New Books in the History of Science
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.
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601
Han F. Vermeulen, "Before Boas: The Genesis of ...
Where did ethnography come from?
100 min
602
Jamie L. Pietruska, "Looking Forward: Predictio...
Pietruska assesses how different varieties of forecasting created an often-contradictory “culture of prediction” during the rise of modern bureaucracies...
36 min
603
David Lindsay Roberts, "Republic of Numbers: Un...
Roberts anchors 20 biographical chapters to a decadal series of events, whose mathematical significance could not often have been anticipated...
71 min
604
Lucas Richert, “Strange Trips: Science, Culture...
Richert investigates the myths, meanings, and boundaries of recreational drugs, palliative care drugs, and pharmaceuticals, as well as struggles over product innovation, consumer protection, and freedom of choice in the medical marketplace...
48 min
605
Erika Milam, "Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for H...
Milam talks about the scientific search for human nature, a project that captured the attention of paleontologists, anthropologists, and primatologists in the years after World War II...
38 min
606
Charles King, "Gods of the Upper Air: How A Cir...
King's book is a reminder of the central ideas of Boasian anthropology: a recognition that gender roles and racial assumptions are cultural constructions and not biological facts...
59 min
607
Davide Crippa, The Impossibility of Squaring th...
From 1667 to 1676, a pivotal controversy played out among several mathematical luminaries of the time,..
57 min
608
David Philip Miller, "The Life and Legend of Ja...
For all of his fame as one of the seminal figures of the Industrial Revolution, James Watt is a person around whom many misconceptions congregate...
68 min
609
Andrew Wright Hurley, "Ludwig Leichhardt’s Ghos...
Hurley talks about the life and afterlife of the Prussian explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, a man whose reputation has shifted to reflect the changing cultures of Australia and Germany over the past 160 years....
33 min
610
Violet Moller, "The Map of Knowledge: A Thousan...
Moller traces the histories of migration of three ancient authors, Euclid, Ptolemy and Galen, from ancient Alexandria in 500 to Syria and Constantinople,
61 min
611
Vanessa Heggie, "Higher and Colder: A History o...
Heggie talks about the history of biomedical research in extreme environments...
34 min
612
Tita Chico, "The Experimental Imagination: Lite...
Chico’s new book upends the traditional, modern dichotomies which enforce strict separations between literature and science...
65 min
613
John D. Hawks, "Almost Human: The Astonishing T...
Hawks talks about new developments in paleoanthropology – the discovery of a new hominid species Homo Naledi in South Africa, the Neanderthal ancestry of many human populations, and the challenge of rethinking anthropological science’s relationship with indigenous peoples and the general public...
30 min
614
Robin Scheffler, “A Contagious Cause: The Ameri...
Could cancer be a contagious disease? Although this possibility might seem surprising to many of us, it has a long history...
38 min
615
Philip W. Clements, "Science in an Extreme Envi...
Clements discusses the 1963 American Mount Everest Expedition...
30 min
616
Daniel Nemser, "Infrastructures of Race: Concen...
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...
60 min
617
Matthew Edney, "Cartography: The Ideal and Its ...
Edney chronicles precisely how the ideal of cartography that has developed in the West since 1800 has gone astray...
56 min
618
David Munns, "Engineering the Environment: Phyt...
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...
31 min
619
David Munns, "Engineering the Environment: Phyt...
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...
31 min
620
Terence Keel, "Divine Variations: How Christian...
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...
51 min
621
Karin Rosemblatt, "The Science and Politics of ...
Rosemblatt traces how U.S.- and Mexican-trained intellectuals, social and human scientists, and anthropologists applied their ethnographic field work on indigenous and Native American peoples on both sides of the Rio Grande to debates over race, national culture, and economic development...
51 min
622
Nikolai Krementsov, "With and Without Galton: V...
Krementsov provides a fascinating analysis of the vicissitudes of Russian attempts to improve the human species...
79 min
623
Lukas Engelmann, "Mapping AIDS: Visual Historie...
What role do visual media play in establishing a medical phenomenon?
48 min
624
Robert A. Voeks, "The Ethnobotany of Eden: Reth...
Jungle medicine: it's everywhere, from chia seeds to ginseng tea to CBD oil..
45 min
625
Gregory Dawes, "Galileo and the Conflict betwee...
Open conflict between religion and science may not be inevitable, but a germ of discord resides in some of the fundamental commitments of both...
44 min