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A new model of health emerged in Britain between 1870 and 1939. Centered on the working body, organized around the concept of efficiency, and grounded in scientific understandings of human labor, scientists, politicians, and capitalists of the era believed that national economic productivity could be maximized by transforming the body of the worker into a machine. At the core of this approach was the conviction that worker productivity was intimately connected to worker health.

Under this new “science of work,” fatigue was seen as the ultimate pathology of the working-class body, reducing workers’ capacity to perform continued physical or mental labor. As Steffan Blayney shows, the equation between health and efficiency did not go unchallenged. While biomedical and psychological experts sought to render the body measurable, governable, and intelligible, ordinary men and women found ways to resist the logics of productivity and efficiency imposed on them, and to articulate alternative perspectives on work, health, and the body.

This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

Weaving together lyrical history and personal memoir, Virdi powerfully examines society’s—and her own—perception of life as a deaf person in America.

At the age of four, Jaipreet Virdi’s world went silent. A severe case of meningitis left her alive but deaf, suddenly treated differently by everyone. Her deafness downplayed by society and doctors, she struggled to “pass” as hearing for most of her life. Countless cures, treatments, and technologies led to dead ends. Never quite deaf enough for the Deaf community or quite hearing enough for the “normal” majority, Virdi was stuck in aural limbo for years. It wasn’t until her thirties, exasperated by problems with new digital hearing aids, that she began to actively assert her deafness and reexamine society’s—and her own—perception of life as a deaf person in America.
 
Through lyrical history and personal memoir, Hearing Happiness raises pivotal questions about deafness in American society and the endless quest for a cure. Taking us from the 1860s up to the present, Virdi combs archives and museums in order to understand the long history of curious cures: ear trumpets, violet ray apparatuses, vibrating massagers, electrotherapy machines, airplane diving, bloodletting, skull hammering, and many more. Hundreds of procedures and products have promised grand miracles but always failed to deliver a universal cure—a harmful legacy that is still present in contemporary biomedicine.

Weaving Virdi’s own experiences together with her exploration into the fascinating history of deafness cures, Hearing Happiness is a powerful story that America needs to hear.

The life and legacy of a pioneer who helped shape American geology.

Henry Darwin Rogers, 1808–1866: American Geologist is the first comprehensive biography of Henry Darwin Rogers, one of the pioneering figures who helped establish geology as a professional scientific discipline in the United States. Written by historian Patsy Gerstner, this meticulously researched study traces Rogers's life from his early education and scientific interests to his leadership of the groundbreaking geological surveys of New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

At a time when American science was still in its formative stages, Rogers distinguished himself through extensive fieldwork, influential publications, and innovative theories about the formation of mountain systems. His investigations of Pennsylvania's Appalachian region led to one of the first distinctly American theories of mountain elevation and helped advance understanding of the earth's geological structure. Gerstner places these achievements within the broader context of nineteenth-century scientific institutions, professional rivalries, and the growing importance of state-sponsored research

More than a scientific biography, the book offers a compelling account of the emergence of American geology and the individuals who transformed natural history into a rigorous scientific enterprise. It is an indispensable resource for understanding the history of science, the development of geological thought, and the evolution of scientific professionalism in the United States.

The life of a pioneering Southern scientist in an era of war, change, and discovery.

Henry William Ravenel, 1814–1887: South Carolina Scientist in the Civil War Era is a compelling biography of one of nineteenth-century America's most accomplished yet largely overlooked natural scientists. Through meticulous archival research, Tamara Miner Haygood brings to life the story of Henry William Ravenel, a South Carolina planter, botanist, and pioneering mycologist whose work earned international recognition while he lived far from the major scientific centers of the United States.

Born into the Lowcountry planter class, Ravenel developed a lifelong fascination with the natural world and became a leading authority on the study of fungi and plants. Despite limited formal scientific training, he built an extensive network of correspondents that included some of the most prominent botanists in America and Europe. His collections, publications, and exchanges of specimens contributed significantly to the advancement of botanical science and established his reputation as one of the foremost naturalists of his generation.

Haygood places Ravenel's scientific achievements within the broader context of Southern society, demonstrating how intellectual pursuits flourished in unexpected ways within a region often overlooked in histories of American science. At the same time, the biography confronts the realities of slavery, plantation life, religion, and regional identity that shaped Ravenel's world. His experience challenges long-held assumptions about the relationship between Southern culture and scientific inquiry.

The Civil War and its aftermath transformed Ravenel's life, disrupting his finances, professional networks, and daily routines. Yet he remained committed to scientific work, continuing to collect, study, and publish despite enormous challenges. More than a biography, this volume offers a fascinating exploration of science, society, and survival during one of the most turbulent periods in American history. Essential reading for historians of science, Civil War scholars, environmental historians, botanists, and students of Southern culture.

Sir John Herschel, one of the founders of Southern Hemisphere astronomy, was a man of extraordinarily wide interests. He made contributions to botany, geology, and ornithology, as well as to astronomy, chemistry, and mathematics. Throughout his scientific career he kept a diary, recording his public and private life. The diaries from 1834 to 1838, years he spent making astronomical observations at the Cape of Good Hope, are reproduced in this book and prove to be much more than an ordinary scientist’s logbook. They present personal and social history, literary commentaries, the results of close observations of nature and numerous scientific experiments, the excitement of travel, political intrigues, gossip, and philosophical reflections—all interpreted through an alert and versatile mind. In the present transcription, the material has been enriched with selected correspondence of Sir John and his wife Lady Herschel (née Margaret Brodie Stewart).

Sir John devoted his working time at the Cape primarily to a systematic observation of the southern sky, complementing his earlier “sweeping” of the northern sky at Slough, England. He later became one of the founders of photography, but at the Cape he used a simple optical device, the camera lucida, in the production of numerous landscape drawings. Many of these, along with reproductions of sketches contained in the diaries and botanical drawings made by Sir John and Lady Herschel, are used to illustrate this book. Sir John was also a leading figure in the foundation of the educational system of the Cape and a supporter of exploratory expeditions into the interior.

As the son of Sir William Herschel, in his day the most famous British astronomer and the discoverer of the planet Uranus, Sir John was already celebrated when he arrived from England. Every individual of note, resident at the Cape or visiting, went to see him. He was supported in his work by his wife, who ran an enormous establishment and bore a huge family, but who nevertheless found time to travel in the country around the western Cape with him and to assist in his observations.

The diaries and letters are supplemented by especially valuable editorial notes that provide much needed and highly interesting information concerning persons and events mentioned and described by Sir John. All the original manuscript material used in this volume is archived at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Sir John’s camera lucida drawings are from the South African Public Library in Cape Town.