Few astronomers in the 20th century did as much to expand our understanding of the universe as Vera Rubin. To tell her remarkable story in their biography Vera Rubin: A Life (Belknap Press, 2021), authors Jacqueline and Simon Mitton describe both the range of her accomplishments as well as the barriers she overcame in order to achieve them.  As they explain, Rubin was drawn early to the study of the stars, determining early in her life that she wanted to be an astronomer. To become one she had to overcome the assumptions of many of her peers that science was not an appropriate field of study for a woman, or that she would abandon her studies once she married and had children.  Defying their expectations, Rubin balanced child-rearing with earning her doctorate in astronomy and undertaking observational work. Though she participated in a number of different studies, her passion was for understanding galaxies, and her discoveries proved critical for the acceptance of the existence of dark matter in the universe.  Acclaimed for her work, she used her position to fight for improve the status of women in the sciences, a fight that she continued alongside her research for the rest of her life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A four-hundred-year history of the development of alchemy in England that brings to light the evolution of the practice. Tracing the development of alchemy in England from the beginning of the fourteenth century to the end of the seventeenth, Jennifer M. Rampling illuminates the role of alchemical reading and experimental practice in the broader context of national and scientific history.  Using new manuscript sources, she shows how practitioners like George Ripley, John Dee, and Edward Kelley, as well as many previously unknown alchemists, devised new practical approaches to alchemy while seeking the support of English monarchs. By reconstructing their alchemical ideas, practices, and disputes, Rampling reveals how English alchemy was continually reinvented over the space of four centuries, resulting in changes to the science itself. In so doing, The Experimental Fire The Experimental Fire: Inventing English Alchemy, 1300-1700 (University of Chicago Press, 2020) bridges the intellectual history of chemistry and the wider worlds of early modern patronage, medicine, and science. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The appreciation of color is considered universal among human societies, yet varies vastly according to cultural norms and material circumstances. In the nineteenth century, synthetic chemistry produced new hues like mauve that changed the sensory worlds of people living in industrial societies. In The Republic of Color: Science, Perception, and the Making of Modern America (Chicago UP 2019), historian Michael Rossi explores how reformers and scientists turned to color science to ask and answer profound questions about the relationship between perception and personhood. Their efforts to define and standardize the modern sensorium were often proposed as solutions to practical problems of education and accountability. In this way, color systems made moral and political claims on what good governance in an increasingly bureaucratized society might look like. From the Pragmatists’ protoplasmic preoccupations to the educational experiments of board game magnates, Rossi’s study of color in American life brings anxieties over the possibility of community in the modern world into brilliant focus. Whether rooted in philosophical paradoxes or unabashed racial animus, standardizing color cut to the heart of human difference at a crucial moment in the development of the human sciences. This vibrant book will find an audience in aesthetes and Americanists alike, or virtually anyone interested in why the technical tools for making and modulating color look the way they do—not to spoil it, but how deeply have you considered the color options in software like Photoshop? Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He is writing a dissertation on how people used statistics to make claims of discrimination in 1970s America, and how the relationship between rights and numbers became a flashpoint in political struggles over bureaucracy, race, and law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jim Crow Sociology: The Black and Southern Roots of American Sociology (U Cincinnati Press, 2020) is an extraordinary new volume that examines the origin, development, and significance of Black Sociology through the accomplishments of early African American sociologists at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) such as Atlanta University, Tuskegee Institute, Fisk University, and Howard University. Black Sociology is a concept that weaponizes the discipline for that which is “right and good" and prioritizes scholar-activist inspired research directed at impacting real world conditions of African Americans. Guided by this approach, this book debunks the idea that the sociology practiced by early African Americans does not exemplify scholarly excellence. Instead, Earl Wright II demonstrates that Tuskegee Institute, under the leadership of Booker T. Washington, established the first applied program of rural sociology. Fisk University, first under the guidance of George Edmund Haynes then Charles S. Johnson, developed one of the earliest and most impactful programs of applied urban sociology. Wright extends our understanding of W. E. B. Du Bois's Atlanta Sociological Laboratory with an articulation of the contributions of women to the first American school of sociology.  Jim Crow Sociology forces contemporary scholars to grapple with who are and who are not included in the disciplinary canon. Specifically, this book forces us to ask why early African American sociologists and HBCUs are not canonized. What makes this book most consequential is that it provides evidence supporting the proposition that sociology began in earnest in the United States as a Black and southern enterprise. C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A reporter uncovers the secrets behind the scientific scam of the century.  The news breaks first as a tale of fear and pity. Doctors at a London hospital claim a link between autism and a vaccine given to millions of children: MMR. Young parents are terrified. Immunization rates slump. And as a worldwide ‘anti-vax’ movement kicks off, old diseases return to sicken and kill. But a veteran reporter isn’t so sure, and sets out on an epic investigation. Battling establishment cover-ups, smear campaigns, and gagging lawsuits, he exposes rigged research and secret schemes, the heartbreaking plight of families struggling with disability, and the scientific deception of our time. Brian Deer's The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Andrew Wakefield's War on Vaccines (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020) tells the troubling story of Andrew Wakefield: a man in search of greatness, who stakes his soul on big ideas that, if right, might transform lives. But when the facts don’t fit, he can’t face failure. He’ll do whatever it takes to succeed. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Forms, Formats and the Circulation of Knowledge: British Printscape’s Innovations, 1688-1832 (Brill, 2020) explores the printscape – the mental mapping of knowledge in all its printed shapes – to chart the British networks of publishers, printers, copyright-holders, readers and authors. This transdisciplinary volume skilfully recovers innovations and practices in the book trade between 1688 and 1832. It investigates how print circulated information in a multitude of sizes and media, through an evolving framework of transactions. The authority of print is demonstrated by studies of prospectuses, blank forms, periodicals, pamphlets, globes, games and ephemera, uniquely gathered in eleven essays engaging in legal, economic, literary, and historical methodologies. The tight focus on material format reappraises a disorderly market accommodating a widening audience consumption. Louisiane Ferlier, Ph.D. (2012, Université Paris Diderot), is the Digital Resources Manager at Centre for the History of Science at the Royal Society. She has published articles on John Wallis, the Bodleian Library and cross-Atlantic circulation of books. Bénédicte Miyamoto, Ph.D. (2011, Université Paris Diderot), is Associate Professor of British History at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3. She has published on eighteenth-century drawing manuals, sales catalogues and art markets. Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Early Modern European History at King’s College London. She tweets at @timetravelallie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Americans today are often skeptical of scientific authority. Many conservatives dismiss climate change and Darwinism as liberal fictions, arguing that "tenured radicals" have coopted the sciences and other disciplines. Some progressives, especially in the universities, worry that science's celebration of objectivity and neutrality masks its attachment to Eurocentric and patriarchal values. As we grapple with the implications of climate change and revolutions in fields from biotechnology to robotics to computing, it is crucial to understand how scientific authority functions--and where it has run up against political and cultural barriers. Science Under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America (Harvard UP, 2020) reconstructs a century of battles over the cultural implications of science in the United States. Andrew Jewett reveals a persistent current of criticism which maintains that scientists have injected faulty social philosophies into the nation's bloodstream under the cover of neutrality. This charge of corruption has taken many forms and appeared among critics with a wide range of social, political, and theological views, but common to all is the argument that an ideologically compromised science has produced an array of social ills. Jewett shows that this suspicion of science has been a major force in American politics and culture by tracking its development, varied expressions, and potent consequences since the 1920s. Looking at today's battles over science, Jewett argues that citizens and leaders must steer a course between, on the one hand, the naïve image of science as a pristine, value-neutral form of knowledge, and, on the other, the assumption that scientists' claims are merely ideologies masquerading as truths. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When is sorrow sickness? That is the question that this book asks, exploring how our understandings of sadness, melancholy, depression, mania and anxiety have changed over time, and how societies have tried to treat something which lies on the border between the natural and the pathological. Jonathan Sadowsky's book The Empire of Depression: A New History (Polity, 2020) explores the various medical treatments for depression, classed as a modern illness with definite (but changing) symptoms from the 20th century onwards, in relation to a longer history of treatments for ‘melancholia’ and related states considered either as biological or social sicknesses or as a natural part of some people’s constitution. He also compares the western history of medicalising depression with the experiences of both sadness and clinical depression in non-western cultures, such as Nigeria and Japan. He asks, what have we lost as a consequence of the hegemony of the western clinical model, and how can we reclaim the patient experience in the face of sometimes hostile doctors and pharmaceutical companies? The book is poetic but well-researched, written by a leading medical historian, and distinguished from the crowd of books about depression through its global focus, and its historical rigour. C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Between 1927 and 1979, more than 8,000 people were involuntarily sterilized in five hospitals across the state of Virginia. From this plain and terrible fact springs Elizabeth Catte's Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia (Belt, 2021), a sweeping, unsparing history of eugenics in Virginia, and by extension the United States. Virginia's twentieth-century eugenics program was not the misguided initiative of well-meaning men of the day, writes Catte, with clarity and ferocity. It was a manifestation of white supremacy. It was a form of employment insurance. It was a means of controlling "troublesome" women and a philosophy that helped remove poor people from valuable land. It was cruel and it was wrong, and yet today sites where it was practiced like Western State Hospital, in Staunton, VA, are rehabilitated as luxury housing, their histories hushed up in the service of capital. As was amply evidenced by her acclaimed 2018 book What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, Catte has no room for excuses; no patience for equivocation. What does it mean for modern America, she asks here, that such buildings are given the second chance that 8,000 citizens never got? And what possible interventions can be made now, repair their damage? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Though the current political climate might lead one to suspect that religion and medicine make for uncomfortable bedfellows, the two institutions have a long history of alliance. From religious healers and religious hospitals to religiously informed bioethics and research studies on the impact of religious and spiritual beliefs on physical and mental well-being, religion and medicine have encountered one another from antiquity through the present day. In Religion and Medicine: A History of the Encounter Between Humanity’s Two Greatest Institutions (Oxford University Press, 2020), Dr. Jeff Levin outlines this longstanding history and the multifaceted interconnections between these two institutions. The first book to cover the full breadth of this subject, it documents religion-medicine alliances across religious traditions, throughout the world, and over the course of history. Levin summarizes a wide range of material in the most comprehensive introduction to this emerging field of scholarship to date. Jeff Levin holds a distinguished chair at Baylor University, where he is university professor of epidemiology and population health, professor of medical humanities, and director of the program on religion and population health at the Institute for the Studies of Religion. Lindsey Jackson is a PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Fedman's Seeds of Control: Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea (University of Washington Press, 2020) is hard to categorize. In a good way. Put simply, it is a broad but sharp look at the history of Japanese forest management in the Korean peninsula, 1910-1945. In this sense, Fedman’s book is an environmental history, to be sure, but also a material history of empire, science, and industry. It is a history of Japan and Korea, but also of transnational networks of knowledge and power. In other words, Seeds of Control is positioned at the intersection of environmental, imperial, and material histories, but it also contributes to studies in the history of science and other fields. Fedman problematizes the ideologies and practices of forest conservation and regeneration (“greenification”) within the asymmetric politics of colonial rule. Part 1 sets the stage with an overview of the institutional transformations of Japanese forestry across the Tokugawa-Meiji divide and the ways that Japanese “stories about the land… were mobilized in service of settler colonialism.” Part 2 begins with the reform of land rights under imperial rule. Fedman then delineates the histories of the Forest Experiment Stations, the timber industry (especially in the Yalu River basin), and the state-led project of civic forestry and the place of Forest Owners Associations. Finally, Part 3 looks at wartime (1937-1945), starting with the uses of “forest-love thought” as an “ideological lubricant” for mobilization and finally the spectacular denuding and exploitation of the Korean peninsula’s forests in support. Because of its transdisciplinarity, this book will appeal to a wide range of academic audiences. Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese and East Asian history in the Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Séances, clairvoyance, and telepathy captivated public imagination in the United States from the 1850s well into the twentieth century. Though skeptics dismissed these experiences as delusions, a new kind of investigator emerged to seek the science behind such phenomena. With new technologies like the telegraph collapsing the boundaries of time and space, an explanation seemed within reach. As Americans took up psychical experiments in their homes, the boundaries of the mind began to waver. Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science (Stanford UP, 2020) brings these experiments back to life while modeling a new approach to the history of psychology and the mind sciences. Drawing on previously untapped archives of participant-reported data, Alicia Puglionesi recounts how an eclectic group of investigators tried to capture the most elusive dimensions of human consciousness. A vast though flawed experiment in democratic science, psychical research gave participants valuable tools with which to study their experiences on their own terms. Academic psychology would ultimately disown this effort as both a scientific failure and a remnant of magical thinking, but its challenge to the limits of science, the mind, and the soul still reverberates today. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode we speak to Anne Lawrence-Mathers, Professor of History at the University of Reading about her new book Medieval Meteorology: Forecasting the Weather from Aristotle to the Almanac, out this year, 2020, with Cambridge University Press. The practice of weather forecasting underwent a crucial transformation in the Middle Ages. Exploring how scientifically-based meteorology spread and flourished from c.700-c.1600, this study reveals the dramatic changes in forecasting and how the new science of 'astro-meteorology' developed. Both narrower and more practical in its approach than earlier forms of meteorology, this new science claimed to deliver weather forecasts for months and even years ahead, on the premise that weather is caused by the atmospheric effects of the planets and stars, and mediated by local and seasonal climatic conditions. Anne Lawrence-Mathers explores how these forecasts were made and explains the growing practice of recording actual weather. These records were used to support forecasting practices, and their popularity grew from the fourteenth century onwards. Essential reading for anyone interested in medieval science, Medieval Meteorology demonstrates that the roots of scientific forecasting are much deeper than is usually recognized. Professor Lawrence-Mathers is the author of The True History of Merlin the Magician and Magic and Medieval Society,(along with Carolina Escobar-Vargas) as well as a host of articles and reviews about Medieval magic and religion. With this book the author continues her examination of spiritual practice – licit and illicit, clerical and lay – as it was culturally understood in the medieval era. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We so often take our senses as natural, but perhaps we should understand them as historically situated. Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race and the Aesthetics of Feeling (Duke University Press, 2020) allows us to reconsider the history of psychophysics and psychology through the lens of sensory studies and to rethinking science in the context of racial capitalism. Breathing new life into nineteenth century psychophysics, Erica Fretwell presents a history of how science, technology, and literature came together to both reinforce and challenge racial boundaries.  While each central chapter of Sensory Experiments deals with the recognized five senses, Fretwell also writes short intervals, or what she calls intervals, on the synthesis of particular senses (for instance, color and sound or mouthfeel). The synthesia assumed in these intervals challenge the hierarchy of senses often assumed by scientists during this time period. Through examining these scientific models of sense and sensitivity, Fretwell provides the reader with the nineteenth and early twentieth century evolutionary frameworks of Lamarckism and Darwinism, alongside Galton’s eugenics program. Fretwell contrasts these theories with psychophysics, including the spiritually motivated psychophysicist, Gustav Fechner, as well as many media and literature that focuses on sensitivity. Spirit photography provides one such example, a visual medium intended to provide some healing to family members who lost loved ones during the American Civil War. Through these images sight is transformed into a sense of loss; this was particularly the case for white bodies, which were more likely to have their pictures taken and more likely to be seen as “particularly capable of feeling loss.” To help us understand the racial politics of sound, Fretwell not only turns to the nascent field of psychoacoustics led by Hermann Helmholtz, but also the utopian fiction stories of Pauline Hopkins and Edward Bellamy. Each of these writers thought that differences in tonal sensitivity renders difference as racialized, and thus promoted segregated forms of social harmony from the most sensitive, civilized ear to the least sensitive, “primitive” ear. Meanwhile, inventions in chemistry and manufacturing of perfume performed functions of designating socially appropriate odors, which often segregated individuals by race and gender, while at other times challenging such segregation. In her taste chapter, Fretwell positions gastronomy and culinary science as ostensibly racial uplift projects. This can be further seen in Fretwell’s discussion of the racial framing of sweetness and black cake (the latter of which is taken up in the work of Emily Dickinson). In her penultimate chapter, Fretwell explores the relationality of touch through some of Helen Keller’s biography. While figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois thought that Keller could be an example of going beyond the sight of racial differences, as Fretwell points out, Keller, a deaf-blind woman, was actually attentive to the sensation of racial difference. In the Coda, Fretwell implores humanities and social science scholars to think about the historical dimensions of our sensory experiences. Overall, Sensory Experiments delivers a much needed history of senses that can provide important context for the racial politics of today.  C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. CJ’s research interests include the history of the human sciences, the influence of the behavioral sciences on medical practice and health policy, and digital wellness culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The figure of Sigmund Freud has captivated the Western imagination like few others. One hundred and twenty-five years after the publication of Studies on Hysteria, the good doctor from Vienna continues to stir controversy in institutions, academic circles, and nuclear households across the world.  Perhaps Freud’s sharpest and most adamant critic, Frederick Crews has been debating Freud’s legacy for over thirty years. His latest work, Freud: The Making of an Illusion (Picador, 2018) challenges us with an extensive psychological profile of the legend here revealed as scam artist. What some analysts might argue to be a 750 page character assassination, Crews maintains is simply a recitation of facts which leaves readers to draw their own conclusions. One might wonder if the story of facts that is conveyed is not itself a counter myth. Was Freud a megalomaniacal, greedy, cocaine-addled opportunist and psychoanalysis a pseudoscience that has reigned tyrannically over twentieth century thought? Making use of Freud’s extensive letters to Martha Bernays, Crews paints a “damning portrait” (Esquire) of a money hungry, adulterous, and uncaring man.  How can this portrait be reconciled with the radically meaningful and deeply transformative process many of us know psychoanalysis to be? Is the tyranny of rationality preferable to the tyranny of myth? Does the unmaking of the myth of the man undo the gift of his work? In this interview Crews responds to questions of what it means to have an empirical attitude, how we should “test” the process of healing, what’s so tempting about Freud, and what should become of psychoanalysis today. Meticulously researched, the Crews of the Freud wars is back again, and he’s going in for the kill shot. Cassandra B. Seltman is a writer, psychoanalyst, and researcher in NYC. [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Sharon Strocchia, Professor of History at Emory University. She is the author of Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), and the book we are here to talk about today, Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy, a 2019 Harvard University Press release. In this book, Professor Strocchia continues the work of her career: recentering the discourse to include the formative contributions of women in the Italian Renaissance. Through a discussion of Medici women, convent pharmacists, and hospital nurses, Strocchia adeptly argues that women played a leading role in the development of Renaissance medicine. Jana Byars is the academic director of SIT Amsterdam’s study abroad program, Gender and Sexuality in an International Perspective. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Science may be known for banishing the demons of superstition from the modern world. Yet just as the demon-haunted world was being exorcized by the enlightening power of reason, a new kind of demon mischievously materialized in the scientific imagination itself. Scientists began to employ hypothetical beings to perform certain roles in thought experiments—experiments that can only be done in the imagination—and these impish assistants helped scientists achieve major breakthroughs that pushed forward the frontiers of science and technology. Spanning four centuries of discovery—from René Descartes, whose demon could hijack sensorial reality, to James Clerk Maxwell, whose molecular-sized demon deftly broke the second law of thermodynamics, to Darwin, Einstein, Feynman, and beyond—Jimena Canales tells a shadow history of science and the demons that bedevil it.  In Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science (Princeton UP, 2020), she reveals how the greatest scientific thinkers used demons to explore problems, test the limits of what is possible, and better understand nature. Their imaginary familiars helped unlock the secrets of entropy, heredity, relativity, quantum mechanics, and other scientific wonders—and continue to inspire breakthroughs in the realms of computer science, artificial intelligence, and economics today. The world may no longer be haunted as it once was, but the demons of the scientific imagination are alive and well, continuing to play a vital role in scientists’ efforts to explore the unknown and make the impossible real. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1618, on the eve of the Thirty Years’ War, the German alchemist and physician Michael Maier published Atalanta fugiens, an intriguing and complex musical alchemical emblem book designed to engage the ear, eye, and intellect. The book unfolds as a series of fifty emblems, each of which contains an accompanying "fugue" music scored for three voices. Historians of alchemy have long understood this virtuoso work as an ambitious demonstration of the art’s literary potential and of the possibilities of the early modern printed book. Atalanta fugiens lends itself unusually well to today’s digital tools. Re-rendering Maier’s multimedia alchemical project as an enhanced online publication, Furnace and Fugue allows contemporary readers to hear, see, manipulate, and investigate Atalanta fugiens in ways that Maier perhaps imagined but that were impossible to fully realize before now. An interactive, layered digital edition provides accessibility and flexibility, presenting all the elements of the original book along with significant enhancements that allow for deep engagement by specialists and nonspecialists alike. Three short introductory essays invite readers to get acquainted with early modern alchemy, and Michael Maier. Eight extended interpretive essays explore Atalanta fugiens and its place in the history of music, science, print, and visual culture in early modern Europe. These interdisciplinary essays also include interactive features that clarify and/or advance the authors’ arguments while positioning Furnace and Fugue as an original, uniquely engaging contribution to our understanding of early modern culture. Drs. Bilak and Nummedal are the editors of this innovative digital edition of a seventeenth-century alchemical text that combines text, image, and music. Furnace & Fugue was developed by Brown University’s Mellon-supported Digital Publications Initiative, and published by the University of Virginia Press (2020) as an open-access edition. Supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Office of the Vice President for Research and the Social Science Research Institute at Brown University. Dr. Bilak is an academic and a goldsmith. She is the Creative Director of 12 Keys Consultancy & Design, LLC, and an Independent Scholar. She is an historian of early modern science Donna's research extends to the cross-cultural examination of jewellery, artisanal technologies, and meaning-making with materials. Dr. Nummedal is Professor of History and of Italian Studies at Brown University. She is the author of Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2007), Anna Zieglerin and the Lion’s Blood: Alchemy and End Times in Reformation Germany (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). With Janice Neri and John V. Calhoun, she published John Abbot and William Swainson: Art, Science, and Commerce in Nineteenth-Century Natural History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the mid-1870s, the experimental therapy of lamb blood transfusion spread like an epidemic across Europe and the USA. Doctors tried it as a cure for tuberculosis, pellagra and anemia; proposed it as a means to reanimate seemingly dead soldiers on the battlefield. It was a contested therapy because it meant crossing boundaries and challenging taboos. Was the transfusion of lamb blood into desperately sick humans really defensible? Boel Berner, Strange Blood: The Rise and Fall of Lamb Blood Transfusion in 19th Century Medicine and Beyond (Transcript Verlag, 2020) takes the reader on a journey into hospital wards and lunatic asylums, physiological laboratories and 19th century wars. It presents a fascinating story of medical knowledge, ambitions and concerns – a story that provides lessons for current debates on the morality of medical experimentation and care. Boel Berner is a sociologist, historian, and professor emerita at Linköping University in Sweden. In her research she investigates the character and power of expertise, historically and today. She has studied education and work, the gendered nature of technical knowledge, household modernization, and issues of risk. Her current work is oriented towards the history of medicine. It focuses, besides questions of blood donation and transfusion, on the politics of blood group analysis in the interwar years. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cancer exists in nearly every animal and has afflicted humans as long as our species has walked the earth. In Rebel Cell: Cancer, Evolution, and the New Science of Life's Oldest Betrayal (Benbella Books, 2020), Kat Arney reveals the secrets of our most formidable medical enemy, most notably the fact that it isn't so much a foreign invader as a double agent: cancer is hardwired into the fundamental processes of life. New evidence shows that this disease is the result of the same evolutionary changes that allowed us to thrive. Evolution helped us outsmart our environment, and it helps cancer outsmart its environment as well—alas, that environment is us. Rebel Cell is a story about life and death, hope and hubris, nature and nurture. It's about a new way of thinking about what this disease really is and the role it plays in human life. Above all, it's a story about where cancer came from, where it's going, and how we can stop it. Matthew Jordan is a professor at McMaster University, where he teaches courses on AI and the history of science. You can follow him on Twitter @mattyj612 or his website matthewleejordan.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America (University of Florida Press 2020), a collection edited by María del Pilar Blanco and Joanna Page is a wonderful and imaginative contribution to the fields of history of science, science and technology studies, and cultural studies. This volume assembles a broad and varied collection of chapters that span from the colonial period to the twenty first century, and explore diverse themes in varied Latin American regions: utopianism; science and the modern nation; Latin America as a site of knowledge production; the convergence between science and arts; critiques to modernity; among others. In this exciting conversation Blanco and Page tell us about the collaborative process that led to this book, the many topics and time periods they covered, and the specific contributions of their own chapters. Listeners will find in this book an exciting new addition to the literature, one that is particularly important today because, as the authors remind us, political actors use ‘science’ as a concept in varied and contradictory ways. This makes evident one of the most important claims of this book: the scientific and the political are always entangled. As the collection demonstrates, Latin America has been a site where this relationship has been explored, exposed and analyzed many times over. Lisette Varón-Carvajal is a PhD Candidate at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. You can tweet her and suggest books at @LisetteVaron Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” With this provocative and apparently paradoxical claim, Steven Shapin begins The Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2018), his bold, vibrant exploration of the origins of the modern scientific worldview, now updated with a new bibliographic essay featuring the latest scholarship. Steven Shapin is the Franklin L. Ford Research Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. His books include Leviathan and the Air-Pump (with Simon Schaffer), A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England, and The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation. Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Calculus Reordered: A History of the Big Ideas (Princeton UP, 2019) takes readers on a remarkable journey through hundreds of years to tell the story of how calculus evolved into the subject we know today. David Bressoud explains why calculus is credited to seventeenth-century figures Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, and how its current structure is based on developments that arose in the nineteenth century. Bressoud argues that a pedagogy informed by the historical development of calculus represents a sounder way for students to learn this fascinating area of mathematics. Delving into calculus’s birth in the Hellenistic Eastern Mediterranean—particularly in Syracuse, Sicily and Alexandria, Egypt—as well as India and the Islamic Middle East, Bressoud considers how calculus developed in response to essential questions emerging from engineering and astronomy. He looks at how Newton and Leibniz built their work on a flurry of activity that occurred throughout Europe, and how Italian philosophers such as Galileo Galilei played a particularly important role. In describing calculus’s evolution, Bressoud reveals problems with the standard ordering of its curriculum: limits, differentiation, integration, and series. He contends that the historical order—integration as accumulation, then differentiation as ratios of change, series as sequences of partial sums, and finally limits as they arise from the algebra of inequalities—makes more sense in the classroom environment. Exploring the motivations behind calculus’s discovery, Calculus Reordered highlights how this essential tool of mathematics came to be. David M. Bressoud is DeWitt Wallace Professor of Mathematics at Macalester College and Director of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences. His many books include Second Year Calculus and A Radical Approach to Lebesgue’s Theory of Integration. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The nostalgic mist surrounding farms can make it hard to write their history, encrusting them with stereotypical rural virtues and unrealistically separating them from markets, capitalism, and urban influences. The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North (University Of Chicago Press) aims to remake this staid vision. Emily Pawley examines a place and period of enormous agricultural vitality—antebellum New York State—and follows thousands of “improving agriculturists,” part of the largest, most diverse, and most active scientific community in nineteenth-century America. Pawley shows that these improvers practiced a kind of science hard for contemporary readers to recognize, in which profit was not only a goal but also the underlying purpose of the natural world. Far from producing a more rational vision of nature, northern farmers practiced a form of science where conflicting visions of the future landscape appeared and evaporated in quick succession. Drawing from environmental history, U.S. history, and the history of science, and extensively mining a wealth of antebellum agricultural publications, The Nature of the Future uncovers the rich loam hiding beneath ostensibly infertile scholarly terrain, revealing a surprising area of agricultural experimentation that transformed American landscapes and American ideas of expertise, success, and exploitation. New Books Network listeners can purchase The Nature of the Future for 25% off using the coupon code PAWLEY here. Emily Pawley is Associate Professor of History at Dickinson College. Twitter. Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history. He lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re hearing an awful lot about the fraught relationship between science and media. In his book, News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy, 1860-1910 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), historian of science Joshua Nall shows us that a blurry boundary between science and journalism was a key feature—not a bug—of the emergence of modern astronomy. Focusing on objects and media, such as newspapers, encyclopedias, cigarette cards, and globes, Nall offers a history of how astronomers’ cultivation of a mass public shaped their discipline as it managed controversies over the possibility of canals on Mars, and even interplanetary communication. This book is strongly recommended for historians of science and communication, as well as those with an eye for material culture. Joshua Nall is curator of modern sciences at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He is writing a dissertation on how people used statistics to make claims of discrimination in 1970s America, and how the relationship between rights and num- bers became a flashpoint in political struggles over bureaucracy, race, and law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mark Anderson’s From Boas to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism and American Anthropology (Stanford University Press) is at once a story about US anthropology and US liberalism from the 1930s to the 1960s. By interrogating the Boasian intervention into the idea of biological race, Anderson shows how, despite their progressive and anti-racist intentions, Boas and ‘the Boasians’ naturalised the idea of the United States as a white nation and helped to entrench problematic discourses, such as “colour-blindness”. Alongside tracing the history of Boasian thought on race, highlighting the paradoxes and strange logics in Boasian anti-racism, Anderson identifies contemporaries who undertook more rigorous examinations of race, who offered more critical anti-racist analytics, but were sidelined in the history of US anthropology. From Boas to Black Power doesn’t attempt to deny that the Boasians offered a trenchant critique of the biological conception of race, but shows that their commitment to liberalism undermined a true reckoning with how race shapes the United States. Mark D. Anderson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, and also wrote Black and Indigenous: Garifuna Activism and Consumer Culture in Honduras (University of Minnesota Press). Lachlan Summers is a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, USA, where he researches earthquake politics in Mexico City. He and his friends were permanently banned from teaching at UCSC for participating in the wildcat strike of 2019-2020. He is a contributing editor for Cultural Anthropology and can be found on Twitter @backup_sandwich. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Carving a Niche: The Medical Profession in Mexico 1800-1870 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018), Luz María Hernández Sáenz follows the trajectory of physicians in their quest for the professionalization of medicine in Mexico. In the nineteenth century, medical practitioners sought to earn scientific and professional recognition both at home an internationally, and in doing so, they created institutions that shaped their profession, and sought to establish a monopoly in the realm of public health. Hernández Sáenz places this story in an international context and demonstrates the importance of the French model in the establishment of a modern medical profession in Mexico. Significantly, we see how medical institutions changed as Mexico transitioned from a colonial society to a liberal, independent republic. As we hear by the end of the interview, Mexican medical practitioners were eventually successful in earning professional status, and in monopolizing medical knowledge, however, they did not oust their rivals, nor they managed to turn medicine into a priority for local and national governments. This is particularly important in the context of the current global pandemic for as Hernández Sáenz tells us, many of the problems that preoccupied physicians and government officials in the nineteenth century, still accompany us today. Chief among them is the subordination of matters of public health to economic interests, an important consideration for listeners interested in thinking how the past informs our present. Luz María Hernández Sáenz is associate professor of history at the University of Western Ontario. Lisette Varón-Carvajal is a PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. You can tweet her and suggest books at @LisetteVaron Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Kaiser is a truly unique scholar: he is simultaneously a physics researcher and a historian of science whose writing beautifully melds the past and future of science. As a historian, he studies mostly 20th-century physics, and in particular the history of quantum mechanics, Feynman diagrams, physics in the counterculture era, and much more. As a physicist, he studies particle physics and theories of cosmology, focused mostly on the early expansion of the universe. In this New Books Network podcast, I speak to David Kaiser about his new book, Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World (University of Chicago Press, 2020). It’s a collection of essays, many of them adapted from magazine and newspaper articles he’s penned over the years. The book paints intimate portraits of some incredible luminaries—Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Paul Dirac, among many others—explains how physics has changed as a discipline in the last century, and demonstrates how science is inseparable from its social context. David Kaiser is an incredible ambassador for physics and its history, and it was a delight to speak with him. David Kaiser is the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Matthew Jordan is an instructor at McMaster University, where he teaches courses on AI and the history of science. You can follow him on Twitter @mattyj612 or his website matthewleejordan.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Of the many medical specializations to transform themselves during the rise of National Socialism, anatomy has received relatively little attention from historians. While politics and racial laws drove many anatomists from the profession, most who remained joined the Nazi party, and some helped to develop the scientific basis for its racialist dogma. As Sabine Hildebrandt reveals in The Anatomy of Murder: Ethical Transgressions and Anatomical Science during the Third Reich (Berghahn, 2017), however, their complicity with the Nazi state went beyond the merely ideological. They progressed through gradual stages of ethical transgression, turning increasingly to victims of the regime for body procurement, as the traditional model of working with bodies of the deceased gave way, in some cases, to a new paradigm of experimentation with the “future dead.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Historians of Latin America have long appreciated the central role of mining and metallurgy in the region. The Spanish Empire in particular was created for and founded upon the mining and coining of silver ore from its colonies. Our knowledge about this vital industry, however, remains invariably tethered to the elite sources and perspectives that were preserved in the written record. In Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World (UNC Press 2020), Allison Bigelow provides an important historiographical contribution by demonstrating how we can revisit these sources to trace the transmission of metallurgical knowledge from the colonized indigenous laborers who worked the ore to the metropolitan authors who codified practices and knowledge. Rather than European science diffusing to colonial outposts, Bigelow’s studies of gold, silver, copper, and iron illustrate that the technologies that sustained Iberian imperialism were amalgamations like the ores themselves. From prospecting to refining, the making of imperial wealth required learning from indigenous ways of knowing and working the earth and its resources. Moreover, Mining Language goes beyond finding hybridity in the archive by teasing out how Europeans systematically (and sometimes not so systematically) erased the indigenous roots of knowledge and practices. Bigelow shows how as information traveled from American soils to European academies through translations and retranslations, identities became reified, fantasies were confirmed, meanings were lost and occasionally pure nonsense got into the mix. Overall, Mining Language demonstrates the possibilities opened when we reconsider the history of technology to no longer center eye-popping inventions but instead the more quotidian practices that sustain life, create wealth, and enforce power. Seen thusly, the history of technology, power, and imperialism is not a story of implementation and adaptation, but rather one of syncretism and erasure. Scholars and readers interested in the social politics of knowledge production will find Mining Language a compelling and thought-provoking work that provides essential historical background to related issues in the 21st century. Allison Bigelow is the Tom Scully Discovery Chair Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia. Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. More at http://empiresprogeny.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

He Bian’s new book Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Culture in Early Modern China (Princeton University Press, 2020) is a beautiful cultural history of pharmacy in early modern China. This trans-dynastic book looks at how Chinese approaches to knowledge changed during the Ming and Qing as state-commissioned pharmacopeias dwindled, amateur investigations into the knowledge of things soared, and, ultimately, as natural history was de-medicalized, all while commercialization, monetization, long-distance trade, and empire flourished. This exceptionally rich and intimately text-based study introduces readers to a number of fascinating bencao (materia media), makes a compelling case for studying Chinese history through the lens of pharmacy, and demonstrates that Chinese pharmacy itself has a rich and vibrant history—all with stunning ease. This is both an essential and a joyful read for China historians, while still accessible for non-specialists interested in reading about the early modern world, medicine, the history of knowledge, and stories of strange drugs and the even stranger men who dispensed them. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard University. She is interested in book history, early modern translation, and anything involving a kesike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Analyzing a wide variety of late-nineteenth-century sources, Sex, Skulls, and Citizens: Gender and Racial Science in Argentina (1860-1910) (Vanderbilt University Press, 2020) argues that Argentine scientific projects of the era were not just racial encounters, but were also conditioned by sexual relationships in all their messy, physical reality. The writers studied here (an eclectic group of scientists, anthropologists, and novelists, including Estanislao Zeballos, Lucio and Eduarda Mansilla, Ramón Lista, and Florence Dixie reflect on Indigenous sexual practices, analyze the advisability and effects of interracial sex, and use the language of desire to narrate encounters with Indigenous peoples as they try to scientifically pinpoint Argentina's racial identity and future potential. Kerr's reach extends into history of science, literary studies, and history of anthropology, illuminating a scholarly time and place in which the lines betwixt were much blurrier, if they existed at all. Ashley Kerr is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Idaho. Candela Marini is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and Spanish at MSOE University. You can tweet her and suggest books at @MariniCandela Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The idea of a single scientific method, shared across specialties and teachable to ten-year-olds, is just over a hundred years old. For centuries prior, science had meant a kind of knowledge, made from facts gathered through direct observation or deduced from first principles. But during the nineteenth century, science came to mean something else: a way of thinking.  The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey (Harvard University Press, 2020) tells the story of how this approach took hold in laboratories, the field, and eventually classrooms, where science was once taught as a natural process.  Henry M. Cowles reveals the intertwined histories of evolution and experiment, from Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection to John Dewey’s vision for science education. Darwin portrayed nature as akin to a man of science, experimenting through evolution, while his followers turned his theory onto the mind itself. Psychologists reimagined the scientific method as a problem-solving adaptation, a basic feature of cognition that had helped humans prosper. This was how Dewey and other educators taught science at the turn of the twentieth century—but their organic account was not to last. Soon, the scientific method was reimagined as a means of controlling nature, not a product of it. By shedding its roots in evolutionary theory, the scientific method came to seem far less natural, but far more powerful.  This book reveals the origin of a fundamental modern concept. Once seen as a natural adaptation, the method soon became a symbol of science’s power over nature, a power that, until recently, has rarely been called into question.  This interview was conducted by Lukas Rieppel, a historian of science and capitalism at Brown University. You can learn more about his research here, or find him on twitter here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a matter of basic metaphysics, we classify individuals in terms of their relations to other things – for example, a parent is a parent of someone, a larger object is larger than a smaller object. The nature of relativity – the question of how things relate to other things – is a topic that winds its way through the history of philosophy to the present day. In Ancient Relativity: Plato, Aristotle, Stoics and Skeptics (Oxford University Press, 2020), Matthew Duncombe considers ancient views of relativity from Plato, Aristotle, the Skeptics (particularly Simplicius), and the Stoics (particularly Sextus Empiricus). Duncombe, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Nottingham, defends the view that these thinkers shared a common basic position that he calls “constitutive relativity” – the idea that relativity is a matter of the relative being a certain way, rather than having a certain predicate true of it or having a certain feature. He argues that this reading is in the background in a number of arguments in these thinkers, including Parmenides’ main objection to Plato’s Theory of the Forms, and that it comes into its own as a key element of the Skeptics’ opposition to dogmatic belief. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Modern science uses the “randomized controlled trial”—whereby people are randomly allocated either the drug or a placebo—as a gold standard to find out whether a newly discovered drug works. In this podcast, Dr. Martin Edwards, a general practitioner and retired clinician affiliated to the University of London, discusses the British Medical Research Council’s exploitation of the term “controlled” to establish “controlled trials” as the gold standard for therapeutic evaluation. His discussion is an extension of his paper “Control and the Therapeutic Trial: Rhetoric and Experimentation in Britain, 1918-48,” which is published in Brill’s Clio Medica. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cars are among our most ubiquitous technologies; one could say that the cultural lore of the postwar United States is written in tire marks. But as much as they have been a vehicle for liberation and expression, historian Lee Vinsel argues that automobiles have been shaped by government regulation through and through. In Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), Vinsel combats the free market doctrine that auto regulation is fundamentally opposed to innovation. In part, he does this by historicizing the animus against regulation and the “innovation speak” that emerged in its wake. But the book itself makes a compelling argument for how the automobile has always been perceived by voluntary associations and governing bodies as a risk in need of taming. These shifting perceptions formed the basis for infrastructures that made the car into a more dependable, safer, and cleaner technology. Vinsel’s engaging narrative provides a model for studying technology and governance in the postwar U.S. in which policy instruments, built environments, and constructions of the human subject all share the road. Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He is writing a dissertation on how people used discrimination statistics to argue about rights in 1970s America, and what this means for histories of bureaucracy, quantification, law, politics, and race. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine. Evolutionary Theory and Religion in Modern Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2017), G. Clinton Godart (Associate Professor at Tohoku University’s Department of Global Japanese Studies) brings to life more than a century of ideas by examining how and why Japanese intellectuals, religious thinkers of different faiths, philosophers, biologists, journalists, activists, and ideologues engaged with evolutionary theory and religion. How did Japanese religiously think about evolution? What were their main concerns? Did they reject evolution on religious grounds, or - as was more often the case - how did they combine evolutionary theory with their religious beliefs? These are some of the questions the book tries to answer, in a tour de force that takes the reader from the Meiji Restoration to the contemporary period. And in doing so, the book makes a significant contribution to two of the most debated topics in the history of evolutionary theory: religion and the political legacy of evolution. Since the introduction of evolutionary theory in the nineteenth century, Japanese intellectuals - including Buddhist, Shinto, Confucian, and Christian thinkers - struggled to formulate a meaningful worldview after Darwin. They often had opposing agendas, and so the debate was quite heated and long-lived: as Godart argues in his book, it took a hundred years of appropriating, translating, thinking, and debating to reconsider the natural world and the relation between nature, science, and the sacred in light of evolutionary theory. Eventually, the drive to find goodness and the divine within nature and evolution shaped much of Japan’s modern intellectual history and changed Japanese understandings of nature, society, and the sacred. Roman Paşca is Assistant Professor at Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Letters, Department of Japanese Philosophy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book On Trial for Reason: Science, Religion, and Culture in the Galileo Affair (Oxford University Press, 2019), Maurice Finocchiaro shows that there were (and are) really two Galileo “affairs.” Galileo’s original trial and condemnation forms the first affair, the cultural history of controversies about the meaning of the original trial, forms the second. With scrupulous attention to evidence and the argumentation employed by various participants, Dr. Finocchiaro’s book is at once an accessible primer on a key event in the 16th- and 17th-century Scientific Revolution, and a thought provoking look at how the subsequent controversies resonate down to the present day. Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western, in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Amy Shira Teitel talks about Apollo and the community of people who are deeply attached to space history. Teitel is a spaceflight historian and the creator of the YouTube Channel, Vintage Space. She is also the author of Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight Before NASA (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Apollo Pilot: The Memory of Astronaut Don Eisele (University of Nebraska Press, 2017). NASA's history is a familiar story, culminating with the agency successfully landing men on the moon in 1969, but its prehistory is an important and rarely told tale. Breaking the Chains of Gravity looks at the evolving roots of America's space program--the scientific advances, the personalities, and the rivalries between the various arms of the United States military. America's space agency drew together some of the best minds the non-Soviet world had to offer. The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and the U.S. Air Force, meanwhile, brought rocket technology into the world of manned flight. The road to NASA and successful spaceflight was paved by fascinating stories and characters. At the end of World War II, Wernher von Braun escaped Nazi Germany and came to America where he began developing missiles for the United States Army. Ten years after he created the V-2 missile, his Jupiter rocket was the only one capable of launching a satellite into orbit. NACA test pilots like Neil Armstrong flew cutting-edge aircraft in the thin upper atmosphere while Air Force pilots rode to the fringes of space in balloons to see how humans handled radiation at high altitude. After the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, getting a man in space suddenly became a national imperative, leading President Dwight D. Eisenhower to pull various pieces together to create the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Alistair Sponsel talks about Darwin’s experiences on HMS Beagle and his early career as a naturalist. His close reading of Darwin’s journals and letters reveals insights about the man that would become known as the father of evolution. Sponsel is the author Darwin’s Evolving Identity: Adventure, Ambition, and the Sin of Speculation (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Why—against his mentor’s exhortations to publish—did Charles Darwin take twenty years to reveal his theory of evolution by natural selection? In Darwin’s Evolving Identity, Alistair Sponsel argues that Darwin adopted this cautious approach to atone for his provocative theorizing as a young author spurred by that mentor, the geologist Charles Lyell. While we might expect him to have been tormented by guilt about his private study of evolution, Darwin was most distressed by harsh reactions to his published work on coral reefs, volcanoes, and earthquakes, judging himself guilty of an authorial “sin of speculation.” It was the battle to defend himself against charges of overzealous theorizing as a geologist, rather than the prospect of broader public outcry over evolution, which made Darwin such a cautious author of Origin of Species. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Radio host Kevin Fox interviews Michael F. Robinson about the history of American Arctic exploration, the subject of his book, The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006). The disappearance of the Franklin Expedition in 1845 turned the Arctic into an object of fascination. By the end of the century, it had become an ‘Arctic Fever.’ Fox is the host of the radio program Geographical Imaginations for RadioFabrik in Salzburg, which is also available on iTunes as a podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel Kennefick talks about resistance to relativity theory in the early twentieth century and the huge challenges that faced British astronomers who wanted to test the theory during the solar eclipse of 1919. Kennefick is an associate professor of physics at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He’s the author of No Shadow of Doubt: The 1919 Eclipse that Confirmed Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (Princeton University Press, 2019). Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many centuries before the emergence of the scientific consensus on climate change, people began to imagine the existence of a global environment: a natural system capable of changing humans and of being changed by them. In After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), Lydia Barnett traces the history of this idea back to the early modern period, when the Scientific Revolution, the Reformations, the Little Ice Age, and the overseas expansion of European empire, religion, and commerce gave rise to new ideas about nature and humanity, and their intersecting histories. Recovering a forgotten episode in the history of environmental thought, Barnett brings to light the crucial role of religious faith and conflict in fostering new ways of thinking about the capacity of humans and nature to change each other on a planetary scale. In the hands of Protestant and Catholic writers from across Europe and its American colonies, the biblical story of Noah's Flood became a vehicle for imagining the power of sin to wreck the world, the dangers of overpopulation, the transformative effects of shifting landforms on the course of human history, and the impact of a changing climate on human bodies, health, and lives. Following Noah's Flood as a popular topic of debate through long-distance networks of knowledge from the late sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries, Barnett reveals how early modern earth and environmental sciences were shaped by gender, evangelism, empire, race, and nation. After the Flood illuminates the hidden role and complicated legacy of religion in the emergence of a global environmental consciousness. Interviewed by Lukas Rieppel. Visit my personal website here, or find me on twitter here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the late 1500s, the mines of Potosí –a mountain in southern Bolivia — produced 60% of the world’s silver. It was a place of great wealth and terrible suffering. It is also a place, Jorge Canizares-Esguerra argues, that challenges the very idea of the Scientific Revolution. Canizares-Esguerra discusses Potosí and how its peoples and technologies shaped 16th century science. He is the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. His work has been honored by awards from the American Historical Association and the History of Science Society. Canizares-Esguerra is the author of (among other books) of Nature, Empire, And Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford University Press, 2006). Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Science and technology have shaped not only economic empires and industrial landscapes, but also the identities, anxieties, and understandings of people living in modern times. The book I’m looking at today, Made Modern: Science and Technology in Canadian History (University of British Columbia Press, 2018) explores the complex interconnections between science, technology, and modernity in Canada. Edited by Edward Jones-Imhotep and Tina Adcock, it draws together leading scholars from a wide range of fields to enrich our understanding of history inside and outside Canada’s borders. Organized around three key themes – bodies, technologies, and environments – the book’s chapters examine how science and technology have allowed Canadians to imagine and reinvent themselves as modern. Focusing on topics as varied as colonial anthropology, scientific expeditions, electrotherapy, the occult sciences, industrial development, telephony, patents, neuroscience, aviation, space science, and infrastructure, the contributors explore Canadians’ modern engagements with science and technology and situate them within larger national and transnational contexts. The first major collection of its kind in thirty years, Made Modern explores the place of science and technology in shaping Canadians’ experience of themselves and their place in the modern world. Edward Jones-Imhotep is a cultural historian of science and technology and an associate professor of history at York University. He is the recipient of the Sidney Edelstein Prize in the history of technology for his book The Unreliable Nation: Hostile Nature and Technological Failure in the Cold War. Tina Adcock is a cultural and environmental historian of modern Canada and an assistant professor of history at Simon Fraser University. She is an associate of the L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jason Smith discusses the US Navy’s role in exploring and charting the ocean world. Smith is an assistant professor of history at Southern Connecticut State University. He’s the author of To Master the Boundless Sea: The US Navy, the Marine Environment, and the Cartography of Empire (UNC Press, 2018). As the United States grew into an empire in the late nineteenth century, notions like "sea power" derived not only from fleets, bases, and decisive battles but also from a scientific effort to understand and master the ocean environment. Beginning in the early nineteenth century and concluding in the first years of the twentieth, Jason W. Smith tells the story of the rise of the U.S. Navy and the emergence of American ocean empire through its struggle to control nature. In vividly told sketches of exploration, naval officers, war, and, most significantly, the ocean environment, Smith draws together insights from environmental, maritime, military, and naval history, and the history of science and cartography, placing the U.S. Navy's scientific efforts within a broader cultural context. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Standards are crucial to the way we live—just look around you. A no. 2 pencil, perhaps? That arrived in an 8x8.5x20 shipping container? Standards allow your computer and smart phone to connect seamlessly with others. While it is clear that standards shape the material world we live in, someone decided that they should be that way. In a word, standards have a social life of their own. In Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy look at the pervasive practice of private, voluntary standard setting as it grew out of a social movement of engineers. From the International Organization for Standards (ISO) to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Yates and Murphy provide an engaging narrative about the people and processes responsible for making the technologies we have today work with one another. Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He is writing a dissertation on how people used discrimination statistics to argue about rights in 1970s America, and what this means for histories of bureaucracy, quantification, law, politics, and race. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Throughout the Age of Exploration, European maritime communities bent on colonial and commercial expansion embraced the complex mechanics of celestial navigation. They developed schools, textbooks, and instruments to teach the new mathematical techniques to sailors. As these experts debated the value of theory and practice, memory and mathematics, they created hybrid models that would have a lasting impact on applied science. In Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill, 1550-1800 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), a richly illustrated comparative study of this transformative period, Margaret E. Schotte charts more than two hundred years of navigational history as she investigates how mariners solved the challenges of navigating beyond sight of land. She begins by outlining the influential sixteenth-century Iberian model for training and certifying nautical practitioners. She takes us into a Dutch bookshop stocked with maritime manuals and a French trigonometry lesson devoted to the idea that "navigation is nothing more than a right triangle." The story culminates at the close of the eighteenth century with a young British naval officer who managed to keep his damaged vessel afloat for two long months, thanks largely to lessons he learned as a keen student. This is the first study to trace the importance, for the navigator's art, of the world of print. Schotte interrogates a wide variety of archival records from six countries, including hundreds of published textbooks and never-before-studied manuscripts crafted by practitioners themselves. Ultimately, Sailing School helps us to rethink the relationship among maritime history, the Scientific Revolution, and the rise of print culture during a period of unparalleled innovation and global expansion. Lukas Rieppel teaches at Brown University. You can find more about him here, or find him on twitter here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices