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Uncovers human histories, cultures, and politics on the ocean floor.

While often characterized as an alien realm, the seabed has long been fundamental to human life. As new technologies offer ever greater access to this environment, the bottom of the ocean is key to debates about our future—and yet we are poorly equipped to understand our relation to it.

The Seabed plumbs the ocean’s depths to reveal a rich and complex history of human activity at the seafloor, a history that extends from the classical world to the present. Jimmy Packham and Laurence Publicover highlight the literary significance of the seabed, examining works by writers including Aphra Behn, Anton Chekhov, Euripides, Herman Melville, M. NourbeSe Philip, William Shakespeare, Derek Walcott, and H. G. Wells, as well as lesser-known authors who have imagined this dark and mysterious realm. Putting these in dialogue with the science writing of Rachel Carson, Sylvia Earle, and others, and with visual art, politics, and historical case studies, they show how imaginative speculations concerning the ocean floor have influenced, and continue to inform, human activity on the seabed itself. Through chapters that explore sea burial and seafloor memorials, scientific exploration, deep-sea infrastructure, salvage from the seabed, and deep-sea extraction, the book reveals that the ocean floor’s cultural visibility has fluctuated over time. But longstanding visions of the seabed continue to shape our relationship with this place, a site for undersea cables and—in the near future—deep-sea mining.

The bottom of the ocean is closer than we think. Understanding our history there is crucial to assessing the present and imagining our future.

The so-called “Bone Wars” of the 1880s, which pitted Edward Drinker Cope against Othniel Charles Marsh in a frenzy of fossil collection and discovery, may have marked the introduction of dinosaurs to the American public, but the second Jurassic dinosaur rush, which took place around the turn of the twentieth century, brought the prehistoric beasts back to life. These later expeditions—which involved new competitors hailing from leading natural history museums in New York, Chicago, and Pittsburgh—yielded specimens that would be reconstructed into the colossal skeletons that thrill visitors today in museum halls across the country.

Reconsidering the fossil speculation, the museum displays, and the media frenzy that ushered dinosaurs into the American public consciousness, Paul Brinkman takes us back to the birth of dinomania, the modern obsession with all things Jurassic. Featuring engaging and colorful personalities and motivations both altruistic and ignoble, The Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush shows that these later expeditions were just as foundational—if not more so—to the establishment of paleontology and the budding collections of museums than the more famous Cope and Marsh treks. With adventure, intrigue, and rivalry, this is science at its most swashbuckling.

One of the world's oldest crossroads, the Sinai joins the great continental land masses of Africa and Eurasia. Its physical geography of rugged mountain peaks, desert plains, and sea coasts was formed by the collision of the two continental plates, while the human tides that have swept across the region over millennia have left an intricate web of cultures and ethnicities.

In this book, Ned Greenwood offers a complete, up-to-date physical geography of Sinai. After an introductory chapter that situates Sinai within world history and geography, he focuses in detail on the following areas: plate tectonics and geology, geomorphology and drainage, weather and climate, soils, and biogeography.

In the concluding chapter, Greenwood considers the human geography of Sinai, including the pressures currently posed by population growth, political extremism, and environmental constrictions on development. He offers a fully rounded picture of the physical environment of Sinai that will be vital reading for everyone concerned about the future of this strategic yet fragile land.

When Philadelphia naturalist Samuel George Morton died in 1851, no one cut off his head, boiled away its flesh, and added his grinning skull to a collection of crania. It would have been strange, but perhaps fitting, had Morton’s skull wound up in a collector’s cabinet, for Morton himself had collected hundreds of skulls over the course of a long career. Friends, diplomats, doctors, soldiers, and fellow naturalists sent him skulls they gathered from battlefields and burial grounds across America and around the world.

With The Skull Collectors, eminent historian Ann Fabian resurrects that popular and scientific movement, telling the strange—and at times gruesome—story of Morton, his contemporaries, and their search for a scientific foundation for racial difference. From cranial measurements and museum shelves to heads on stakes, bloody battlefields, and the “rascally pleasure” of grave robbing, Fabian paints a lively picture of scientific inquiry in service of an agenda of racial superiority, and of a society coming to grips with both the deadly implications of manifest destiny and the mass slaughter of the Civil War. Even as she vividly recreates the past, Fabian also deftly traces the continuing implications of this history, from lingering traces of scientific racism to debates over the return of the remains of Native Americans that are held by museums to this day.

Full of anecdotes, oddities, and insights, The Skull Collectors takes readers on a darkly fascinating trip down a little-visited but surprisingly important byway of American history.

The war in Ukraine, with the exposure of nuclear power stations and the danger of atomic warfare, has made the legacy of the Soviet nuclear sector of critical importance.

The two authors map the Soviet nuclear industry in a shifting historical context, making sense of a complex socio-technical and environmental history. Taking an innovative approach, this book explores the history of atomic power in the former Soviet Union using the spatial dimensions of the nuclear industry as a point of departure. The key concept is that of the archipelago – a network of nuclear facilities spread throughout the Soviet territory, but mutually reliant on each other and densely connected.

The story traces the emergence of nuclear science and technology for military and civilian purposes through to the post-Soviet Russian nuclear corporations as providers of resources and technology. The book explains how nuclear developments in the Soviet Union interacted with processes of environmental and landscape change. The spatial lens offers an analytically fruitful and pedagogically stimulating way to comprehend the nuclear histories of the Soviet Union and its successor states.

A historical novel about the role of science in modern life, set against the backdrop of the 1925 Scopes Trial.

When William Jennings Bryan began a campaign to get evolution out of American schools in the 1920s, entomologist Martin Sullivan sought refuge from the tumult in his research. Although the theory of evolution provides the foundation for his scientific work, he prefers the careful methods of observation and classification to the passion of public debate. But when Martin takes a job teaching college biology in Seattle, he finds it increasingly difficult to retreat to the haven of science. His students are taking sides in the debate over whether religion and evolution can be reconciled. Socialists are using evolution to justify revolution. Politicians are citing Darwin in defense of anti-immigration laws. And Martin’s own colleagues are insisting that only eugenic reforms will save the world. As anti-evolution legislation spreads across the country and passions flare on all sides, the effort to apply science to marriage laws and mate choice even begins to touch the lives of those he loves. By the time the state of Tennessee puts John T. Scopes on trial for teaching evolution in the summer of 1925, Martin can no longer ignore the debates that surround him and must take a stand in the fight over the role of science in American society.

Although set a hundred years ago, The Species Maker wrestles with many issues that continue to confront scientists and science watchers in the present day. Kristin Johnson draws on her experiences in the classroom and extensive knowledge of the history of science to depict what it might have been like for a careful scientist to watch the heated debates over teaching evolution in the United States in the 1920s.

Visit www.thespeciesmaker.com for supplemental material including historical essays, links to online primary sources, a glossary, and guiding questions useful for the classroom or book clubs.

 

Throughout the four hundred thousand years that humanity has been collecting fossils, sea urchin fossils, or echinoids, have continually been among the most prized, from the Paleolithic era, when they decorated flint axes, to today, when paleobiologists study them for clues to the earth’s history. 

In The Star-Crossed Stone, Kenneth J. McNamara, an expert on fossil echinoids, takes readers on an incredible fossil hunt, with stops in history, paleontology, folklore, mythology, art, religion, and much more. Beginning with prehistoric times, when urchin fossils were used as jewelry, McNamara reveals how the fossil crept into the religious and cultural lives of societies around the world—the roots of the familiar five-pointed star, for example, can be traced to the pattern found on urchins. But McNamara’s vision is even broader than that: using our knowledge of early habits of fossil collecting, he explores the evolution of the human mind itself, drawing striking conclusions about humanity’s earliest appreciation of beauty and the first stirrings of artistic expression. Along the way, the fossil becomes a nexus through which we meet brilliant eccentrics and visionary archaeologists and develop new insights into topics as seemingly disparate as hieroglyphics, Beowulf, and even church organs.

An idiosyncratic celebration of science, nature, and human ingenuity, The Star-Crossed Stone is as charming and unforgettable as the fossil at its heart.

The inside account of how astronomers were able to build the world’s largest observatories on Hawai‘i’s most revered mountain.

In July 2019, a demonstration erupted on Hawai‘i Island to prevent the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope, which, if built, would be one of the largest and most advanced ground-based telescopes in the world. For months, thousands of people camped on the access road leading to the proposed location: Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano, the highest point in Hawai‘i, and a sacred site for Native Hawaiians. The standoff in 2019 was not the first. For decades, activists had resisted attempts to build the TMT and its predecessors. Even so, many astronomers were startled by opposition to the TMT and the discoveries it promised. Astronomers were focused on the stars; Native Hawaiians and environmentalists were concerned about not only the sky, but also the land.

The Stars of Mauna Kea traces the history of astronomy on Hawai‘i Island, shedding new light on why scientists were granted access to the volcano in the first place. Beginning in 1959, when Hawai‘i became the fiftieth US state, it chronicles the ways astronomers benefited from Hawai‘i’s colonial past to gain free and exclusive land use rights on what had long been the archipelago’s most revered mountain. Drawing on unprecedented archival research and extensive interviews, Pascal Marichalar carefully charts the course of astronomical development on Mauna Kea. He describes the devastating tsunami that led a local businessman to contact scientists just as a renowned astronomer was scouting for places to observe the stars; the controversial authority the University of Hawai‘i assumed over the volcano after 1964; the environmental opposition to the first large international project, the Canada-France-Hawai‘i Telescope; and the resistance to telescope development that became a major focus of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. Marichalar introduces readers to scientists working on Mauna Kea, as well as the people living in the mountain’s shadow, including key opposition figures involved in recent events.

Like the dark matter that holds together rotating galaxies, the colonial forces that have shaped Hawai‘i exert a gravitational pull on the science undertaken on the volcano’s summit. The Stars of Mauna Kea brings readers inside an ongoing debate over the morality of scientific research conducted on contested ground.