The book effectively historicizes categories that are often take for granted (sex, race, vice, habit), and shows us not only their temporal contingency, but by inviting the reader to delve into the strangeness of early modern ontologies and epistemologies...

Could cancer be a contagious disease? Although this possibility might seem surprising to many of us, it has a long history...

Alexander examines the approaches to dealing with the ever-present threat of fire in Mexico City in an era in which technology and modernity were transforming the city in fundamental ways...

What is the social role of data?

Clements discusses the 1963 American Mount Everest Expedition...

Nemser examines the long history of how Spanish imperial rule depended upon spatial concentration – the gathering of people and things into centralized spaces – to control populations and consolidate power...

Edney chronicles precisely how the ideal of cartography that has developed in the West since 1800 has gone astray...

Lippert explores the significance of the pictorial revolution in one of its vanguard cities: San Francisco, the revolving door of the gold rush...

Ramirez explores how laypeople impacted the new medical techniques and technologies implemented by the imperial state in the final decades of Spanish rule in colonial Mexico...

The phytotron was not only at the center of post-war plant science, but also connected to the Cold War, commercial agriculture, and long-duration space flight...

Dr. Pauline Chen shares her experiences as a medical student and transplant surgeon and how they’ve shaped the way she practices medicine.

While there is a robust scientific consensus that there is no meaningful genetic basis for race, Russell’s analysis of the role of race in ARTs reveals that when it comes to producing kinship, race is still doing a great deal of work.

With trenchant analyses of Christian intellectual history and the founding figures of ethnology, Keel documents an infrastructure of  thought – about universalism, the supercession of knowledge, creation, and human dispersion – that shaped and still shapes the science of race...

Tworek explores how elites in academia, business, and government fought over the regulation of news at home and sought to use communications to extend German power abroad.

Jones talks about the many different groups, from naturalists and conservationists to African American artists and intellectuals, who begin to recast Africa in the America imagination in the early 20th century...

Dodman explores the history of nostalgia from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth century...

Milanich explains how fatherhood, long believed to be impossible to know with certainty, became a biological “fact” that could be ascertained with scientific testing...

De Kosnik and Feldman bring together a broad array of chapters that dive into multiple perspectives on social media engagement, especially around hashtag activism and the ways that individuals think about and interact with others via Twitter in regard to social movements and political involvement...

Wallace talks about a 2002 FUNAI expedition to find the Arrow People, one of the last uncontacted tribes in the world.,,

Kerim Yasar argues that modern technologies of sound reproduction and transmission have had profound—and often underappreciated—social, economic, and political effects...

Gökçe Günel explores the United Arab Emirates’s planned Masdar City, an experimental attempt at designing an emissions-free society.

Influential sexologist and activist Magnus Hirschfeld founded Berlin's Institute of Sexual Sciences in 1919 as a home and workplace to study homosexual rights activism and support transgender people...

Using Motorola as a case study, A Telephone for the World tracks how U.S. businesses navigated the end of the twentieth century, a moment marked by the rise of neoliberalism, the economic challenge of Japan, and the end of the Cold War.

Is democracy still the best political regime for countries to adapt to economic and technological pressures and increase their level of prosperity?

It seems logical that would NASA select military test pilots to be the first astronauts, right?