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Engineering the battlefield—one armored advance at a time.

For centuries sailing vessels crept along the coastline, ready to flee ashore in case of danger or trouble; this worked well until weather or poor sailing drove these ships against an unforgiving coast. Saviors and salvors (often the same people) struggled to rescue both humans and cargo, often with results as tragic for them as for the sailors and passengers.

Joseph Francis (b. Boston, Massachusetts, 1801) was an inventor who also had the ability to organize a business to produce his inventions and the salesmanship to sell his products. His metal lifeboats, first used in survey expeditions in Asia Minor and Central America, came into demand among the world’s merchant marine, the U.S. Navy, and the U.S. Revenue Service. His corrugated “life car” was the keystone to development of the U.S. Life-Saving Service. Francis’s metal bateaux and lifeboats played an important role in the Third Seminole War in Florida. His metal pontoon army wagons served in the trans-Mississippi campaigns against the Indians.

In Europe, he was acclaimed as a genius and sold patent rights to shipyards in Liverpool and the Woolwich Arsenal in England, Le Havre seaport in France, in the free city of Hamburg, and in the Russian Empire. But while Francis was busy in Europe, Captain Douglass Ottinger, U.S. Revenue Marine Service, claimed to be the inventor of Francis’s life car and obtained support in the U.S. Congress and the Patent Office for his claim. Francis had to battle for decades to prove his rights, and Americans remained generally unfamiliar with his devices, thereby condemning Civil War armies to inferior copies while Europe was using, and acclaiming, his inventions.

Now available in English—one of the twentieth century’s most important works on the philosophy of technology


With this first English translation of influential German philosopher Günther Anders’s 1956 masterpiece of critical theory, The Obsolescence of the Human, a new generation of readers can now engage with his prescient and haunting vision of a “world without us” dominated by technology.

Looking at technological events such as the detonation of the nuclear bomb and the arrival of televisions in our living rooms, Anders advances a warning of what humanity looks like in a world where it has surrendered all agency. He outlines the new emotional landscapes that shape our relationship to increasingly capable technology, including Promethean shame, the human sense of unease our own superior technological innovations can instill. Confronting the growing gap between what we can collectively create and what we can individually comprehend, Anders speculates on the trajectory of a developing technological world that rapidly exceeds our ability to control or even foresee its negative consequences.

The Obsolescence of the Human prefigures contemporary posthumanist discourse and is eerily predictive of current debates around automation, global warming, and artificial intelligence. Providing new ways to conceptualize the intersection of technology and emotion, it offers groundbreaking frameworks for future-oriented ethics. Radical in both its stylistic experimentation and its theoretical insights, this new translation presents a cautionary tale regarding the human capacity to usher in its own destruction.

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The Price of Copper is a veteran journalist’s unflinching investigation of a family tragedy and long-standing mystery—the sensational 1938 suicide of powerful New Mexico copper mine boss Rone B. Tempest Sr. on the eve of his scheduled testimony before a federal labor board. From this dramatic opening, the book paints a vivid portrait of open-pit copper mining, labor conflicts, and corporate-sponsored racism in company mining towns across the Mountain West from the early years of the twentieth century to the first successes of the civil rights movement in the 1950s.

The author’s paternal grandfather, Rone Tempest Sr., was the general manager of the Chino Copper Mine in Santa Rita, New Mexico, which was owned by the Kennecott Copper Corporation and under investigation over labor practices. His boss was Salt Lake City copper baron and ruthless anti-union strikebreaker Daniel C. Jackling—the “Prophet of Porphyry,” who pioneered the industrial mining of low-grade copper ores by introducing the use of dynamite, steam shovels, rail, and giant mill works. After detailing the saga around Tempest Sr.’s death, the story follows the trajectory of the Chino mine over time, including the rise of predominantly Hispanic labor unions and the advancement of Hispanic workers to senior management roles—gains in civil rights that would have made the labor environment entirely unrecognizable to those fighting for reform in 1938. 

A compelling and dramatic history of the great early twentieth-century advances in western copper mining that provided the essential metal needed to electrify the continent and the world, The Price of Copper is a unique personal story that connects to the broader history of copper mining in the West, as well as a valuable social history offering a new narrative about the dynamics of corporate management and giving additional insight into the formation of the “Copper Age” in the United States.

The forgotten air campaign that gave birth to modern air power.

A fascinating examination of the strategies and uses of air power in the First World War, Sky on Fire covers not only developments in military hardware and tactics but also how public policy and political considerations shaped the ways air power was deployed. Providing an excellent balance of data and statistics as well as human insights, Fredette’s book is essential reading for readers interested in the air power, both historically and in contemporary conflicts.
 

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.

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. 

Personal and simple, earthy and warm—recipes and stories from the Steger Wilderness Center in Minnesota’s north woods
 

The Steger Homestead Kitchen is an inspiring and down-to-earth collection of meals and memories gathered at the Homestead, the home of the Arctic explorer and environmental activist Will Steger, located in the north woods near Ely, Minnesota. Founded in 1988, the Steger Wilderness Center was established to model viable carbon-neutral solutions, teach ecological stewardship, and address climate change. In her role as the Homestead’s chef, Will’s niece Rita Mae creates delicious and hearty meals that become a cornerstone experience for visitors from all over the world, nourishing them as they learn and share their visions for a healthy and abundant future. 

Now, with this new book, home chefs can make Rita Mae’s simple, hearty meals to share around their own homestead tables. Interwoven with dozens of mouth-watering recipes—for generous breakfasts (Almond Berry Griddlecakes), warming lunches (Northwoods Mushroom Wild Rice Soup), elegant dinners (Spatchcock Chicken with Blueberry Maple Glaze), desserts (Very Carrot Cake), and snacks (Steger Wilderness Bars)—are Will Steger’s exhilarating stories of epic adventures exploring the Earth’s most remote and endangered regions.

The Steger Homestead Kitchen opens up the Wilderness Center’s hospitality, its heart and hearth, providing the practical advice and inspiration to cook up a good life in harmony with nature.

From the telegraph to the touchscreen, how the development of binary switching transformed everyday life and changed the shape of human agency
 

The Switch traces the sudden rise of a technology that has transformed everyday life for billions of people: the binary switch. By chronicling the rapid growth of binary switching since the mid-nineteenth century, Jason Puskar contends that there is no human activity as common today as pushing a button or flipping a switch—the deceptively simple act of turning something on or off. More than a technical history, The Switch offers a cultural and political analysis of how reducing so much human action to binary alternatives has profoundly reshaped modern society.

Analyzing this history, Puskar charts the rapid shift from analog to digital across a range of devices—keyboards, cameras, guns, light switches, computers, game controls, even the “nuclear button”—to understand how nineteenth-century techniques continue to influence today’s pervasive digital technologies. In contexts that include musical performance, finger counting, machine writing, voting methods, and immersive play, Puskar shows how the switch to switching led to radically new forms of action and thought.

The innovative analysis in The Switch makes clear that binary inputs have altered human agency by making choice instantaneous, effort minimal, and effects more far-reaching than ever. In the process, it concludes, switching also fosters forms of individualism that, though empowering for many, also preserve a legacy of inequality and even domination.

A richly illustrated study of how technical drawing shaped culture in the early United States.

With The Technology of Drawing, Elizabeth Bacon Eager explores the importance of manual skill and graphic literacy in the emergence of American industry, offering readers a new lens through which to view the visual culture of the early United States. Focused on questions of materiality and process, the book traces the development of drawing as a technology and argues for it as an embodied way of thinking and knowing, revealing the significance of such knowledge in the construction of both scientific and social authority. Through close analysis of materials, including construction drawings, mechanical treatises, cartographic surveys, and patent drawings, many of which have never been published before, Eager presents a history of American art focused on materiality and process through the view of the mechanic rather than the fine artist. 

Reaching beyond the traditional boundaries of art historical study to engage objects rarely considered as art, The Technology of Drawing treats the technical image as a site of extraordinary creativity, in which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans across the social spectrum negotiated critical concepts of identity, invention, and authorship with a remarkable degree of material intelligence and visual sophistication.