Madeline Groves and Catherine Rutherford
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2015
Barry F. Saunders
Duke University Press, 2008
Saunders’s analyses are informed by strands of cultural history and theory including art historical critiques of realist representation, Walter Benjamin’s concerns about violence in “mechanical reproduction,” and tropes of detective fiction such as intrigue, the case, and the culprit. Saunders analyzes the diagnostic “gaze” of medical personnel reading images at the viewbox, the two-dimensional images or slices of the human body rendered by the scanner, methods of archiving images, and the use of scans as pedagogical tools in clinical conferences. Bringing cloistered diagnostic practices into public view, he reveals the customs and the social and professional hierarchies that are formulated and negotiated around the weighty presence of the CT scanner. At the same time, by returning throughout to the nineteenth-century ideas of detection and scientific authority that inform contemporary medical diagnosis, Saunders highlights the specters of the past in what appears to be a preeminently modern machine.
Darren McKague
Michigan Publishing Services, 2022
Robert Scully
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2025
Joshua Schuster
University of Minnesota Press, 2021
What are the implications of how we talk about apocalypse?
A new philosophical field has emerged. “Existential risk” studies any real or hypothetical human extinction event in the near or distant future. This movement examines catastrophes ranging from runaway global warming to nuclear warfare to malevolent artificial intelligence, deploying a curious mix of utilitarian ethics, statistical risk analysis, and, controversially, a transhuman advocacy that would aim to supersede almost all extinction scenarios. The proponents of existential risk thinking, led by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, have seen their work gain immense popularity, attracting endorsement from Bill Gates and Elon Musk, millions of dollars, and millions of views.
Calamity Theory is the first book to examine the rise of this thinking and its failures to acknowledge the ways some communities and lifeways are more at risk than others and what it implies about human extinction.
Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
Gerardo Aldana y Villalobos
University of Arizona Press, 2021
Jesse D'Elia and Susan M. Haig
Oregon State University Press, 2013
Daniel Lanza Rivers
Duke University Press, 2026
Stephen J. Pyne
University of Arizona Press, 2016
Siobhan Angus
Duke University Press, 2024

Denis Owen
University of Chicago Press, 1982
Andrew Inkpen and Ford Doolittle
University of Chicago Press, 2022

John Stager
Rutgers University Press, 1992
Discover the Far North hand-in-hand with two leading authorities on the Arctic.
This travel guide offers a unique eight-day tour of the Canadian Arctic, starting at Iqaluit near the head of Frobisher Bay (2,000 kilometers north of Ottawa), flying across the line of the Arctic Circle to Resolute, and onward to Ward Hunt Island, the northernmost airstrip in North America. Whether you make the journey in person or as an armchair traveler, this eye-opening book will tell you just what makes this region so extraordinary. Stager and Swain comment on everything that's likely to catch your attention from the air, on the ground, or in the frigid waters--from the lay of the land to the cost of the food, from frost polygons to sea smoke, from narwhals to snow geese, from kayaks to icebreakers, from soapstone sculptures to satellite dishes.
Canada North: Journey to the High Arctic makes the best of traveling companions: compact, informed, and lively. You'll want to read and reread it as you plan the journey of a lifetime.
Peter Keating and Alberto Cambrosio
University of Chicago Press, 2011
Marc Bekoff
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Theophile Maher
West Virginia University Press, 2021
Based mostly on his own experiences, Theophile Maher’s local color novel Cannel Coal Oil Days challenges many popular ideas about antebellum Appalachia, bringing it more fully into the broader story of the United States. Written in 1887, discovered in 2018, and published here for the first time, it offers a narrative of life between 1859 and 1861 in what was then western Virginia as it became West Virginia.
Cannel coal (a soft form of coal whose oil, when distilled, was competitive in the lighting oil business after overfishing reduced the whale oil supply) was at the center of one of Appalachia’s first extractive industries. Using the development of coal oil manufacturing in the Kanawha valley as its launching point, Maher’s semiautobiographical novel tells of a series of interrelated changes, each reflecting larger transformations in the United States as a whole. It shows how coal oil manufacturing was transformed from an amateurish endeavor to a more professional industry, with implications for Appalachian environment and labor. Then, Maher foreshadows the coming Progressive Era by insisting on moral and environmental reforms based in democratic and Christian principles. Finally, he tells the story of the coming of the Civil War to the region, as the novel’s protagonist, a mining engineer, works closely with a Black family to organize the local abolitionist mountain folk into a Union militia to aid in the secession of West Virginia from Virginia.
Don Lago
University of Nevada Press, 2025
Named one of the 2026 Southwest Books of the Year
Throughout history, humans have sought creation stories to define our identity and affirm our connections with the universe, diverse life forms, and one another. Over the last two centuries, science has delivered a bold new creation story full of immense time and space, extraordinary objects, and powerful natural forces. Science ideas can seem mere abstractions, but at the Grand Canyon, better than anywhere else on Earth, our new creation story is manifested physically and powerfully.
A major work of literary nature writing, Canyon and Cosmos takes readers on a journey through the Grand Canyon's deep time, geological forces, and biological evolution, making them very real, personal, and meaningful. Through decades of hiking and kayaking, author Don Lago has gotten to know the canyon intimately. Ranging through world mythologies and Native American spirituality, he explores how humans have sought to understand the universe. He confronts existential questions of whether humans can find enough meaning in the scientific cosmos. Through poetic prose, symbolism, and philosophical insight, he shows how existence itself is our deepest source of life and meaning.
Donald L. Baars
University of Utah Press, 1993
An easy-to-read geological history of the amazing red rock landscapes in southeastern Utah.
Towering red buttes, plunging canyon walls, domes, pinnacles, spires, ten thousand strangely carved forms—what visitor hasn’t marveled at the land of rock in southeastern Utah that is Canyonlands Country?
Canyonlands Country offers a unique geological history of this awesome landscape, in language understandable by the non-geologist. The story is as strange and fascinating as the land itself. Each exposed rock layer has a different geologic history: one is a stream deposit, another is an ancient field of dunes, another was deposited by shallow tropic seas. The Green and Colorado Rivers began carving canyons thirty million years ago, but to understand such relatively recent events Canyonlands Country takes us on a journey of two billion years.
Tours include Arches National Park, Island in the Sky, Needles District, The Maze and Elaterite Basin, Labyrinth and Stillwater Canyons, Meander Canyon, and Cataract Canyon.
John T. Cumbler
University of Massachusetts Press, 2014
Eric Alliez
University of Minnesota Press, 1996
Elizabeth A. Sutton
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Jennifer C. James
Duke University Press, 2026
Ronald C. Kramer
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Andrew J. Hoffman
University of Michigan Press, 2007
Victor Seow
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Victor Seow
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Audiobook edition
A forceful reckoning with the relationship between energy and power through the history of what was once East Asia’s largest coal mine.
The coal-mining town of Fushun in China’s Northeast is home to a monstrous open pit. First excavated in the early twentieth century, this pit grew like a widening maw over the ensuing decades, as various Chinese and Japanese states endeavored to unearth Fushun’s purportedly “inexhaustible” carbon resources. Today, the depleted mine that remains is a wondrous and terrifying monument to fantasies of a fossil-fueled future and the technologies mobilized in attempts to turn those developmentalist dreams into reality.
In Carbon Technocracy, Victor Seow uses the remarkable story of the Fushun colliery to chart how the fossil fuel economy emerged in tandem with the rise of the modern technocratic state. Taking coal as an essential feedstock of national wealth and power, Chinese and Japanese bureaucrats, engineers, and industrialists deployed new technologies like open-pit mining and hydraulic stowage in pursuit of intensive energy extraction. But as much as these mine operators idealized the might of fossil fuel–driven machines, their extractive efforts nevertheless relied heavily on the human labor that those devices were expected to displace. Under the carbon energy regime, countless workers here and elsewhere would be subjected to invasive techniques of labor control, ever-escalating output targets, and the dangers of an increasingly exploited earth.
Although Fushun is no longer the coal capital it once was, the pattern of aggressive fossil-fueled development that led to its ascent endures. As we confront a planetary crisis precipitated by our extravagant consumption of carbon, it holds urgent lessons. This is a groundbreaking exploration of how the mutual production of energy and power came to define industrial modernity and the wider world that carbon made.
Bing, Richard J.
Rutgers University Press, 1999
Michael Murphy, Greg Spyreas, and Paul Marcum
University of Illinois Press, 2025
Drawing on the study of thousands of specimens, Carex of Illinois and Surrounding States: The Oval Sedges is an invaluable resource for botanists, ecologists, environmental engineers, and professional and amateur environmentalists interested in a deeper understanding of these essential plants.
John M. Weeks
University Press of Colorado, 2006
The Carnegie Institution of Washington sponsored archaeological, ethnographic, linguistic, and historical investigations in the Maya region of southern Mexico and northern Central America between 1914 and 1957. The institution led the field during that time, with financial support and other resources no university could match.
Dispersed and out-of-print for fifty years, more than 350 reports from the Maya program are now available in this single volume. Reports from the institution's annual Year Books and other materials collected here tell the history of Maya research through firsthand accounts by participating scholars and reveal the progression of Mesoamerican archaeology from avocational interest to scholarly pursuit. Thematic and regional organization of the reports permits readers to monitor development of research concepts. Appendixes list all Carnegie Maya publications, Carnegie personnel, and the archival holdings of Carnegie-derived material at Harvard University, Tulane University, and the University of Chicago.
Purchase of the print book comes with free individual access to the Adobe Digital Editions Carnegie Maya Series Ebook, which contains the complete set of The Carnegie Maya, The Carnegie Maya II, The Carnegie Maya III and The Carnegie Maya IV, thus making hundreds of documents from the Carnegie Institution's Maya program available in one source.

Edited by G. Malcolm Lewis
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Piper, Karen
Rutgers University Press, 2002
Maps are stories as much about us as about the landscape. They reveal changing perceptions of the natural world, as well as conflicts over the acquisition of territories. Cartographic Fictions looks at maps in relation to journals, correspondence, advertisements, and novels by authors such as Joseph Conrad and Michael Ondaatje. In her innovative study, Karen Piper follows the history of cartography through three stages: the establishment of the prime meridian, the development of aerial photography, and the emergence of satellite and computer mapping.
Piper follows the cartographer’s impulse to “leave the ground” as the desire to escape the racialized or gendered subject. With the distance that the aerial view provided, maps could then be produced “objectively,” that is, devoid of “problematic” native interference. Piper attempts to bring back the dialogue of the “native informant,” demonstrating how maps have historically constructed or betrayed anxieties about race. The book also attempts to bring back key areas of contact to the map between explorer/native and masculine/feminine definitions of space.
Edited by Kären Wigen, Sugimoto Fumiko, and Cary Karacas
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Mark Monmonier
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Edited by James R. Akerman
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Finding one’s way with a map is a relatively recent phenomenon. In premodern times, maps were used, if at all, mainly for planning journeys in advance, not for guiding travelers on the road. With the exception of navigational sea charts, the use of maps by travelers only became common in the modern era; indeed, in the last two hundred years, maps have become the most ubiquitous and familiar genre of modern cartography.
Examining the historical relationship between travelers, navigation, and maps, Cartographies of Travel and Navigation considers the cartographic response to the new modalities of modern travel brought about by technological and institutional developments in the twentieth century. Highlighting the ways in which the travelers, operators, and planners of modern transportation systems value maps as both navigation tools and as representatives of a radical new mobility, this collection brings the cartography of travel—by road, sea, rail, and air—to the forefront, placing maps at the center of the history of travel and movement.
Richly and colorfully illustrated, Cartographies of Travel and Navigation ably fills the void in historical literature on transportation mapping.
Matthew H. Edney
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Catherine Tatiana Dunlop
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Gordon Greenblatt
University of Chicago Press, 1981
Laurent Testot
University of Chicago Press, 2020

Edited by Rafael F. De Almeida, Robert Lücking, Aída Vasco-Palacios, Ester Gaya, and Mauricio Diazgranados
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2022

Edited by Raquel Negrão, Alexandre K. Monro, Carolina Castellanos-Castro, and Mauricio Diazgranados
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2022

David Woodward
University of Chicago Press, 1996
David Sepkoski
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Mary Terrall
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Ernest Zebrowski and Judith A. Howard
University of Michigan Press, 2005
Richard Cleminson
Central European University Press, 2014
J. Terrence McCabe
University of Michigan Press, 2004
James A. Young
University of Nevada Press, 2002
A sophisticated ecological analysis of ranching in northern Nevada featuring a new chapter and new epilogue by the authors.First published in 1985, Cattle in the Cold Desert has become a classic in the environmental history of the Great Basin, brilliantly combining a lively account of the development of the Great Basin grazing industry with a detailed scientific discussion of the ecology of its sagebrush/grassland plant communities. The volume traces the history of white settlement in the Great Basin from about 1860, along with the arrival of herds of cattle and sheep to exploit the forage resources of a pristine environment and, through the history of John Sparks, a pioneer cattleman, illustrates how the herdsmen interacted with the sagebrush/grasslands of the cold desert West. As the story unfolds on two levels—that of the herdsmen adapting their livelihood to the challenging conditions of the Great Basin's scanty forage, aridity, and fierce winters, and that of the fragile ecology of the desert plant communities responding to the presence of huge herds of livestock—we see the results of a grand experiment initiated by men willing to venture beyond the limits of accepted environmental potential to settle the Great Basin, as well as the often ruinous consequences of the introduction of domestic livestock into the plant communities of the region. The result is a remarkably balanced and insightful discussion of the grazing industry in the Intermountain West. This new paperback edition includes an additional chapter that addresses the impact of wild mustangs on the Great Basin rangelands, and an epilogue that discusses changes in rangeland management and in rangeland conditions, especially the impact of recent wildfires. As concern over the future of the Great Basin's unique rangeland environment and its principal agricultural industry grows, Cattle in the Cold Desert remains essential reading for everyone who cares about this underappreciated region of the American West.
Claus E. Rolfs and William S. Rodney
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Edited by Robert M. Ross and Warren D. Allmon
University of Chicago Press, 1990
John Hanson Mitchell
University Press of New England, 2013