere but is found so rarely, it might as well appear nowhere. Kemp’s journey begins with an encounter on a New Zealand beach with a giant lump of faux ambergris—determined after much excitement to nothing more exotic than lard—that inspires a comprehensive quest to seek out ambergris and its story. He takes us from the wild, rocky New Zealand coastline to Stewart Island, a remote, windswept island in the southern seas, to Boston and Cape Cod, and back again. Along the way, he tracks down the secretive collectors and traders who populate the clandestine modern-day ambergris trade.

Floating Gold is an entertaining and lively history that covers not only these precious gray lumps and those who covet them, but presents a highly informative account of the natural history of whales, squid, ocean ecology, and even a history of the perfume industry. Kemp’s obsessive curiosity is infectious, and eager readers will feel as though they have stumbled upon a precious bounty of this intriguing substance.

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Electrical Degradation and Breakdown in Polymers
L.A. Dissado
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1992
Breakdown is fascinating to the scientist and frustrating to the engineer! As well as advancing the scientific and engineering understanding of electrical degradation and breakdown in polymers, this book forms a comprehensive and international review of the state-of-the-art. Topics include: water and electrical treeing; charge transport; 'classical' and filamentary thermal, electromechanical, electronic and partial discharge breakdown models; the stochastic nature of breakdown and statistical characterisation techniques; and engineering considerations for breakdown testing and degradation assessment. The treatment presumes little prior knowledge but develops into an advanced understanding of new concepts such as the fractal-like nature of trees. Although the book is primarily aimed at scientists and engineers practising in the field, a broad introductory section has been included to cater for a wide audience including those new to the subject area. This comprises a description of the nature of the polymers, basic solid-state physics and an introduction to degradation and breakdown.
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Organic Sensors
Materials and applications
Eduardo Garcia-Breijo
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2017
This book reviews the state of the art in the use of organic materals as physical, chemical and biomedical sensors in a variety of application settings.
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A Skeptical Biochemist
Joseph Fruton
Harvard University Press, 1992

An eminent pioneer of modern protein chemistry looks back on six decades in biochemical research and education to advance stimulating thoughts about science—how it is practiced, how it is explained, and how its history is written. Taking the title of his book from Robert Boyle’s classic, The Sceptical Chymist (1661), and Joseph Needham’s The Sceptical Biologist (1929), Joseph Fruton brings his own skeptical vision to bear on how chemistry and biology interact to describe living systems.

Scientists, philosophers, historians, and sociologists will seize upon the questions Fruton raises: What is the nature of the tension between the chemical and the biological sciences? What are the roots and future direction of molecular biology? What is the proper place of expert scientists in the historiography of science? How does the “scientific method” really work in practice? These and many other topics are fair game for this author’s wise critiques. In a stimulating final chapter, Fruton analyzes the evolution of key terms and symbols—the conceptual underpinnings used in the biochemical literature.

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Selected Papers of Robert S. Mulliken
Robert S. Mulliken
University of Chicago Press, 1975
This book brings together in one volume the most important papers of Robert S. Mulliken, who was awarded the 1966 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his seminal work on chemical bonds and the electronic structures of molecules. The papers collected here range from suggestive to closely detailed analyses of various topics in the theory of spectra and electronic structure of diatomic and polyatomic molecules. Professor Mulliken has written introductory commentaries on each of the volume's seven parts.

Included in the volume are essays of general as well as scientific interest; they are grouped under thematic headings. Part I contains those papers which are of historical significance. An autobiographical piece by Dr. Mulliken offers a glimpse of the many famous people whom he has known. Also reprinted is the text of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. At the end is a list of his students and other co-workers, and a complete bibliography of his papers.

Part II includes Mulliken's work on band spectra and chemistry as well as his research on the assignment of quantum numbers for electrons in molecules. Part III surveys the author's early work on the bonding power of electrons and the method of molecular orbitals. Included is a discussion of the structure and spectra of a number of important types of molecules. The papers in part IV focus on the intensities of electronic transitions in molecular spectra. This incorporates Mulliken's work on charge transfer and the halogen molecule spectra.

The problems addressed in part V center on the spectra and structure of polyatomic molecules. Reprinted here is a report which Mulliken prepared on notation for polyatomic molecules. Part VI is devoted to the problem of hyperconjugation. These papers develop and apply the concept of hyperconjugation and explore its relation to the concept of conjugation. The last part offers some of the most important papers from the author's postwar publications. The central focus is on molecular orbital theory, the area in which Mulliken's Nobel-winning discoveries were made.
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Mikhail Vasil’evich Lomonosov on the Corpuscular Theory
Mikhail Vasil’evich Lomonosov
Harvard University Press, 1970
Soviet historians of science regard the eighteenth-century polymath M. V. Lomonosov as a forerunner of much of modern science and as the founder of Russian science. Although his works have been published extensively in the U.S.S.R., Lomonosov's scientific theories are little known throughout the rest of the world. In this book Henry Leicester presents translations of the papers on chemistry and physics in which Lomonosov developed his atomic (corpuscular) theories. In his Introduction Leicester discusses Lomonosov's life and analyzes his scientific theories, examines the sources of his ideas, and considers the place of his corpuscular theory in the history of science.
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The Elements
A Visual History of Their Discovery
Philip Ball
University of Chicago Press, 2021
From water, air, and fire to tennessine and oganesson, celebrated science writer Philip Ball leads us through the full sweep of the field of chemistry in this exquisitely illustrated history of the elements.
 
The Elements is a stunning visual journey through the discovery of the chemical building blocks of our universe. By piecing together the history of the periodic table, Ball explores not only how we have come to understand what everything is made of, but also how chemistry developed into a modern science. Ball groups the elements into chronological eras of discovery, covering seven millennia from the first known to the last named. As he moves from prehistory and classical antiquity to the age of atomic bombs and particle accelerators, Ball highlights images and stories from around the world and sheds needed light on those who struggled for their ideas to gain inclusion. By also featuring some elements that aren’t true elements but were long thought to be—from the foundational prote hyle and heavenly aetherof the ancient Greeks to more recent false elements like phlogiston and caloric—The Elements boldly tells the full history of the central science of chemistry.
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Equilibrium in Solutions and Surface and Colloid Chemistry
George Scatchard
Harvard University Press, 1976

This volume brings together two previously unpublished works by the late George Scatchard. One of the most eminent physical chemists of this century, Scatchard, in collaboration with Edwin Cohn, had enormous influence on the development of protein chemistry. The “Scatchard Plot,” a device for evaluating the interaction of proteins with smaller molecules, is today a ubiquitous feature of articles on biochemistry, immunology, and endocrinology.

These two monographs concern the laws of thermodynamics and the Oebye-Huckel theory as they are applied to the physical chemistry of inorganic and organic systems in solution. A unique feature of both works is their detailed extension of thermodynamic principles to the interactions of dissolved proteins with each other and with small molecules. They represent one of the most important links between the classical physical chemistry of the first four decades of this century and the contemporary science of protein chemistry.

Known previously only to a limited audience of Scatchard's students and colleagues, these remarkable treatises deserve much wider circulation today. Succinct, comprehensive, and systematic, they will stand as useful guides to one of the central sciences of our time.

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Global Climate Change
A Primer
Orrin H. Pilkey and Keith C. Pilkey
Duke University Press, 2011
An internationally recognized expert on the geology of barrier islands, Orrin H. Pilkey is one of the rare academics who engages in public advocacy about science-related issues. He has written dozens of books and articles explaining coastal processes to lay readers, and he is a frequent and outspoken interviewee in the mainstream media. Here, the colorful scientist takes on climate change deniers in an outstanding and much-needed primer on the science of global change and its effects.

After explaining the greenhouse effect, Pilkey, writing with son Keith, turns to the damage it is causing: sea level rise, ocean acidification, glacier and sea ice melting, changing habitats, desertification, and the threats to animals, humans, coral reefs, marshes, and mangroves. These explanations are accompanied by Mary Edna Fraser’s stunning batiks depicting the large-scale arenas in which climate change plays out.

The Pilkeys directly confront and rebut arguments typically advanced by global change deniers. Particularly valuable are their discussions of “Climategate,” a manufactured scandal that undermined respect for the scientific community, and the denial campaigns by the fossil fuel industry, which they compare to the tactics used by the tobacco companies a generation ago to obfuscate findings on the harm caused by cigarettes.

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Crystals
Ian Mercer
Harvard University Press, 1990
Drawn from the spectacular collections of the British Museum (Natural History), this book covers every aspect of crystallography and includes over 150 photographs and illustrations, 122 of them in color.
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From Mineralogy to Geology
The Foundations of a Science, 1650-1830
Rachel Laudan
University of Chicago Press, 1987
"A fine treatment of this critical time in geology's history. Although it goes against our standard histories of the field, Laudan defends her views convincingly. Her style is direct, with carefully reasoned personal opinions and interpretations clearly defined."—Jere H. Lipps, The Scientist
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New Earth Histories
Geo-Cosmologies and the Making of the Modern World
Edited by Alison Bashford, Emily M. Kern, and Adam Bobbette
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A kaleidoscopic rethinking of how we come to know the earth.
 
This book brings the history of the geosciences and world cosmologies together, exploring many traditions, including Chinese, Pacific, Islamic, South and Southeast Asian conceptions of the earth’s origin and makeup. Together the chapters ask: How have different ideas about the sacred, animate, and earthly changed modern environmental sciences? How have different world traditions understood human and geological origins? How does the inclusion of multiple cosmologies change the meaning of the Anthropocene and the global climate crisis? By carefully examining these questions, New Earth Histories sets an ambitious agenda for how we think about the earth.
 
The chapters consider debates about the age and structure of the earth, how humans and earth systems interact, and how empire has been conceived in multiple traditions. The methods the authors deploy are diverse—from cultural history and visual and material studies to ethnography, geography, and Indigenous studies—and the effect is to highlight how earth knowledge emerged from historically specific situations. New Earth Histories provides both a framework for studying science at a global scale and fascinating examples to educate as well as inspire future work. Essential reading for students and scholars of earth science history, environmental humanities, history of science and religion, and science and empire.
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Thinking about the Earth
A History of Ideas in Geology
David Oldroyd
Harvard University Press, 1996

Not quite a history of geology, Thinking about the Earth is a history of the geological tradition of Western science. Beginning with a discussion of "organic" views of the earth in ancient cultures, David Oldroyd traverses such topics as "mechanical" and "historicist" views of the earth, map-work, chemical analyses of rocks and minerals, geomorphology, experimental petrology, seismology, theories of mountain building, and geochemistry. He brings us back to the idea that the earth may, in a sense, be regarded as a living entity, or at least that life is an essential feature of its behavior.

Oldroyd offers a broad-brush contribution to the history of ideas and theories about the earth, providing a general synthesis of what science-historians have written about the history of the earth sciences. He shows us that ideas about the earth have been changing constantly since the beginnings of geological science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and indeed that ideas changed much more rapidly after the establishment of this science than in preceding centuries.

Thinking about the Earth does not assume previous knowledge of earth science. What it does require is an openness to the notion that an understanding of what geologists have to tell us today about the earth can be achieved by examining the evolving history of ideas in geology. This book will be of considerable interest to historians of science, historians of ideas, geologists, students of earth science, and general readers as well.

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Earth's Deep History
How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters
Martin J. S. Rudwick
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Earth has been witness to mammoths and dinosaurs, global ice ages, continents colliding or splitting apart, and comets and asteroids crashing catastrophically to the surface, as well as the birth of humans who are curious to understand it. But how was all this discovered? How was the evidence for it collected and interpreted? And what kinds of people have sought to reconstruct this past that no human witnessed or recorded? In this sweeping and accessible book, Martin J. S. Rudwick, the premier historian of the Earth sciences, tells the gripping human story of the gradual realization that the Earth’s history has not only been unimaginably long but also astonishingly eventful.

Rudwick begins in the seventeenth century with Archbishop James Ussher, who famously dated the creation of the cosmos to 4004 BC. His narrative later turns to the crucial period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when inquisitive intellectuals, who came to call themselves “geologists,” began to interpret rocks and fossils, mountains and volcanoes, as natural archives of Earth’s history. He then shows how this geological evidence was used—and is still being used—to reconstruct a history of the Earth that is as varied and unpredictable as human history itself. Along the way, Rudwick rejects the popular view of this story as a conflict between science and religion and shows how the modern scientific account of the Earth’s deep history retains strong roots in Judaeo-Christian ideas. 

Extensively illustrated, Earth’s Deep History is an engaging and impressive capstone to Rudwick’s distinguished career.  Though the story of the Earth is inconceivable in length, Rudwick moves with grace from the earliest imaginings of our planet’s deep past to today’s scientific discoveries, proving that this is a tale at once timeless and timely.
 
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Unearthing the Nation
Modern Geology and Nationalism in Republican China
Grace Yen Shen
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Questions of national identity have long dominated China’s political, social, and cultural horizons. So in the early 1900s, when diverse groups in China began to covet foreign science in the name of new technology and modernization, questions of nationhood came to the fore. In Unearthing the Nation, Grace Yen Shen uses the development of modern geology to explore this complex relationship between science and nationalism in Republican China.
           
Shen shows that Chinese geologists—in battling growing Western and Japanese encroachment of Chinese sovereignty—faced two ongoing challenges: how to develop objective, internationally recognized scientific authority without effacing native identity, and how to serve China when China was still searching for a stable national form. Shen argues that Chinese geologists overcame these obstacles by experimenting with different ways to associate the subjects of their scientific study, the land and its features, with the object of their political and cultural loyalties. This, in turn, led them to link national survival with the establishment of scientific authority in Chinese society.

The first major history of modern Chinese geology, Unearthing the Nation introduces the key figures in the rise of the field, as well as several key organizations, such as the Geological Society of China, and explains how they helped bring Chinese geology onto the world stage.
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Worlds Before Adam
The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform
Martin J. S. Rudwick
University of Chicago Press, 2008
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, scientists reconstructed the immensely long history of the earth—and the relatively recent arrival of human life. The geologists of the period, many of whom were devout believers, agreed about this vast timescale. But despite this apparent harmony between geology and Genesis, these scientists still debated a great many questions: Had the earth cooled from its origin as a fiery ball in space, or had it always been the same kind of place as it is now? Was prehuman life marked by mass extinctions, or had fauna and flora changed slowly over time?

The first detailed account of the reconstruction of prehuman geohistory, Martin J. S. Rudwick’s Worlds Before Adam picks up where his celebrated Bursting the Limits of Time leaves off. Here, Rudwick takes readers from the post-Napoleonic Restoration in Europe to the early years of Britain’s Victorian age, chronicling the staggering discoveries geologists made during the period: the unearthing of the first dinosaur fossils, the glacial theory of the last ice age, and the meaning of igneous rocks, among others. Ultimately, Rudwick reveals geology to be the first of the sciences to investigate the historical dimension of nature, a model that Charles Darwin used in developing his evolutionary theory.

Featuring an international cast of colorful characters, with Georges Cuvier and Charles Lyell playing major roles and Darwin appearing as a young geologist, Worlds Before Adam is a worthy successor to Rudwick’s magisterial first volume. Completing the highly readable narrative of one of the most momentous changes in human understanding of our place in the natural world, Worlds Before Adam is a capstone to the career of one of the world’s leading historians of science.
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The Earth on Show
Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856
Ralph O'Connor
University of Chicago Press, 2007
At the turn of the nineteenth century, geology—and its claims that the earth had a long and colorful prehuman history—was widely dismissedasdangerous nonsense. But just fifty years later, it was the most celebrated of Victorian sciences. Ralph O’Connor tracks the astonishing growth of geology’s prestige in Britain, exploring how a new geohistory far more alluring than the standard six days of Creation was assembled and sold to the wider Bible-reading public.

Shrewd science-writers, O’Connor shows, marketed spectacular visions of past worlds, piquing the public imagination with glimpses of man-eating mammoths, talking dinosaurs, and sea-dragons spawned by Satan himself. These authors—including men of science, women, clergymen, biblical literalists, hack writers, blackmailers, and prophets—borrowed freely from the Bible, modern poetry, and the urban entertainment industry, creating new forms of literature in order to transport their readers into a vanished and alien past.

In exploring the use of poetry and spectacle in the promotion of popular science, O’Connor proves that geology’s success owed much to the literary techniques of its authors. An innovative blend of the history of science, literary criticism, book history, and visual culture, The Earth on Show rethinks the relationship between science and literature in the nineteenth century.
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The Highlands Controversy
Constructing Geological Knowledge through Fieldwork in Nineteenth-Century Britain
David R. Oldroyd
University of Chicago Press, 1990
The Highlands Controversy is a rich and perceptive account of the third and last major dispute in nineteenth-century geology stemming from the work of Sir Roderick Murchison. The earlier Devonian and Cambrian-Silurian controversies centered on whether the strata of Devon and Wales should be classified by lithological or paleontological criteria, but the Highlands dispute arose from the difficulties the Scottish Highlands presented to geologists who were just learning to decipher the very complex processes of mountain building and metamorphism. David Oldroyd follows this controversy into the last years of the nineteenth century, as geology was transformed by increasing professionalization and by the development of new field and laboratory techniques. In telling this story, Oldroyd's aim is to analyze how scientific knowledge is constructed within a competitive scientific community—how theory, empirical findings, and social factors interact in the formation of knowledge.

Oldroyd uses archival material and his own extensive reconstruction of the nineteenth-century fieldwork in a case study showing how detailed maps and sections made it possible to understand the exceptionally complex geological structure of the Highlands

An invaluable addition to the history of geology, The Highlands Controversy also makes important contributions to our understanding of the social and conceptual processes of scientific work, especially in times of heated dispute.
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Geological Sciences in the Antebellum South
Edited by James X. Corgan
University of Alabama Press, 1982
Nine essays that provide detailed information about the early geological exploration of the southeastern United States

Originally presented under the aegis of the Geological Society of America, these essays cover observations and studies made between 1796 and the 1850s. Each essay includes fascinating biographic sketches of the author, a bibliography, and an index.
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Clarence Edward Dutton
An Appraisal
Stegner, Wallace
University of Utah Press, 2006
"A finger smashed in a car door and a missed geology examination at the University of Utah led Wallace Stegner to a special assignment about Clarence E. Dutton, thence to John Wesley Powell, and finally in 1954 to publication of what is arguably the single best nonfiction book dealing with the American West. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian remains in print fifty-two years after its initial appearance. Not many books have survived that length of time and thrived, despite competing works on the same subject.

This combination of biography, history, and environmental primer written with the flair and the technical skill of a novelist who could masterfully evoke scenes and sustain a gripping factual narrative sprang from Clarence Edward Dutton: An Appraisal. Seldom has such a classic book had such a humble beginning.

Stegner was a young English instructor at the University of Utah when he produced the Dutton essay. He was ambitious and desperate for recognition, a raise (he was earning $1,700 a year), and steady employment in the Depression years. The essay contains hints, in terms of style and content, of what Stegner would eventually produce. Dutton was Stegner’s first published work of nonfiction, and it is fair to say that it lead him, in conjunction with Bernard DeVoto’s prodding, to the subject of conservation."
—from the foreword

Clarence Edward Dutton: An Appraisal was first published by the University of Utah in 1936 and has since become a rarity on the antiquarian book market. It is reproduced in facsimile for this edition.
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Grove Karl Gilbert
A Great Engine of Research
Stephen J. Pyne
University of Iowa Press, 1980
As Stephen Pyne reveals in his biography, few other scientists can match Grove Karl Gilbert’s range of talents. A premier explorer of the American West who made major contributions to the cascade of new discoveries about the earth, Gilbert described two novel forms of mountain building, invented the concept of the graded stream, inaugurated modern theories of lunar origin, helped found the science of geomorphology, and added to the canon of conservation literature.
    Gilbert knew most of geology's grand figures--including John Wesley Powell, Clarence Dutton,  and Clarence King--and Pyne's chronicle of the imperturbable, quietly unconventional Gilbert is couterpointed with sketches of these prominent scientists. The man who wrote that "happiness is sitting under a tent with walls uplifted, just after a brief shower,", created answers to the larger questions of the earth in ways that have become classics of his science.
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Raphael Pumpelly
Gentleman Geologist of the Gilded Age
Peggy Champlin
University of Alabama Press, 1994
The biography of Raphael Pumpelly, a transitional figure in a period of rapid change
 
Raphael Pumpelly: Gentleman Geologist of the Gilded Age provides an excellent opportunity to look at the development of the profession of geology during the years spanned by his career, from 1860 to the early twentieth century. In this period, the practical applications of geology to resource development were of major importance, but geologists were also investigating new subjects, such as petrology, geomorphology, glaciology, and structural geology. These investigations resulted in an explosion of knowledge in these areas and in the growth of subdisciplines. Pumpelly did research in these fields but like others of his generation did not limit himself to any one of them; he remained a generalist in a time of increasing specialization, a transitional figure in a period of rapid change.
 
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A Passion For Gold
An Autobiography
Ralph J. Roberts
University of Nevada Press, 2002

Ralph J. Roberts is not a household name in Nevada, but it should be—it was he who discovered the Carlin Belt gold deposits that created a major mining boom in the state in the last four decades of the twentieth century. But this discovery was only one episode of his remarkably eventful life. This colorful and personal account of the author's search for his passion—gold—is a story as adventurous as that of any fictional character.

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Henry Darwin Rogers, 1808–1866
American Geologist
Patsy Gerstner
University of Alabama Press, 1994

Henry Darwin Rogers was one of the first professional geologists in the United States. He directed two of the earliest state geological surveys--New Jersey and Pennsylvania--in the mid-1830s.  His major interest was Pennsylvania, with its Appalachian Mountains, which Rogers saw as great folds of sedimentary rock. He belived that an interpretation of these folds would lead to an understanding of the dynamic processes that had shaped the earth. From Rogers' efforts to explain these Pennsylvania folds came the first uniquely American theory of mountain elevation, a theory that Rogers personally considered his most significant achievement.

 

 

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Strata
William Smith’s Geological Maps
Edited by the Oxford University Museum of Natural History
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Lavishly illustrated with full-color geological maps, tables of strata, geological cross-sections, photographs, and fossil illustrations from the archives of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, the Geological Society, the London Natural History Museum, and others, Strata provides the first complete presentation of the revolutionary work of nineteenth-century geologist William Smith, the so-called father of English geology. It illustrates the story of his career, from apprentice to surveyor for hire and fossil collector, from his 1799 geological map of Bath and table of strata to his groundbreaking 1815 geological strata map, and from his imprisonment for debt to his detailed stratigraphical county maps.
 
This sumptuous volume begins with an introduction by Douglas Palmer that places Smith’s work in the context of earlier, concurrent, and subsequent ideas regarding the structure and natural processes of the earth, geographical mapping, and biostratigraphical theories. The book is then organized into four parts, each beginning with four sheets from Smith’s hand-colored, 1815 strata map, accompanied by related geological cross-sections and county maps, and followed by fossil illustrations by Smith contemporary James Sowerby, all organized by strata. Essays between each section explore the aims of Smith’s work and its application in the fields of mining, agriculture, cartography and hydrology. Strata concludes with reflections on Smith’s later years as an itinerant geologist and surveyor, plagiarism by a rival, receipt of the first Wollaston Medal in recognition of his achievements, and the influence of his geological mapping and biostratigraphical theories on the sciences—all of which culminated in the establishment of the modern geological timescale.
 
Featuring a foreword by Robert Macfarlane, Strata is a glorious testament to the lasting geological and illustrative genius of William Smith, a collection as colossal and awe-inspiring as the layers of the Earth themselves.
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Protogaea
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Protogaea, an ambitious account of terrestrial history, was central to the development of the earth sciences in the eighteenth century and provides key philosophical insights into the unity of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s thought and writings. In the book, Leibniz offers observations about the formation of the earth, the actions of fire and water, the genesis of rocks and minerals, the origins of salts and springs, the formation of fossils, and their identification as the remains of living organisms. Protogaea also includes a series of engraved plates depicting the remains of animals—in particular the famous reconstruction of a “fossil unicorn”—together with a cross section of the cave in which some fossil objects were discovered.
Though the works of Leibniz have been widely translated, Protogaea has languished in its original Latin for centuries. Now Claudine Cohen and Andre Wakefield offer the first English translation of this central text in natural philosophy and natural history. Written between 1691 and 1693, and first published after Leibniz’s death in 1749, Protogaea reemerges in this bilingual edition with an introduction that carefully situates the work within its historical context.
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Principles of Geology, Volume 2
Charles Lyell
University of Chicago Press, 1991
As important to modern world views as any work of Darwin, Marx, or Freud, Lyell's Principles of Geology has never before been available in paperback. In the second of three volumes, Lyell (1797-1875) continues his uniformitarian argument of Volume I—the physical features of the earth are endlessly fluctuating around a stable mean—but focuses on organic rather than inorganic processes. Volume II is widely known because of its influence on Darwin, who took the book on his famous Beagle voyage and was stimulated by Lyell's extensive treatment of biological history and diversity.
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Principles of Geology, Volume 1
Charles Lyell
University of Chicago Press, 1990
As important to modern world views as any work of Darwin, Marx, or Freud, Principles of Geology is a landmark in the history of science. In this first of three volumes, Charles Lyell (1797-1875) sets forth his powerful uniformitarian argument: processes now visibly acting in the natural world are essentially the same as those that have acted throughout the history of the earth, and are sufficient to account for all geological phenomena.

Martin J. S. Rudwick's new Introduction, summarizing the origins of the Principles, guides the reader through the structure of the entire three-volume first edition and considers the legacy of Lyell's great work.

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front cover of Principles of Geology, Volume 3
Principles of Geology, Volume 3
Charles Lyell
University of Chicago Press, 1991
As important to modern world views as any work of Darwin, Marx, or Freud, Lyell's Principles of Geology has never before been available in paperback. In this third and final volume, Charles Lyell (1797-1875) devotes much attention to the "syntax of geology," that is, to a way of reconstructing the geological past on the basis of the "grammar" of the present processes he has described in the earlier volumes. He defines four periods of the Tertiary—Newer Pliocene, Older Pliocene, Miocene, and Eocene—and argues that the deposits dating from each period demonstrate the uniformity of processes and environments throughout the Tertiary, and indeed in earlier periods of earth history.

Martin J. S. Rudwick has compiled a bibliography giving full references for the sources Lyell cites in all three volumes of the Principles.

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The Pulse of the Earth
Political Geology in Java
Adam Bobbette
Duke University Press, 2023
In The Pulse of the Earth Adam Bobbette tells the story of how modern theories of the earth emerged from the slopes of Indonesia’s volcanoes. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, scientists became concerned with protecting the colonial plantation economy from the unpredictable bursts and shudders of volcanoes. Bobbette follows Javanese knowledge traditions, colonial geologists, volcanologists, mystics, Theosophists, orientalists, and revolutionaries to show how the earth sciences originate from a fusion of Western and non-Western cosmology, theology, anthropology, and geology. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and fieldwork at Javanese volcanoes and in scientific observatories, he explores how Indonesian Islam shaped the theory of plate tectonics, how Dutch colonial volcanologists learned to see the earth in new ways from Javanese spiritual traditions, and how new scientific technologies radically recast notions of the human body, distance, and the earth. In this way, Bobbette decenters the significance of Western scientists to expand our understanding of the evolution of planetary thought and rethinks the politics of geological knowledge.
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