Results by title

An innovative study of the history of standardization that draws on both technical documents and novels.

Jonathan H. Grossman’s elegant analysis of standardization approaches the topic by exploring how institutions create standards. Grossman tracks how published standards documents became the dominant means of homogenizing durable objects during the nineteenth century’s industrialization of manufacturing, including printing. Examining these documents as a genre, he reconstructs the nineteenth-century history of published standards documents and shows how they evolved to produce uniformity across manufactured objects.

Shifting focus from the standardized creation of objects to their use by subjects, Grossman then probes how people reimagined, through print, the ways in which their subjectivity combined with identical, interchangeable manufactured objects. To understand that relation, he looks to nineteenth-century novels by Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Elizabeth Gaskell, revealing how these books depicted the interchangeability of the subjects implied by this production of identical objects. The novels do not merely observe the interplay between subjects and standardized objects; they materialize it in the assemblage of readers holding their industrially manufactured, print copy.  

An hourly guide that tracks twenty-four stars, stellar clusters, and constellations across the sky to reveal their luminous lives and lore.

Over the course of a day, the constellations slowly shift, rising in the east and setting in the west, due to Earth’s rotation. A full turn of the celestial sphere, that bowl above us where the stars seemingly appear fixed to the surface, is completed once every twenty-four hours. In fact, the stars inspired the twenty-four-hour day, and one star, our Sun, rules the circadian rhythms of all life on our planet. This short book sweeps through the celestial sphere hour by hour, introducing a remarkable cast of stellar characters with each chapter. Celebrated science writer Marcia Bartusiak and mathematician Stephen Lowe blend practical astronomy with fascinating history to share unique cosmological stories.  

This husband and wife team explain that observers have long split the sky into twenty-four hours of right ascension—a celestial equivalent of longitude and a universal scheme for locating cosmological objects. Each chapter of Star Day presents a single right ascension hour, from the stellar death of S Andromedae (zeroth hour)—an explosion that helped reveal the size of the universe—to Scheat (twenty-third hour), an aging red giant. Twice the mass of the Sun and some 1,500 times as bright, Scheat sometimes guides amateur astronomers to distant galaxies. In between, we learn about humans’ pole star, Polaris (second hour), and meet the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy (seventeenth hour). By the end of our star day, we will appreciate both our own stellar origins and the fragile and deep connections between human civilizations and the ever-changing heavens. Star Day reminds us that wonder and discovery are easily available, all for the simple price of looking up.

For each chapter, artist Matthew Green has depicted these stellar scenes with entrancing pen-and-ink drawings. Working together to narrate and illustrate these stars' stories, Bartusiak, Lowe, and Green have created an engaging read that is a perfect way to spend an hour or two—and a true gift to both seasoned skywatchers and curious beginners. 

The process of nation-building in Latin America transformed the relations between the state, the economy, and nature. Between 1760 and 1940, the economies of most countries in the Spanish Caribbean came to depend heavily on the export of plant products, such as coffee, tobacco, and sugar. After the mid-nineteenth century, this model of export-led economic growth also became a central tenet of liberal projects of nation-building. As international competition grew and commodity prices fell over this period, Latin American growers strove to remain competitive by increasing agricultural production. By the turn of the twentieth century, their pursuit of export-led growth had generated severe environmental problems, including soil exhaustion, erosion, and epidemic outbreaks of crop diseases and pests.

This book traces the history of the intersections between nature, economy, and nation in the Spanish Caribbean through a history of the agricultural and botanical sciences. Growers and governments in Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Colombia, and Costa Rica turned to scientists to help them establish practical and ideological control over nature. They hoped to use science to alleviate the pressing environmental and economic stresses, without having to give up their commitment to export-led growth. Starting from an overview of the relationship among science, nature, and development throughout the export boom of 1760 to 1930, Stuart McCook examines such topics as the relationship between scientific plant surveys and nation-building, the development of a "creole science" to address the problems of tropical agriculture, the ecological rationalization of the sugar industry, and the growth of technocratic ideologies of science and progress. He concludes with a look at how the Great Depression of the 1930s changed the paradigms of economic and political development and the role of science and nature in these paradigms.

With the overwhelming amount of new information that bombards us each day, it is perhaps difficult to imagine a time when the widespread availability of the printed word was a novelty. In early nineteenth-century Britain, print was not novel—Gutenberg’s printing press had been around for nearly four centuries—but printed matter was still a rare and relatively expensive luxury. All this changed, however, as publishers began employing new technologies to astounding effect, mass-producing instructive and educational books and magazines and revolutionizing how knowledge was disseminated to the general public.

The forgotten history of grassroots climate science, built by women.

For over two centuries, scientists have struggled to predict how people will respond to the vagaries of weather and climate. Today, governments, insurance companies, and investment firms continue to forecast what climate change will mean for local communities, setting adaptation goals from the top down. But hidden in the archives is another approach to this problem that is democratic, collaborative, and grows from the bottom up.

In Stewards of the Sky, historian Deborah R. Coen uncovers the stories of women who documented the humble drivers of change that unfold at the scale of everyday life, modeling the stewardship of the atmosphere as an equitably shared resource—a commons. These naturalists revealed how insects and plants work together to survive unusual weather, how air powers the cycle of life and death, and how people with disabilities cope with pollution. Coen spotlights Geneviève Thiroux d’Arconville, Anna Kingsford, Rosa Luxemburg, and Margaret Collins, as well as the contemporary figures Susan Cutter, Diana Liverman, and Maria Lemos, scientists and activists who resisted their colleagues’ efforts to replace traditional forms of collective security with predictive sciences that would make risk profitable. In contrast, Coen’s antiheroines demonstrated the value of humility and respect for the interpersonal and cross-species relationships that make research possible. Their work shows that surviving climate change is not a zero-sum game, that mutual aid is critical, and that antiheroic science can help build alliances that respect different ways of knowing the world.

A study of the ways that southern Presbyterians in the wake of the Civil War contended with a host of cultural and theological questions

Southern Presbyterian theologians enjoyed a prominent position in antebellum southern culture. Respected for both their erudition and elite constituency, these theologians identified the southern society as representing a divine, Biblically ordained order. Beginning in the 1840s, however, this facile identification became more difficult to maintain, colliding first with antislavery polemics, then with Confederate defeat and reconstruction, and later with women’s rights, philosophical empiricism, literary criticisms of the Bible, and that most salient symbol of modernity, natural science.

As Monte Harrell Hampton shows in Storm of Words, modern science seemed most explicitly to express the rationalistic spirit of the age and threaten the Protestant conviction that science was the faithful “handmaid” of theology. Southern Presbyterians disposed of some of these threats with ease. Contemporary geology, however, posed thornier problems. Ambivalence over how to respond to geology led to the establishment in 1859 of the Perkins Professorship of Natural Science in Connexion with Revealed Religion at the seminary in Columbia, South Carolina. Installing scientist-theologian James Woodrow in this position, southern Presbyterians expected him to defend their positions.

Within twenty-five years, however, their anointed expert held that evolution did not contradict scripture. Indeed, he declared that it was in fact God’s method of creating. The resulting debate was the first extended evolution controversy in American history. It drove a wedge between those tolerant of new exegetical and scientific developments and the majority who opposed such openness. Hampton argues that Woodrow believed he was shoring up the alliance between science and scripture—that a circumscribed form of evolution did no violence to scriptural infallibility. The traditionalists’ view, however, remained interwoven with their identity as defenders of the Lost Cause and guardians of southern culture.

The ensuing debate triggered Woodrow’s dismissal. It also capped a modernity crisis experienced by an influential group of southern intellectuals who were grappling with the nature of knowledge, both scientific and religious, and its relationship to culture—a culture attempting to define itself in the shadow of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

No single figure embodies Cold War science more than the renowned physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. Although other scientists may have been more influential in establishing the institutions and policies of the nuclear age, none has loomed larger in the popular imagination than the “father of the atomic bomb.” Americans have been drawn to the story of the Manhattan Project Oppenheimer helped lead and riveted by the McCarthy-era politics that caught him in its crosshairs. Journalists and politicians, writers and artists have told Oppenheimer's story in many different ways since he first gained notoriety in 1945. In Storytelling and Science, David K. Hecht examines why they did so, and what they hoped to achieve through their stories.

From the outset, accounts of Oppenheimer's life and work were deployed for multiple ends: to trumpet or denigrate the value of science, to settle old scores or advocate new policies, to register dissent or express anxieties. In these different renditions, Oppenheimer was alternately portrayed as hero and villain, establishment figure and principled outsider, “destroyer of worlds” and humanist critic. Yet beneath the varying details of these stories, Hecht discerns important patterns in the way that audiences interpret, and often misinterpret, news about science. In the end, he argues, we find that science itself has surprisingly little to do with how its truths are assimilated by the public. Instead its meaning is shaped by narrative traditions and myths that frame how we think and write about it.

A fascinating look at the lives of the world’s largest dog population—street dogs—offering essential insights into your dog’s behavior and the mysterious origins of human-dog cooperation. 

Today, there are close to a billion dogs on the planet. Some twenty thousand years ago, there were none. How did dogs originate from wolves? And how did we begin our best friendship? Although we can’t go back in time, we can study modern dogs for clues. Of today’s dogs, about eighty percent are street dogs, which don’t live in human homes, but near them, existing in a space between wild and domesticated.

This fascinating and eye-opening book offers us a chance to meet these street dogs and, through them, to imagine the earliest stages of human-canine companionship and collaboration. Award-winning author and animal behaviorist Lee Alan Dugatkin and world canine expert Anindita Bhadra take us from the hallways of Bhadra’s Dog Lab onto the bustling streets of Kolkata, India, where we encounter the intelligent, resourceful, and sometimes mischievous street dogs that have lived alongside humans for hundreds of dog generations. By observing these street dogs’ social structures, survival strategies, and personalities—and comparing them to foxes, wolves, and house dogs, among other species—we learn a lot about canine behavior. Take, for example, Bhadra’s discovery that, no matter how vital food is to a street dog, when given a choice between a meal and a gentle carress, dogs choose love over the food. We also learn that many dogs prefer yellow to other colors; that dog grandmoms may adopt unrelated puppies; and that dog genes harbor a mutation that, in humans, is associated with extreme friendliness. We even begin to understand why dogs pee on, well, everything—particularly on other dog pee.

Watching dogs live independent lives alongside humans, we also start to wonder, as Bhadra does, about the origins of human-dog cooperation. She persuades us that early dogs and humans likely protected each other, as many still do today, and that street dogs may help us to imagine our ancestors’ interactions with the earliest proto-dogs. In their engaging exploration, Dugatkin and Bhadra show that getting to know street dogs may help us understand the past, present, and future of our unique interspecies relationship.

A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

Within the general structure-and-process theme of this compendium, the authors have focused on either intrasite problems (those dealing with the formation and structure of a site, type of site, or type of feature) or intersite problems (those dealing with behavioral organization and process as developed from comparative site data). These papers, from a broad range of specialists, present a comprehensive study of southeastern archaeology.

Structure and Process in Southeastern Archaeology is a foundational work that reshapes how scholars understand the cultural and social dynamics of prehistoric communities in the Southeastern United States. Roy S. Dickens, Jr. and H. Trawick Ward bring together decades of fieldwork, theoretical insight, and regional expertise to explore how ancient societies organized themselves, interacted, and evolved over time. Rather than focusing solely on artifacts or isolated site reports, this volume emphasizes the broader patterns—both structural and processual—that define the archaeological record of the Southeast.

Through a careful synthesis of settlement data, material culture, and environmental context, the authors reveal how social organization, political structures, and cultural practices were deeply embedded in the landscape. Their approach integrates processual archaeology with a nuanced understanding of regional variation, offering readers a dynamic view of how prehistoric communities adapted to changing conditions and interacted across space and time.

This book is particularly valuable for archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians seeking to move beyond descriptive accounts toward more interpretive frameworks. It provides a model for analyzing archaeological data in ways that illuminate the lived experiences of ancient peoples, making it a vital resource for both academic research and classroom instruction. The authors’ clear writing and thoughtful analysis make complex ideas accessible without sacrificing scholarly rigor.

Whether you're studying Mississippian chiefdoms, Woodland period settlements, or the broader cultural landscapes of the American South, Structure and Process in Southeastern Archaeology offers essential tools for understanding the past. It stands as a testament to the importance of theory-driven, context-rich archaeological interpretation.

As the Mississippi and other midwestern rivers inundated town after town during the summer of 1993, concerned and angry citizens questioned whether the very technologies and structures intended to "tame" the rivers did not, in fact, increase the severity of the floods. Much of the controversy swirled around the apparent culpability of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the builder of many of the flood control systems that failed.

In this book, Todd Shallat examines the turbulent first century of the dam and canal building Corps and follows the agency's rise from European antecedents through the boom years of river development after the American Civil War. Combining extensive research with a lively style, Shallat tells the story of monumental construction and engineering fiascoes, public service and public corruption, and the rise of science and the army expert as agents of the state.

More than an institutional history, Structures in the Stream offers significant insights into American society, which has alternately supported the public works projects that are a legacy of our French heritage and opposed them based on the democratic, individualist tradition inherited from Britain. It will be important reading for a wide audience in environmental, military, and scientific history, policy studies, and American cultural history.

In Strung Together: The Cultural Currency of String Theory as a Scientific Imaginary, Sean Miller examines the cultural currency of string theory, both as part of scientific discourse and beyond it. He demonstrates that the imaginative component of string theory is both integral and indispensable to it as a scientific discourse. While mathematical arguments provide precise prompts for physical intervention in the world, the imaginary that supplements mathematical argument within string theory technical discourse allows theorists to imagine themselves interacting with the cosmos as an abstract space in such a way that strings and branes as phenomena become substantiated and legitimized. And it is precisely this sort of imaginary—which Miller calls a scientific imaginary—duly substantiated and acculturated, that survives the move from string theory technical discourse to popularizations and ultimately to popular and literary discourses. In effect, a string theory imaginary legitimizes the science itself and helps to facilitate a virtual domestication of a cosmos that was heretofore remote, alien, and incomprehensible.