Assembling the Tropics: Science and Medicine in Portugal’s Empire, 1450-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2018) by Hugh Cagle is an exciting analysis of the production of the tropics as an idea and as a dimension of imperialism through the development ...

Physical journals, scrapbooks, and photo albums all offer their owners the opportunity to chronicle both mundane and extravagant events. But unlike social media posting, this analog memorializing of life happenings is not encumbered with the negative t...

Science fiction is, at its core, about tomorrow—exploring through stories what the universe may look like one or 10 or a million years in the future. Twelve Tomorrows (MIT Press, 2018) uses short stories to fit nearly a dozen possible “tomorrows” into ...

Yulia Frumer’s new book follows roughly three hundred years of transformations in how time was conceptualized, measured, and materialized in Japan. Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan (University of Chicago Press,

For most of us, eugenics — the “science of improving the human stock” — is a thing of the past, commonly associated with Nazi Germany and government efforts to promote a pure Aryan race. This view is incorrect: even in California, for example,

Our world today is full of algorithms and metrics designed to help us keep up, to keep track, to keep going. New devices, such as the smartwatch, now make it possible to quantify and standardize every conceivable human activity,

The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions (Brill, 2018) is a masterful new book that will long be on the shelves of anyone working on the history of anatomy,

In Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity (Princeton University Press, 2018), Theodore Porter uncovers the unfamiliar origins of human genetics in the asylums of Europe and North America.

Schizophrènes au XXe siècle: des effets secondaires de l’histoire [Schizophrenics in the Twentieth Century: The Side Effects of History] is a strong argument in support of the history of psychiatry “from below.

In his first book Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India (Cambridge University Press 2018), historian Benjamin Robert Siegel explores independent India’s attempts to feed itself between the 1940s and 1970s.

The work of polymath Gregory Bateson has long been the road to cybernetics travelled by those approaching this trans-disciplinary field from the direction of the social sciences and even the humanities.  Fortunately for devotees of Bateson’s expansive ...

In his new book, The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity (Simon & Schuster, 2018), futurist, technologist, and CEO of Gigaom, Byron Reese makes the case that technology has reshaped humanity just three times in his...

Cameron Strang’s Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) examines how colonists, soldiers, explorers, and American Indians created and circulated knowle...

LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), by P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, outlines the history of social media platforms and their use in popular culture and modern conflict.

Hilary A. Smith’s new book examines the evolution of a Chinese disease concept, foot qi (jiao qi) from its documented origins in the fourth century to the present day. However, at its heart Forgotten Disease: Illnesses Transformed in Chinese Medicine (...

American science and empire have a long mutual history. In American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Megan Raby takes us to Caribbean sites that expanded the reach of American ecology and ...

How did clinicians learn to see the human genome? In Life Histories of Genetic Disease (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Andrew J. Hogan makes the subtle argument that a process described by scholars of biomedicine as “molecularization” took plac...

In her new book, State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature and Dissent After Stalin (Northern Illinois University Press, 2018), Rebecca Reich argues that Soviet dissident writers used literary narratives to counter state-sanctioned psychiatric diagnoses...

Artificial intelligence and Victorian literature: these two notions seem incompatible. AI brings us to the age of information and technology, whereas Victorian literature invites us to the world of lengthy novels, to the world of the written word.

N.A.J. Taylor and Robert Jacobs,’s edited volume Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Nuclear Humanities in the Post-Cold War (Routledge, 2017) developed out of a special journal issue of Critical Military Studies organized on the occasion of the 70th a...

Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene (University of Chicago Press, 2018) curates fifteen objects that might serve as evidence of a future past. From a jar of sand to a painting of a goanna,

Pediatrician and integrative medicine practitioner Michelle Perro, MD, has been treating an increasing number of children with complex chronic illnesses that do not fit into our usual diagnostic boxes. She has spent years treating and disentangling why...

You should never trust celebrities, politicians, or activists for health information. Why? Because they are not scientists! Scientists often cannot compete with celebrities when it comes to charm or evoking emotion.

Though usually a background concern, the aging U.S. electric grid has lately been on the minds of both legislators and consumers. Congress wants to ensure the technological security of this important infrastructure.

We are arguably living in the midst of a form of economy where attention has become a key resource and value, labor, class, and currency are being reconfigured as a result. But how is this happening, what are the consequences,

The history of mankind is interlinked with microbes. As humans evolved and became more advanced, microbes evolved right along with us. Through infection, disease, and pandemic they have helped shape human culture and civilization.

Water politics have long figured prominently in Mexico, and scholars have addressed such critical topics as irrigation, dam and canal building, and resource management, but few have examined how everyday people think about and use the waters in the dai...

The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture (University of Chicago Press, 2017) examines the social and political history of how agricultural knowledge was created in the 19th century.  Over the course of the 19th century,

Commentators have been forecasting the eclipse of hypothesis-driven science and the rise of a new ‘data-driven’ science for some time now. Harkening back to the aspirations of Enlightenment empiricists, who sought to establish for the collection of sen...

Pablo Gomez‘s The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) examines the strategies by which health and spiritual practitioners in the Caribbean claimed knowledge abou...

While Systems Thinking has enjoyed an increasing amount of societal influence through work of such practitioner/authors as Peter Senge, it is also true that the vast majority of the popular literature on the systems view has taken place within a busine...

Metabolism, behavior, sleep, mood swings, the immune system, fighting, fleeing, puberty, and sex: these are just a few of the things our bodies control with hormones. Armed with a healthy dose of wit and curiosity,

Most of us have heard of the math-music connection, but Eli Maor’s Music by the Numbers: From Pythagoras to Schoenberg (Princeton University Press, 2018) is THE book that explains what that connection is, and how both math and music connect to both phy...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that there is a warming trend in the global climate that is attributable to human activity, with an expected increase in global temperature (given current trends) of 1.5- 4.

Ari Larissa Heinrich’s new book, Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body (Duke University Press, 2018), is a fascinating study of representations of the Chinese body in the context of biotechnology.

In his new book, Through the Lion Gate: A History of the Berlin Zoo (Oxford University Press, 2017), Gary Bruce, professor of history at the University of Waterloo, provides the first English-language history of the Berlin Zoo from its inception in 184...

In the modern world, we often tend to view the scientific and the spiritual as diametrically opposed adversaries; we see them as fundamentally irreconcilable ways of understanding the world, whose epistemologies are so divergent that they espouse radic...

Whether through the anxiety of mutually assured destruction or the promise of decolonization throughout Asia and Africa, Cold War politics had a peculiar temporality. In Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood (University of Chicago Press,

Is India facing a waste crisis? As its population, cities and consumption grow what are the implications for the health, well being and everyday lives of Indians? In Waste of a Nation: Growth and Garbage in India (Harvard University Press, 2018),

Personal health information often seems locked-down: protected by patient privacy laws, encased in electronic record systems (EHRs) and difficult to share or transport by and between physicians and hospitals.

In Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research During the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2013), Joy Rohde discusses the relationship between the social sciences, academia, and national security institutions.

Londa Schiebinger‘s new book Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford University Press, 2017) examines the contexts, programs, and ethics of medical experimentation in the British and Frenc...

Peter Sahlins’s 1668: The Year of the Animal in France (Zone Books, 2017) is a captivating look at the role of animals in court and salon culture in the first decades of Louis XIV’s reign in France.  Focusing on the years in and around 1668,

When you imagine the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, what colors do you see? Whatever comes to mind, Laura Kalba’s, Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art (Penn State University Press,

As a 17th-century noblewoman who became the first duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish has often been viewed as a royalist and a conservative within the context of the social and political issues of her time.

Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2018), Eli Berman, Joseph H. Felter, and Jacob N. Shapiro, takes a data-based approach to examine how actions can affect violence in asymmetric conflicts.

In The Flight of a Butterfly or the Path of a Bullet? Using Technology to Transform Teaching and Learning (Harvard Education Press, 2018), Larry Cuban looks at the uses and effects of digital technologies in K–12 classrooms,

In Middle Eastern history, the printing press has been both over- and under-assigned significance as an agent of social change. Hala Auji’s Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (Brill,

Beginning with a discussion about Black Lives Matter may seem like an unlikely place to start a book about nineteenth century science and culture. However, by contrasting Black lives with White feelings, Kyla Schuller sets up the central conflict of he...

It would be difficult to argue against Stafford Beer’s Project Cybersyn as the most bold and audacious chapter in the history of cybernetics.  In the early 70’s, at the invitation of leftist president, Salvador Allende,

French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot is perhaps most well known today from the images of his “hysterical” female patients featured in Bourneville’s Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. While not diminishing the epistemological and aesthetic...

Professor Martha Few’s For All Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala (University of Arizona Press, 2015) describes the implementation of public health reforms in late eighteenth-century Guatemala and the diverse ways t...

Space Science and the Arab World, Astronauts, Observatories and Nationalism in the Middle East (I. B. Tauris, 2018) a recently published history of Arab exploration of space, offers a fascinating insight into fundamental issues shaping the contemporary...

The Spanish flu of 1918-1920 was one of the greatest human disasters of all time. It infected a third of the people on Earth–from the poorest immigrants of New York City to the king of Spain, Franz Kafka, Mahatma Gandhi and Woodrow Wilson.

What do Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, media theorist Marshall McLuhan and Canadian popular culture have in common? This is the question that Mark A. McCutcheon seeks to answer in his new book, The Medium Is the Monster: Canadian Adaptations of Frankenst...

The use of our data and the privacy, or lack thereof, that we have when we go online has become a topic of increasing importance as technology becomes ubiquitous and more sophisticated. Governments, advocacy groups and individual citizens are demanding...

Early studies of the functions of the human brain used a simple method: wait for misfortune to strike—strokes, seizures, infectious diseases, lobotomies, horrendous accidents-and see how the victim coped. In many cases survival was miraculous,

The Americans with Disability Act passed in 1990, but it was just one moment in ongoing efforts to craft the meaning and practice of “good design” that put people with disabilities at the center. In their new book,

In Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), David J. Silverman argues that Indian societies adopted firearm technology not because they were visually impressive or c...

“What is needed now is not liberal reform or withdrawal, but a radical attack, a strategy of opposition. Scientific workers must develop ways to put their skills at the service of the people and against the oppressors.” (Zimmerman, et al. 1972).

How do we create meaning after the genome? Such a profound question is at the center of the recently published book by Jenny Reardon, The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Knowledge and Justice after the Genome (University of Chicago Press, 2017).

Understanding Cyber Conflict: 14 Analogies (Georgetown University Press, 2017), edited by George Perkovich and Ariel E. Levite, uses analogies to conventional warfare and previous technological innovations to explain the complexities of cyber capabilit...

Susan M. Squier’s book, Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawings as Metaphor (Duke University Press, 2017)  is about development— biological and ecological. It explores how the media (paintings, films, graphics) that experts have created to understand developme...

For thousands of years the human heart remained the deepest of mysteries; both home to the soul and an organ too complex to touch, let alone operate on. Then, in the late nineteenth century, medics began going where no one had dared go before.

What if modern conservatism is less a reaction to environmentalism than a mutation of it? Historian Natasha Zaretsky’s latest book, Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformation of the 1970s (Columbia University Press, 2018),

Sewing, knitting, quilting, the crafts related to fabric making, are usually not what we think about when we consider our digital communications devices. Yet, many of the activities that we find ourselves doing with our devices touching the screen,

The relationship between humans and apes has been discussed for centuries. That discussion took a new turn with the publication and reception of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). In her book, Man,

In his book Playback: A Genealogy of 1980s British Videogames (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Alex Wade examines the culture of bedroom coding, arcades, and format wars in 1980s Britain. Wade interviews gamers,

As Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Literature and Science at Texas Tech University, Bruce Clarke has spent the last decade-plus publishing groundbreaking scholarship introducing the application of second-order systems theory to the analysis of literat...

Thomas Kuhn upset both scientists and philosophers of science when he argued that transitions from one scientific framework (or “paradigm”) to another were irrational: the change was like a religious conversion experience rather than a reasoned shift f...

On this episode, we will be talking to Anthimos Alexandros Tsirigotis about his book Cybernetics, Warfare, and Discourse: The Cybernetisation of Warfare in Britain (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017). Given the significant efforts of the field’s founder,

My father has this personality quirk that drives me crazy. Whenever and wherever he travels, no matter how far, he refuses to reset his watch to the local time. For him, it’s always whatever time it is in Cincinnati, Ohio,

For most people the field of architecture is not what they think about when discussing artificial intelligence as we describe it today. Yet, architects are a part of the historic foundations of what we call the Internet and now AI. In her new book,

Our guest today was Dr. Jennifer Hart who talked to us about her recently published book Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation (Indiana University Press, 2016). In this book, Dr.

For millennia, religions have concocted numerous manifestations of heaven and the afterlife, and though no one has ever returned from such a place to report what it is really like—or that it even exists—today science and technology are being used to tr...

In the early twentieth century, Robert Hertz, a French anthropologist, and Cesare Lombroso, the Italian criminologist, debated the causes and consequences of left-handedness. According to Lombroso, left-handed individuals were more likely to be crimina...

James Delbourgo‘s new book Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane (Allen Lane, 2017) tells the fascinatingly complex and controversial story of Hans Sloane, the man whose collection and last will laid the foundation for the British...

As a historian I find myself constantly asking the question “Is that really new, or is it rather something that looks new but isn’t?” If you read the headlines, particularly those concerning the on going “Digital Revolution,

Popular culture provides many visions of the future. From The Jetsons to Futurama, Black Mirror to Minority Report, Western culture has predicted a future predicated on innovations in technology. In his new book for the MIT Essential Knowledge Series,

We take electricity for granted. But the material grids and wires that bring light to homes and connect places are also objects of moral concern, political freedoms and national advancement, suggests Leo Coleman in his new book A Moral Technology: Elec...

Tom Mullaney’s new book The Chinese Typewriter: A History (MIT Press, 2017) provides a fascinating first look at the development of modern Chinese information technology. Spanning 150 years from the origins of telegraphy in the early 1800s to the adven...

It’s no secret that we continue to live in the midst of digital revolution that continues to unfold in a rapidly accelerating fashion. Digital connectivity and the Internet of Things make possible not only Smart Homes, but Smart Cities.

Polio was a scourge that terrified generations of people throughout the United States and the rest of the world until Jonas Salk’s vaccine provided the first effective defense against it. In Jonas Salk: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2015),

Technology is a form of material culture and is a human activity. The way in which humans view technology is a social construction in which people use social processes of interpretation and negotiation. The mundane rituals that humans carry out when in...

When discussing Internet history, many within the United States believe the creation myth of an Internet born in Silicon Valley. But aspects of the Internet that we use for shopping, financial transactions, and social interactions, among other things,

We tend to think of ourselves—our modern selves–as disenchanted. We have traded magic, myth, and spirits for science, reason, and logic. But this is false. Jason Josephson-Storm, in his exciting new book titled The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic,

How can Lacan help us to understand the subversive potential of video games? In The Playstation Dreamworld (Polity, 2017), Alfie Bown, Assistant Professor of Literature at HSMC, Hong Kong, explores this and many other questions of the modern condition....

Zek Valkyrie teaches at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. His new book, Game Worlds Get Real: How Who We Are Online Became Who We Are Offline (Praeger, 2017), takes readers into the world of electronic games and the complex social relatio...

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow‘s book, Personal Stereo (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) , which is part of the Object Lessons series, offers a compelling and expertly researched study of the Sony Walkman, taking into account the device’s controversial origin story,

Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in western Europe over the 1970s. Observers feared Germany was becoming “ungovernable” and France was moving toward “civil war.” The source of this discontent? Nuclear power. Not weapons.

In The Economization of Life (Duke University Press, 2017), Michelle Murphy pulls apart the late modern concept of “population” to show the lives this concept has produced and continues to produce, and, importantly,

In The Place of Stone: Dighton Rock and the Erasure of America’s Indigenous Past (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Douglas Hunter examines the history of meanings, affinities, and petroglyph studies of Dighton Rock.

If you are an enthusiast of The Cheese and the Worms (1976), The Great Cat Massacre (1984), or The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), then Michael Wintroub‘s The Voyage of Thought: Navigating Knowledge Across the Sixteenth-Century World (Cambridge Univers...

For the first time, African Americans Against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement (Stanford University Press, 2015) tells the compelling story of those black activists who fought for nuclear disarmament by connecting ...

Big Data: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our Lives (Icon Books, 2017), by Brian Clegg, is a relatively short book about a subject that has emerged only recently, but is rapidly becoming a significant force in the evolution of society.

Since its infancy, television has played an important role in shaping U.S. values and the American sense of self. Social activists recognized this power immediately and, consequently, set about trying to influence television’s portrayal of those values...

What is science? A seemingly profound, yet totally ridiculous question to try and answer. Yet, when Oxford University Press reached out to the brilliant scholar of Victorian science, Iwan Rhys Morris, they were tapping the right man for the job on the ...

Widespread human alteration of the planet has led many scholars to claim that we have entered a new epoch in geological time: the Anthropocene, an age dominated by humanity. This ethnography is the first to directly engage the Anthropocene,

As I was reading Ron Edward’s fascinating and far-reaching new book, The Edge of Evolution: Animality, Inhumanity, and Doctor Moreau (Oxford University Press, 2016), I had a flashback. I must have been about seven.

Today “The Fens” is largely a misnomer, as the area of eastern England is now largely flat, dry farmland. Until the early modern era, however, it was a region of wetland marshes. Eric Ash‘s book The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics,