Best of
History-Of-Science

1989

Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science


Donna J. Haraway - 1989
    Haraway's discussions of how scientists have perceived the sexual nature of female primates opens a new chapter in feminist theory, raising unsettling questions about models of the family and of heterosexuality in primate research.

Subterranean Worlds


Walter Kafton-Minkel - 1989
    And that is the author's magic". -- Fate"This is a very well-written, all-inclusive, and absolutely unstoppable book... a brilliant goldmine. The illustrations are superb". -- Gnosis MagazineA delightful work tracing the history of hollow earth theories to their origins. A journey into the human imagination as much as a journey to the center of the earth. Includes dozens of rare photographs and drawings. An excellent book for both teens and adults.

More Heat Than Light: Economics as Social Physics: Physics as Nature's Economics


Philip Mirowski - 1989
    The author traces the development of the energy concept in Western physics and its subsequent effect on the invention and promulgation of neoclassical economics, the modern orthodox theory.

Discovering


Robert Root-Bernstein - 1989
    The index is of names only. TheRoot-Bernstein (natural science and physiology, Michigan State) attempts to understand how scientists in

Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England


Carolyn Merchant - 1989
    Her analysis of how human communities are related to their environment opens a perspective that goes beyond overt changes in the landscape. Merchant brings to light the dense network of links between the human realm of economic regimes, social structure, and gender relations, as they are conditioned by a dominant worldview, and the ecological realm of plant and animal life. Thus we see how the integration of the Indians with their natural world was shattered by Europeans who engaged in exhaustive methods of hunting, trapping, and logging for the market and in widespread subsistence farming. The resulting colonial ecological revolution was to hold sway until roughly the time of American independence, when the onset of industrialization and increasing urbanization brought about the capitalist ecological revolution. By the late nineteenth century, Merchant argues, New England had become a society that viewed the whole ecosphere as an arena for human domination. One can see in New England a mirror of the world, she says. What took place there between 1600 and 1850 was a greatly accelerated recapitulation of the evolutionary ecological changes that had occurred in Europe over a span of 2,500 years.

Ben Franklin Stilled the Waves: An Informal History of Pouring Oil on Water with Reflections on the Ups and Downs of Scientific Life in General


Charles Tanford - 1989
    A century later Lord Rayleigh performed an identical experiment. Irving Langmuir did it with minor variations in 1917, and won a Nobel Prize for it. Then Langmuir's work was followed by a Dutch pediatrician's in 1925. p Each experimenter saw a little more in the result than his predecessor had seen, and the sciences of physics, chemistry and biology have all been illuminated by the work. p Charles Tanford reflects on the evolving nature of science and of individual scientists. Recounting innovations in each trial, he follows the classic experiment from Franklin's drawing room to our present-day institutionalized scientific establishments and speculates on the ensuing changes in our approach to scientific inquiry.

Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason


Gary Gutting - 1989
    Through comprehensive and detailed analyses of such important texts as The History of Madness in the Age of Reason, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, and The Archaeology of Knowledge, the author provides a lucid exposition of Foucault's archaeological approach to the history of thought, a method for uncovering the unconscious structures that set boundaries on the thinking of a given epoch. The book casts Foucault in a new light, relating his work to Gaston Bachelard's philosophy of science and Georges Canguilhem's history of science. This perspective yields a new and valuable understanding of Foucault as a historian and philosopher of science, balancing and complementing the more common view of him as primarily a social critic and theorist.

Lake Monster Traditions: A Cross-Cultural Analysis


Michel Meurger - 1989
    

Some Kind of Paradise: A Chronicle of Man and the Land in Florida


Mark Derr - 1989
    By telling it with such eloquence and learning in ‘Some Kind of Paradise,’ Mr. Derr has revealed the dark side of the historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous hypothesis: our national character was indeed shaped by the frontier. . . . [Derr] writes with a journalist’s eye for telling details and an antiquarian’s fondness for digression and quirky facts. . . . The state’s tortuous journey from one extreme to the other is [his] subject, and he tackles it with brilliance and bravado."--New York Times Book ReviewFor 500 years, visitors to Florida have discovered magic. In Some Kind of Paradise, an eloquent social and environmental history of the state, Mark Derr describes how this exotic land is fast becoming a victim of its own allure. He begins by examining the period between Reconstruction and the Great Depression, when wealthy capitalists led by Henry Flagler and Henry Plant opened the peninsula to a flood of development by building railroads and luxury hotels. Turning to the distant past, he describes the geologic origins of the state and early fossil finds. From archaeological data, he stitches together a portrait of the first human inhabitants and their distinct cultures, then follows the thread of time to the "discovery" of Florida in 1513 by Juan Ponce de León, the fall of the indigenous people to European diseases and weapons, and the pattern of conquest and racial violence that continued into the 19th century as white Americans waged a campaign against the Seminole Indians. Derr keeps his gaze on the land and its people--wreckers and spongers in Key West, cowmen on the "palmetto prairie," speculators and builders from Miami Beach to Seaside, Cuban cigar makers who rolled tobacco while listening to readings from Shakespeare and Marx, and migrant fruit pickers, convict laborers, and the idle rich--the range of dreamers and schemers who have struggled to remake this abundant, fragile wonderland. Written with both tenderness and alarm, Derr’s book presents their competing views of Florida: a paradise to be protected and nurtured or a frontier to be exploited and conquered. Mark Derr moved to Florida with his family at age six; his interest in the state’s history and ecology dates back to the late 1960s, when he watched the landscape around Winter Park change with the construction of Walt Disney World. He is the author of two other critically acclaimed books, The Frontiersman and Dog’s Best Friend, and his articles have appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Natural History, Audubon, and other publications. He lives in Miami Beach with his wife, Gina Maranto.

The Romance Of Victorian Natural History


Lynn L. Merrill - 1989
    This study focuses on how the enthusiasm for natural history in the 19th century produced characteristic ways of conceptualizing and visualizing the world--especially the Victorian fascination with particulars-- as frequently seen in Victorian poetry, fiction, history, and textual studies. Arguing for natural history as an influential literary genre, Merrill examines the language and recurrent motifs in Victorian and some American natural history texts-- metaphors of keen vision, preoccupation with scale, and motifs of microscopes, museums, and collecting--and surveys the works of Philip Henry Gosse, Charles Kingsley, Hugh Miller, and John Burroughs.

Explorations In Islamic Science


Ziauddin Sardar - 1989
    

History of Scientific Thought


Michel Serres - 1989
    This is an analytical introduction to key historical and philosophical moments in the history of science, in twenty-two sections, written by a remarkably accomplished collection of authors at the forefronts of the disci plines of history and philosophy of science.

Ideas of Space: Euclidean, Non-Euclidean, and Relativistic


Jeremy Gray - 1989
    A unique, highly readable, and entertaining account, the book assumes no special mathematical knowledge. Itreviews the failed classical attempts to prove the parallel postulate and provides coverage of the role of Gauss, Lobachevskii, and Bolyai in setting the foundations of modern differential geometry, which laid the groundwork for Einstein's theories of special and general relativity. This updatedaccount includes a new chapter on Islamic contributions to this area, as well as additional information on gravitation, the nature of space and black holes.