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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626
Geraldine Heng, "The Invention of Race in the E...
In creating a detailed impression of the medieval race-making that would be reconfigured into the biological racism of the modern era, Heng reaches beyond medievalists and race-studies scholars to anyone interested in the long history of race.
58 min
627
Joy Lisi Rankin, "A People’s History of Computi...
Rankin makes a compelling case for a social history of computing...
37 min
628
Adrienne Mayor, "Gods and Robots: Myths, Machin...
The first robot to walk the earth was a bronze giant called Talos...
39 min
629
Dagmar Herzog, "Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality,...
Herzog uncovers much that is unexpected. She analyzes Protestant and Catholic theologians that were pro-choice in the 1960s and 1970s...
40 min
630
Nicholas Bauch, "Geography of Digestion: Biotec...
While most people in the US are familiar with the ubiquitous Kellogg cereal brand, few know how it relates to US geography, science and technology around the turn of the 20th century...
59 min
631
Megan Finn, "Documenting Aftermath: Information...
Documenting Aftermath is a very timely book, for as global warming promises more frequent catastrophes, large-scale social media and government information systems increasingly dictate how information moves...
53 min
632
Audra J. Wolfe, "Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold...
Science’s self-concept as politically neutral and dedicated to empirical observation free of bias has often been at odds with its collaboration with the purposes of the Cold War state...
58 min
633
Brian Crim, "Our Germans: Project Paperclip and...
In his new book, Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), Brian Crim, Associate Professor of History at the University of Lynchburg, looks at the controversial program to bring German scientist to the United States after World War II...
57 min
634
Suman Seth, "Difference and Disease: Medicine, ...
Suman Seth's new book Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018) provides a new angle on the formation of modern ideas of race through the formation of the British Empire....
40 min
635
Howard Chiang, "After Eunuchs: Science, Medicin...
Howard Chiang’s new book is a masterful study of the relationship between sexual knowledge and Chinese modernity...
66 min
636
Paola Bertucci, "Artisanal Enlightenment: Scien...
Paola Bertucci's Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (Yale University Press, 2018) is an innovative new look at the role of artisans in the French Enlightenment.
53 min
637
Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers, "The Human...
58 min
638
Michael E. Staub, “The Mismeasure of Minds: Deb...
The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision required desegregation of America’s schools, but it also set in motion an agonizing multi-decade debate over race, class, and IQ. In The Mismeasure of Minds: Debating Race and Intelligence Between Brown and...
36 min
639
Daniel Stolz, “The Lighthouse and the Observato...
Both a history of science and a history of Islam, The Lighthouse and the Observatory: Islam, Science, and Empire in Late Ottoman Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2018) by Daniel Stolz tells the story of Ottoman Egypt and astronomy,
55 min
640
Caitlin C. Rosenthal, “Accounting for Slavery: ...
The familiar narrative of American business development begins in the industrial North, where paternalistic factory owners, committed to a kind of Protestant ethic, scaled up their operations into ‘total institutions’—an effort to forestall labor turno...
37 min
641
Hugh Cagle, “Assembling the Tropics: Science an...
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 ...
57 min
642
Yulia Frumer, “Making Time: Astronomical Time M...
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,
69 min
643
Robert A. Wilson, “The Eugenic Mind Project” (M...
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,
65 min
644
Dániel Margócsy, et al., “The Fabrica of Andrea...
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,
62 min
645
Theodore M. Porter, “Genetics in the Madhouse: ...
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.
53 min
646
Cameron B. Strang, “Frontiers of Science: Imper...
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...
40 min
647
Hilary A. Smith, “Forgotten Disease: Illnesses ...
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 (...
69 min
648
Megan Raby, “American Tropics: The Caribbean R...
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 ...
37 min
649
Andrew J. Hogan, “Life Histories of Genetic Dis...
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...
32 min
650
Rebecca Reich, “State of Madness: Psychiatry, L...
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...
52 min