Whether through the anxiety of mutually assured destruction or the promise of decolonization throughout Asia and Africa, Cold War politics had a peculiar temporality. In Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Joanna Radin explores the conjuncture of time and temperature in Cold War “salvage biology” projects. Cryobiology, genetic epidemiology, and freezer anthropology constructed a dense and tangled global infrastructure of blood circulation. By following these circuits, Radin weaves a narrative about the Cold War human sciences that takes readers up to present ethical debates about the insufficiency of informed consent and the need to better involve communities whose vital materials have been taken for the sake of biomedical research. This book will be of interest to all historians of science, technology, and medicine, as well as to anthropologists and scholars working in Native American and Indigenous Studies. Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He works on computing, quantification, communication, and governance in modern America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Londa Schiebinger‘s new book Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford University Press, 2017) examines the contexts, programs, and ethics of medical experimentation in the British and French West Indies from the 1760s to the early 19th century. Physicians were enlisted into the plantation systems to ensure the greatest profitability of the enslaved workforces. European practices, however, were ill-equipped for the tropics, and so many looked towards the knowledge of enslaved populations for effective remedies. Schiebinger analyses the circuits and structures of this knowledge exchange within the sugar plantation complex and between these islands and Europe. She brilliantly illuminates how and why some practices were adopted and appropriated, why others were prohibited, and how the colonial crucible so often resulted in the loss of vibrant medical traditions and knowledge.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research During the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2013), Joy Rohde discusses the relationship between the social sciences, academia, and national security institutions. Through an examination of the use of military research during the Cold War, Dr. Rohde raises questions about the ethics of scholarship, the military industrial complex, and the role of expertise in the national security arena. This book is a thought provoking read on the implications of military-funded social science. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a 17th-century noblewoman who became the first duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish has often been viewed as a royalist and a conservative within the context of the social and political issues of her time. In Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science, and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Lisa Walters offers a very different interpretation of Cavendish’s thought, revealing the nuance and complexity of Cavendish’s thinking on a variety of subjects. As an aristocrat, Cavendish served as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Henrietta Maria and her family served the Royalist cause during the English Civil War in the 1640s. Yet as Walters demonstrates, Cavendish’s writings contain many radical ideas about women and gender relations, about the makeup of matter, and of political systems. Through an analysis of Cavendish’s writings that draws out commonalities between her fictional works and her nonfiction treatises, Walters provides a very different understanding of this under-appreciated contributor to Western thought. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beginning with a discussion about Black Lives Matter may seem like an unlikely place to start a book about nineteenth century science and culture. However, by contrasting Black lives with White feelings, Kyla Schuller sets up the central conflict of her book. The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Duke University Press, 2017) interrogates the role of sexual difference in the management of racialized populations, making this book a necessary read for understanding the history of such current social movements as Black Lives Matter and the trans* exclusionary “Pussy hat” feminism. From the very beginning of the book, our conceptions of nineteenth-century science are challenged. For much of the century, many US scientists championed Jean-Baptiste Lamarck over Charles Darwin as their most prominent influence. In their quest to refute determinist theories of heredity, the neo-Lamarckians of the American School of Evolution advocated for a self-directed version of evolution. These scientists argued that Anglo-Saxons have the most adaptable features and impressionable heredity. This impressionability was what made Whites more sentimental and civilized than other races, who were not as impressionable and seen as largely stuck in a prior stage of progressivist evolution, according to E.D. Cope and the American School of Evolution. Whites were also seen as having greater sexual dimorphism than other races, while women of color were not seen as achieving true womanhood. Kyla therefore finds the origin of binary sex enveloped in racialized difference. Beyond the subject of evolutionary science, this book introduces us to the Black uplift project of Frances Harper, the vagina politics of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell and Dr. Mary Walker, the biophilanthropy of Charles Loring Brace, and the assemblage theories of W.E.B. DuBois. The Biopolitics of Feeling is packed with interesting, and sometimes shocking, historical anecdotes, such as Walker’s sex advice book to men in 1878, E.D. Cope’s sometimes destructive and violent rivalry with O.C. Marsh, and the “orphan trains” that took two hundred thousand kids out West for educational and labor purposes. The breadth of this book shouldd be of interest to a number of scholars interested in the history of science, literature, and medicine. Meanwhile, Kyla’s engagement and challenge to New Materialist theories is likely to be canonical for future Feminist STS scholars. Chad J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests includes the history of the human sciences, the influence of the behavioral sciences on medical practice and health policy, and political activism around science and the arts. You can follow him on Twitter @chadjvalasek. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What won’t we try in our quest for perfect health, beauty, and the fountain of youth? Well, just imagine a time when doctors prescribed morphine for crying infants. When liquefied gold was touted as immortality in a glass. And when strychnine—yes, that strychnine, the one used in rat poison—was dosed like Viagra. Looking back with fascination, horror, and not a little dash of dark, knowing humor, Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything (Workman Publishing Company, 2017) recounts the lively, at times unbelievable, history of medical misfires and malpractices. Ranging from the merely weird to the outright dangerous, here are dozens of outlandish, morbidly hilarious “treatments”—conceived by doctors and scientists, by spiritualists and snake oil salesmen (yes, they literally tried to sell snake oil)—that were predicated on a range of cluelessness, trial and error, and straight-up scams. With vintage illustrations, photographs, and advertisements throughout, Lydia Kang and Nate Pedersen seamlessly combines macabre humor with science and storytelling to reveal an important and disturbing side of the ever-evolving field of medicine. Jeremy Corr is the co-host of the hit Fixing Healthcare podcast along with industry thought leader Dr. Robert Pearl. A University of Iowa history alumnus, Jeremy is curious and passionate about all things healthcare, which means he’s always up for a good discussion! Reach him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Professor Martha Few’s For All Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala (University of Arizona Press, 2015) describes the implementation of public health reforms in late eighteenth-century Guatemala and the diverse ways that indigenous communities engaged and resisted these programs. Contrary to expectations, colonists were often ahead of administrators in Spain in adopting new medical methods, such as inoculating patients against smallpox. But bringing these to rural communities, some with a significant degree of autonomy, required adaptation and compromise; and if resistance was stiff, medical officers reacted with the persecution of indigenous practices in ways that mirrored the church’s anti-idolatry purges. By bringing Guatemala and its native residents into the networks of Atlantic medicine in the eighteenth century, For All Humanity illuminates the plurality of medical cultures that interacted in the production of the Enlightenment. Martha Few is Professor of Latin American History and Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“What is needed now is not liberal reform or withdrawal, but a radical attack, a strategy of opposition. Scientific workers must develop ways to put their skills at the service of the people and against the oppressors.” (Zimmerman, et al. 1972). Following the 2014 conference, “Science for the People: The 1970s and Today,” Sigrid Schmalzer, Daniel Chard, and Alyssa Botelho, edited a volume of the Science for the People (SftP) movement, curating numerous documents from the group that are as relevant today as when they were published several decades ago. Science for the People: Documents from America’s Movement of Radical Scientists (University of Massachusetts Press, 2018) encapsulates the diverse themes, research, and actions of the movement, which included chapters across the US at one time. Emerging from the radical political culture of the 1960s, and predecessor group, Scientists for Social and Political Action, SftP challenged the value-neutrality of science and technology, and instead sought to democratize science by engaging with other political movements and conducting research with non-experts. While much scientific research continues to be funded by the state or by corporations, SftP provided grassroots scientific and technological assistance and education in a multitude of settings. Just to take a few examples from the volume, these efforts included research for social movements, providing electrical power for a Black Panther free medical clinic, promoting the farming technique of intercropping, as well as distributing resources, literature and education to countries such as Vietnam and Nicaragua. The direction of assistance between SftP and other groups was rarely one-sided, as SftP members absorbed knowledge from other movements and places, as documented in the China: Science Walks on Two Legs selection, wherein several SftP members visited China and learned about some of the traditional science and peasant research conducted in the nation. In addition, through working groups and publications, SftP critiqued racist and sexist science, reductionist biology, nuclear power, weapons research, commercial agriculture, US imperialism, and much more. As their many articles and actions show, SftP did more than just critique mainstream science, they attempted to provide alternatives. Finally, SftP had a formative and lasting effect on Science and Technology Studies through its various studies on the social embeddedness of science and its political uses. Since the 2014 conference, Science for the People has been revitalized through new efforts. Check out https://scienceforthepeople.org/ to see continued and original projects. Chad J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests includes the history of the human sciences, the influence of the behavioral sciences on medical practice and health policy, and political activism around science and the arts. Follow him on Twitter @chadjvalasek. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James Delbourgo‘s new book Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane (Allen Lane, 2017) tells the fascinatingly complex and controversial story of Hans Sloane, the man whose collection and last will laid the foundation for the British Museum, the first national, free, public museum. For Delbourgo, Sloane was for far too long an overlooked figure, who knitted together the interests of a rising empire through methods of botany, natural history and medicine. Overshadowed in part by his counterpart Isaac Newton, Sloane’s life synchronizes with the changes from seventeenth-century England to eighteenth-century Britain. His life and the time are deeply interwoven with slavery and a new world of commerce. It was thanks to this interconnected world and the many intermediaries that Sloane managed to accumulate so many weird and wonderful objects from different places. He collected, catalogued, and exhibited them according to his own belief system, which centered around binaries of enlightenment versus superstition and sober empiricism versus magic. More than anything, Delbourgo’s book reveals the complex lives and stories around Hans Sloane’s collection and the many different peoples, places and stories that are attached to the silent objects, even today. It raises important historical questions about ownership and authorship of public museums, collections and curatorial practices and makes them relevant for us today. Ricarda Brosch is a museum assistant (trainee) at the Asian Art Museum Berlin (Museum fur Asiatische Kunst Berlin Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz), which is due to reopen as part of the Humboldt Forum in 2019. Her research focuses on Ming and Qing Chinese art & material culture, transcultural interchanges, especially with Timurid and Safavid Iran, as well as provenance research & digital humanities. You can find out more about her work by following her on Twitter @RicardaBeatrix or getting in touch via [email protected].   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Polio was a scourge that terrified generations of people throughout the United States and the rest of the world until Jonas Salk’s vaccine provided the first effective defense against it. In Jonas Salk: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2015), Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs chronicles the medical researcher whose success in developing a successful polio vaccine in the 1950s made him an international celebrity. Born to immigrant parents, Salk studied hard to graduate for college and earn his medical degree. His interest in helping all of humanity led Salk to pass on a career as a clinician in favor of one as a researcher in the burgeoning field of virology. After work during World War II on the first successful influenza vaccine Salk moved to Pittsburgh, where he soon found himself involved in a coordinated effort to defeat the disease. Salk’s vaccine became the first to achieve this. Yet as Jacobs demonstrates, the fame Salk won for his achievement came at a price. Though lionized the world over he found himself engaged in a lifelong campaign to prove the superiority of his vaccine, while his efforts to develop vaccines against other diseases never achieved the same degree of success. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We tend to think of ourselves—our modern selves–as disenchanted. We have traded magic, myth, and spirits for science, reason, and logic. But this is false. Jason Josephson-Storm, in his exciting new book titled The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2017) challenges this classical story of modernity. Josephson-Storm, associate professor in and chair of the Department of Religion at Williams College, argues that modernity is riddled with magic, and that attempts to curtail it have often failed. Adding a twist to a well-known expression, he writes that we have never been disenchanted. Josephson-Storm investigates the human sciences—philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, and folklore studies, to name a few—which were critical to the creation and spread of the myth of a mythless society. But the human sciences were themselves also deeply entangled with magic. They often, Josephson-Storm reveals, emerged from occult origins, flirted with the paranormal, or even produced new enchantments. As can be surmised from this brief description, the audience of The Myth of Disenchantment will be a broad and eclectic one. The book will be of interest to scholars in religious studies, science and technology studies, and historians of philosophy, science, ideas, culture, and Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anthony Chaney teaches history and writing at the University of North Texas at Dallas. His book Runaway: Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of Ecological Consciousness (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) offers an examination of the intellectual life and ideas of Gregory Bateson that came to fruition in the midst of the social upheaval of the 1960s. Bateson trained in the natural sciences and anthropology, moved to the field of psychiatry and conceptualized the double bind theory of schizophrenia. Leading a research group of scientists and captivated by the possibilities the double bind theory offered in understanding the anxiety of the age, he sought to connect it with other intellectual currents such cybernetics, game theory, evolutionary and communication theory. Working across disciplines, he addressed the modern problem of the distinctions between fact/value, reason/emotion, nature/culture, producing an inescapable double bind for society. Plunging into the paradox of the human condition, he challenged the instrumental view of solving social problems, breaking new ground against binary thinking and in addressing the ecological crisis as a system in runaway. Without appealing to metaphysics, he articulated a holistic theory of mind as a new foundation for thinking about humanity and its relationship to the natural world. Chaney has provided a rich exploration of a fascinating thinker who set the foundations for the information age. This episode of New Books in American Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you are an enthusiast of The Cheese and the Worms (1976), The Great Cat Massacre (1984), or The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), then Michael Wintroub‘s The Voyage of Thought: Navigating Knowledge Across the Sixteenth-Century World (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is a must read. Simply put, this is a... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is science? A seemingly profound, yet totally ridiculous question to try and answer. Yet, when Oxford University Press reached out to the brilliant scholar of Victorian science, Iwan Rhys Morris, they were tapping the right man for the job on the shoulder. He designed, contributed, and edited The Oxford... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To remember Nathaniel Bowditch today primarily for his famous navigational textbook is to acknowledge only one of his many achievements. As Tamara Plakins Thornton demonstrates in her book Nathaniel Bowditch and the Power of Numbers: How a Nineteenth-Century Man of Business, Science, and the Sea Changed American Life (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), Bowditch’s legacy is one that endures in a surprising range of fields. The son of a luckless merchant captain, Bowditch grew up in the early years of the new republic. At an early age he was apprenticed at a young age to a ship’s chandler, which introduced him to the world of maritime commerce. His aptitude for mathematics led him to identify numerous errors in the standard navigational text he used while on commercial voyages, and his revisions established the book colloquially known by his name today. Yet this was only at the beginning of a long and prosperous career in business, as he moved from commerce to insurance and banking. As Thornton explains, Bowditch’s mathematically-honed passion for order and precision was employed to systematize traditionally irregular business practices in ways that are reflected in the modern workplace, while his use of trusts to preserve family fortunes ensured the perpetuation of an entire New England social class. Such was his success that Bowditch became one of the Brahmin elite of nineteenth-century Boston society, while his achievements in mathematics and astronomy helped to make him a national icon by the time of his death. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Traversing the archives of early African American literature, performance, and visual culture, Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (New York University Press, 2017), uncovers the dynamic experiments of a group of black writers, artists, and performers. The author chronicles a little-known story about race and science in America. While the history of scientific racism in the nineteenth century has been well-documented, there was also a counter-movement of African Americans who worked to refute its claims. Far from rejecting science, these figures were careful readers of antebellum science who linked diverse fields–from astronomy to physiology–to both on-the-ground activism and more speculative forms of knowledge creation. Routinely excluded from institutions of scientific learning and training, they transformed cultural spaces like the page, the stage, the parlor, and even the pulpit into laboratories of knowledge and experimentation. From the recovery of neglected figures like Robert Benjamin Lewis, Hosea Easton, and Sarah Mapps Douglass, to new accounts of Martin Delany, Henry Box Brown, and Frederick Douglass, Fugitive Science makes natural science central to how we understand the origins and development of African American literature and culture. Britt Rusert received her Ph.D. in English and certificate in Feminist Studies from Duke University. Her research and teaching focus on African American literature, American literatures to 1900, speculative fiction, the history of race and science, U.S. print cultures, and critical theory. She is currently working on a book-length research study of William J. Wilson’s “Afric-American Picture Gallery,” a text that imagines the first museum of black art in the United States. She is also editing W.E.B. Du Bois short genre fiction with scholar Adrienne Brown. Their edition of W.E.B. Du Bois’ fantasy story, “The Princess Steel,” was recently published in PMLA, the journal of Modern Language Association of America. Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture is her first book. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fueling his bohemian lifestyle and anti-authoritarian attitude with a steady diet of ice cream and whiskey, along with a healthy dose of insomnia, Warren Sturgis McCulloch is best known for his foundational contributions to cybernetics but led a career that spanned psychiatry, philosophy, neurophysiology, and engineering. Tara H. Abraham‘s new book Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life in Science (MIT Press, 2016) is the first scholarly biography of this towering figure of twentieth century American science. Abrahams careful tracing of McCulloch’s broad disciplinary traverses is grounded in explication of heady theories and mathematical models of the brain. The growing historical scholarship on cybernetics rests on a curious threshold: its subject matter, rife with outsized personalities and uncannily forward-looking ideas, is ever poised to remain more ineluctably fascinating than scholarly analysis can render. Rather than attempting to beat the cyberneticians at their own game–self-consciously or not becoming participant observers in the reflexive system described by “second-order” cybernetics–this rich portrait offers pointed and entertaining insight into the role of style, sociability, and mentorship in twentieth century scientific life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nowadays, it might seem perplexing for the founder of a seed company to express the intention to “shock Mother Nature,” or at least in bad taste. Yet, this was precisely the goal of agricultural innovators like David Burpee, of the Burpee Seed Company, who sought to use radiation and chemical mutagens to accelerate the generation of new plant varieties, a process otherwise requiring painstaking, slow, and resource-intensive artificial selection. Helen Anne Curry‘s Evolution Made to Order: Plant Breeding and Technological Innovation in Twentieth-Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2016) is a fascinating history of biotechnology that documents the interplay between genetic research and agricultural production; genetic engineering avant la lettre, one is tempted to say, although botanist A. F. Blakeslee, who figures prominently in the narrative, made a failed attempt to promote the designation “genetics engineer” to describe his work. Through the lens of three different technologies–x-rays, the chemical colchicine, and atomic radiation–Curry shows how chromosomes and genetic mutations became sites of speculation for industrial agriculture and of experimentation for amateur plant breeders. She deftly restores the experimental station, the marketplace, and the garden to their proper place as sites of knowledge production, showing that landscape and lab were perhaps never so separable as our modern conceit might make them appear. This is part one of a series of new work on twentieth-century biotechnology–look out for further interviews featuring some great new work published by the University of Chicago Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The back cover of J. C. McKeown‘s new book, A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities (Oxford University Press, 2017), is adorned not with review quotes from contemporary scholars, but rather the discordant voices of the medical writers he excerpts. Speaking of Galen, Photius of Constantinople notes that the author tends to overload his writings with irrelevancies and digressions. Aristotle offers a characteristic caution, urging no one can become a doctor by reading books. These statements intimate the overall style and aims of this entertaining book: to approach the culture of antiquity through medical practice and belief. Though McKeown deliberately goes after the uncanny in selecting his excerpts to translate, one gets an overall impression of medicines remarkable continuity. Class, gender, and race were battlegrounds of medical legitimacy as much as they are now, and contemporary suspicion of medical advances was potent as ever. McKeown opts for evocation rather than scholarly interpretation of the medical cultures of antiquity, making this book entertaining reading for anyone interested in medicine’s long history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tania Munz‘s new book is a dual biography: both of Austrian-born experimental physiologist Karl von Frisch, and of the honeybees he worked with as experimental, communicating creatures. The Dancing Bees: Karl von Frisch and the Discovery of the Honeybee Language (University of Chicago Press, 2016) alternates between chapters that take us into the work and life of a fascinating scientist amid the Nazi rise to power, and bee vignettes that chart the transformations of bees in the popular and scientific imagination over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Readers follow von Frisch from his early intimate connection with a small Brazilian parakeet that lived with the family while von Frisch was a boy, to his work on the sensory powers of fish and bees, to his work on bee communication and beyond. Munz introduces us not just to von Frisch’s texts, lectures, and experiments, but also to his work making films and his struggles to live and work under Nazi power. Munz’s book is both compellingly argued and a pleasure to read! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Apartheid in South Africa formally ended in 1994, but the issue of poverty and what to do about it remained as contentious as it had been a century earlier. In the new book, Poverty Knowledge in South Africa: A Social History of Human Science, 1855-2005 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Grace Davie shows that the poverty question was up for grabs even into the twenty-first century because of ongoing disagreements about how to measure poverty and to manage the racists assumptions that underwrote it. The book uses the idiom of co-production to show how scientists, activists and other knowledge-makers made and remade poverty in dynamic interaction with the people they sought to know. The book documents the thwarted efforts of scientists to accomplish their political goals as their expert knowledge was variously invoked, reinterpreted, and dismissed not only by white-supremacist governments, but also by social activists, black communities, and labor unions, which all used experts poverty knowledge for their own political ends. At issue was the question of what constituted credible evidence, and over more than a century debates continued to toggle between quantitative and qualitative forms of evidence, between statistics and stories. Through this analysis, Davie pushes back against the familiar claim that the technocratic state was on a steady march towards quantitative objectivity. Poverty Knowledge in South Africa is a serious, thorough book and it is indispensable for thinking through questions of social justice not only among historical actors but among scholars in the present day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Amit Prasad is widely admired for using Postcolonial Studies to explore questions about science, technology and medicine. In Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India (MIT, 2014), Prasad looks at the linked histories of MRI research and development in India, UK, the USA to show how the patterns of exclusions created by imperialism continue to shape the topography of high-tech medicine. Pushing back against diffusion of science narratives, Prasad shows how the current story of the West (read: USA) as the center of MRI research and development was far from inevitable. The story was retrospectively, collectively created and has had the effect of obscuring the importance of transnational networks, idiosyncratic federal laws, corporate investments, and everyday habits of imagination in the production of medical technology. Prasad himself resists simple dichotomies because, as he writes, “The issue here is not simply the elision of the history of science in the non-West or its entrapment in within Eurocentric temporarily, but the very categories that the history of science takes as its objects of inquiry (80).” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Raz Chen-Morris‘s new book traces a significant and surprising notion through the work of Johannes Kepler: in order to account for real physical motions, one has to investigate artificially produced shadows and reflections. Measuring Shadows: Kepler’s Optics of Invisibility (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016) beautifully places Kepler’s optics into conversation with the art and literature of the period. It looks carefully at the crucial ways that changing notions of visibility set Kepler’s optics up as the cornerstone to his radical Copernican astronomy as Kepler made three moves that helped him bridge the visual gap between the heavens and its observers: (1) He defined light as a mathematical body, (2) He showed how instruments of observation could be manipulated mathematically to achieve exact representation of distant and almost invisible heavenly occurrences, and (3) He helped develop a new language for scientific observation by reformulating the relationship of mathematics to phenomena. In the course of his elegant analysis of how and why this all played out, Chen-Morris also guides readers through the relationships between Kepler’s ideas, Shakespeare’s writings, Renaissance painting, and more. Its a fascinating book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Susan Cayleff’s Nature’s Path: A History of Naturopathic Healing in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016) offers a fascinating alternative to the development of allopathic orthodoxy in the twentieth-century United States. By following Naturopathy from its nineteenth-century origins in the popular health movement through debates in the 1970s, Cayleff sheds light on an enduring critique of the vision of medicine institutionalized by Progressive public health reformers. The holistic medicine proffered by naturopaths drew from a variety of sources and lacked a common theoretical basis; it required closer collaboration between practitioner and patient for gradual cures in the face of medical complexity, a scenario reminiscent of an increasing portion of today’s medical practice, as Robert Aronowitz points out in Risky Medicine. However, Cayleff shows not merely a transhistorical struggle of self-determination, but rather shifting cultural and political grounds on which such different ideological battles were waged and heterodox practices staged. Notably, she highlights how naturopathy empowered female practitioners to work in line with their politics, and gave them access to medical power precluded by the medical establishment. This book is a great read for historians of medicine, countercultural movements, and professionalization. This is the first of a pair of interviews on alternative medicine: for a rhetorical approach to how notions of evidence are invoked to demarcate between alternative and mainstream medical practice, look out for my forthcoming interview with Colleen Derkatch on her book, Bounding Biomedicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Meredith K. Ray’s new book contextualizes and translates a range of seventeenth-century letters, mostly between Margherita Sarrocchi (1560-1617) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), that collectively offer a fascinating window into the correspondence of two brilliant early modern writers and intellectuals. Margherita Sarrocchi’s Letters to Galileo: Astronomy, Astrology, and Poetics in Seventeenth-Century Italy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) traces the relationship between Sarrocchi, a Naples-born writer, famous for her salons and for writing an epic poem that emphasized the significance of women as knowers of the natural world, with Galileo. The letters feature three major themes: Sarrocchi consulting Galileo for writerly advice as she revised her epic poem, Sarrocchi’s efforts to defend Galileo’s discoveries to the scientific community in Italy, and Sarrocchi and Galileo’s shared interest in judicial astrology and natal charts or nativities. The slim volume will be a resource not just for readers and researchers but also for classroom discussion, where the letters could serve as great primary sources to feature in a number of course contexts. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and The Power of Seeing (Crown, 2017), Damion Searls presents the first biography of Hermann Rorschach and the history of the Rorschach Test. A story that is largely untold, Searls starts with the childhood of Rorschach and brings readers through his growth as a psychiatrist as he created an experiment to probe the mind using a set of ten inkblots. As a visual artist, Rorschach incorporated his ability to think about visuals and his belief that what is seen is more important than what we say. After his early death, Rorschach’s Test found its way to America being used by the military, to test job applicants, to evaluate defendants and parents in custody battles and people suffering from mental illness. In addition, it has been used throughout advertising and incorporated in Hollywood and popular culture. A tragic figure, and one of the most influential psychiatrists in the twentieth century, The Inkblots allows readers to better understand how Rorschach and his test impacted psychiatry and psychological testing. Searls’ work is eloquently written and detailed, pulling in unpublished letters, diaries and interviews with family, friends and colleagues. Searls’ well researched text presents insight into the ways that art and science have impacted modern psychology and popular culture. Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital–in people’s lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Matthew James Crawford’s new book is a fascinating history of an object that was central to the history of science, technology, and medicine in the early modern Spanish Atlantic world. The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630-1800 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) looks closely at the struggles of the Spanish Empire in the second half of the eighteenth century to control the cinchona tree and its bark, and traces the history of quina as a product of local, imperial, and commercial networks in [the] eighteenth-century Atlantic World. Science and empire were deeply intertwined in the Spanish Atlantic, and Crawford offers a window into the epistemic culture produced by Spanish colonial governance and resulting encounters across and within the Andean and Atlantic contexts. Part One of the book looks carefully at what it meant to know nature in the early modern Atlantic World. It traces the transformations of quina from a local Andean remedy into a botanical commodity and an imperial natural resource from the mid-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth centuries, showing how these transformations resulted from the bark’s integration into Andean, Atlantic, and imperial networks of circulation of people, texts, objects, and images. Part Two of the book explores several key conflicts in the late eighteenth century that emerged as the Spanish Crown tried to assert greater control over the tree and its bark. It’s a story that will be of interest to the histories of science, medicine, natural history, and early modernity! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Matthew L. Jones’s wonderful new book traces a history of failed efforts to make calculating machines, from Blaise Pascal’s work in the 1640s through the efforts of Charles Babbage in the nineteenth century, incorporating an account of both the work and relationships of scholars and artisans, and their reflections on the nature of invention. Innovative in its approach and its form, Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage (University of Chicago Press, 2016) offers a thoughtful and beautifully-written history of technology that offers an important perspective on a division between two poles of writing the history of technology: “the collective, deterministic account of inventive activity and the individualistic, heroic, creative account (7).” In Jones’s hands, we are offered a third way of understanding cultural production in early modernity, one that did not bifurcate between imitation and originality, social and individual making, or design and production. Central to the story is the history of efforts to mechanize the process of carrying ones in addition, and this fascinating problem persists as a thread through many of the projects discussed in the book. On the pages of Reckoning with Matter, readers will not only enjoy a compelling account of machine calculation through the nineteenth century, but will also find the story of a frog that tears out the eyes of a fish, a man who designed machines for making breakfast, and discussions of the significance of credit and intellectual property, modern programming, sketching, imitation, and debates over the nature of thinking. Highly recommended!   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Projit Bihari Mukharji’s new book explores the power of small, non-spectacular, and everyday technologies as motors or catalysts of change in the history of science and medicine. Focusing on practices of Ayurveda in British Bengal between about 1870-1930, Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Science (University of Chicago Press, 2016) is structured around five case studies that each describe the incorporation of a particular technology into Ayurvedic practice, resulting in a braiding together of strands of sciences and the production of a new body image. Mukharji develops and engages a number of key concepts in the work, significantly introducing a notion of physiograms (materialized physiologies or materialized body metaphors, a development of John Tresch’s notion of cosmograms) and a way of thinking about the braiding of strands of science and medicine. It’s a beautifully written and compellingly argued work that will be of interest to a wide range of readers of the history of science and medicine! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The year 2016 was the hottest year on record, and in recent months, drought and searing heat have fanned wildfires in Fort McMurray Alberta and in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Meanwhile, the Arctic has had record high temperatures, leading one climate researcher to warn the region is unraveling. Yet for the most part, these climate-related events and dire warnings from climatologists have fallen on deaf ears, especially in the United States, where climate-change denial is firmly entrenched, especially among Republican lawmakers. But why? In his recent book, Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming (University of Washington Press, 2016), historian Joshua Howe seeks to answer this question. Howe traces the history of climate change from a scientific oddity in the late 1950s to a topic of fierce debate among politicians and environmental activists who fear that failure to tackle global warming will lead to stronger storms, fiercer wildfires, and rising seas. Scientists knew the most about the nuances of climate change, yet seemed unable to convince policy makers or the public to tackle the problem. Howe sees the climatologists narrow focus on the science of global warming as a partial reason for the inaction. Part history of science, part history of environmentalism, Behind the Curve is a provocative book exploring one of the most vexing issues of our time. Bob Wilson is an associate professor in the Department of Geography, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. His research interests include historical geography and environmental history, animal studies, and climate change politics and activism. Wilson is also a former visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for the American West and a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life,” Oscar Wilde famously observed. Wilde’s waning romanticism can be read in stark contrast with Nietzsche, who argued around the same time, “art is nothing but a kind of applied physiology.” Robert Brain’s The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (University of Washington Press, 2015) unveils a fascinating world of exchange between artistic studios and physiology laboratories concealed by such pithy aphorisms. Brain argues that the influence and stature of physiological aesthetics have been overlooked in accounts of modernism in science and art, and seeks to recover experimental systems that were incredibly influential and fertile in their cultural situation. Brain first sets himself to chart the development of physiological recording in the sciences, first as experimental technique, then as ontology, in a fascinating chapter on the protoplasm theory of life and on to its application to the human qua human problems of linguistic analysis. He then describes the experimentalization of visual art (Georges Seurat, Edvard Munch) and poetry (Gustave Kahn, F. T. Marinetti). The influence of Charles Henry, who inhabited both artists’ circles and physiology laboratories in his work as a preparateur, becomes a key pivot in Brain’s narrative through his creation a scientific aesthetic that could be deployed as a kind of productive black-box. The Pulse of Modernism is a rich portrait of fin-de-siecle material and intellectual culture, and challenges the pride of place given to Victorian sensibilities in the fashioning of the late modern (early modernist) scientific subject. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The social practice we call science has had spectacular success in explaining the natural world since the 17th century. While advanced mathematics and other precursors of modern science were not unique to Europe, it was there that Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and others came up with theories that got modern physics and chemistry off the ground. In his latest book, Wondrous Truths: The Improbable Triumph of Modern Science (Oxford University Press, 2016), J.D. Trout mounts a spirited defense of the claim that the best explanation of the rise of science in 17th Century Europe is that Newton and others got lucky; among other serendipitous factors, they happened to come up with versions of preexisting ideas that were just right enough to explain just enough of the world, and that was enough to get the ball rolling. Trout, who is Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at Loyola University in Chicago, defends the scientific realist view that scientific theories are successful because they are by and large true, not just predictively accurate. He also sharply distinguishes the psychology of explanation–the Aha! feeling of understanding–from the truth of an explanation. On his ontic view of explanation, we can experience being satisfied with bad (false) explanations, and there are true theories we may never understand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our modern networked world owes an oftentimes unacknowledged debt to Guglielmo Marconi. As Marc Raboy demonstrates in Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World (Oxford University Press, 2016), it was he who pioneered the concept of wireless global communications. As a teenager he was fascinated by the recent discovery of radio waves, and by the time he was in his early twenties he had developed an apparatus that used these waves to transmit and receive messages. Traveling to London, he demonstrated a gift for publicity as he established himself as a technological pioneer in an age of rapidly emerging wonders. Thanks to his unassailable patents, Marconi soon created a global communications empire, one that made his name synonymous with radio and was so dominant that it brought the nations of the world together in an unprecedented international agreement to regulate the field of wireless telegraphy. Raboy recounts Marconi’s roving life as a celebrated figure, the development of his multinational business concerns, and his later relationship with the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini and the shadow it cast over his posthumous reputation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his shining new book The Medieval Islamic Hospital: Medicine, Religion, and Charity (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Ahmed Ragab, Assistant Professor of Religion and Science at Harvard Divinity School, charts the institutional and intellectual history of hospitals or bimaristans in medieval Egypt and the Levant. A central argument of this book is that hospitals in Islamdom were more than just institutions where the sick were treated; hospitals also served as important sites of communal services and congregation, as urban architectural monuments, and as symbols and expressions of a rulers political authority. By exploring an astonishing variety and number of sources, Ragab provides an unparalleled window into the aspirations and operations that defined the medieval Islamic hospital. This splendid new book will be of great interest to students of medieval Islamic history, religion and science, medical history, and the study of Islam and religion more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Clarke’s third law, coined in 1973, expresses the difficulty that people of any era have in reconciling the bounds of current knowledge with our experiences in a world full of marvels. In a fascinating investigation of role of automata in the culture of the medieval Latin west, E.R. Truitt’s Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) traces the story of automata from their early appearance in the Latin west as gifts of foreign courts, to the literary manifestations of these objects, to the eventual creation of elaborate mechanical automata in the middle of the thirteenth century. Along the way, this history examines the nature of marvels, the constitution of natural knowledge, the text-based transformation of Latin intellectual culture, definitions of life and death, the spectacle of court, and the mechanics of the universe (8, 9). The cast of characters, both fictional and factual, embraces writers, travelers, and natural philosophers ranging from Liudprand of Cremona (c. 920 972), Pope Sylvester II (c. 946 1003) and Fr. William of Rubruck (c. 1220 1293), to Sir John Mandeville, witness of marvels mechanical and divine, and a Charlemagne whose stay in Constantinople brings him face to face with a pagan rulers powers of astral science that test the potentials of Charlemagne’s piety. Our conversation about Truitt’s comprehensively researched and highly readable book ranges over C-3PO’s medieval forebears in the alabaster chamber, the religious rehabilitation of disembodied talking heads, the role of clocks and clockwork in the discourse shift from natural philosophy to mechanical engineering, and the political significance of lewd mechanical monkeys covered in rotting badger pelts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When I first read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish as an undergrad, I remember wondering, “What does this look like, though? How might the disciplining of the body play out in different places?” Greg Eghigian, author of The Corrigible and the Incorrigible: Science, Medicine, and the Convict in Twentieth-Century Germany (University of Michigan Press, 2015) and Associate Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University, answers that question and more about the evolution of incarceration in modern Germany. Eghigian’s background is in both German history and the history of science, and his expertise in the latter shines through as he explores discourses of criminality among professionals in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, sociology, criminology, and medicine. He has done extensive previous work on the understanding and treatment of madness in modern Europe, and shows that many of the same concerns that motivated physicians, psychoanalysts, and reformers in the emerging field of psychology occupied criminologists in twentieth-century Germany, as well. Perhaps most importantly, the book provides a chronicle of how carceral norms emerge and evolve, one particularly instructive for an America which currently imprisons nearly 2.5 million of its people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is a book about the future – the historical future as three interconnected generations of atmospheric researchers experienced it and envisioned it in the first part of the twentieth century. James Rodger Fleming’s new book is a big picture history of atmospheric science that follows the lives and careers of three men who worked at the center of meteorological research in roughly the first half of the 20th century: Vilhelm Bjerknes, Carl-Gustav Rossby, and Harry Wexler. Though it takes these three figures as orienting tools, Inventing Atmospheric Science: Bjerknes, Rossby, Wexler, and the Foundations of Modern Meteorology (MIT Press, 2016) this is not a biography of three lone geniuses: Fleming is careful to show that the emergence of atmospheric science was a team effort and the result of work by many people in different disciplines and areas. Fleming’s use of archival materials allows readers to appreciate the significance and roles of otherwise-overlooked or ignored historical figures, including Anne Louise Beck (who we discuss in the course of the podcast). Inventing Atmospheric Science weaves together the histories of technology, mathematics, hydrodynamics, the aerospace industry, global pollution, climatology, chaos theory, the US Weather Bureau, and much more into a clear and engaging story thats also a pleasure to read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over the past quarter-century, scientists have been mapping and exploring the human genome to locate the genetic basis of disease and track the histories of populations across time and space. As part of this work, geneticists have formulated markers to calculate percentages of European, African, and Amerindian genetic ancestry in populations presumed to originate or inhabit particular geographic regions. The work done by geneticists in recent years has been received with a mixture of excitement and concern. Genomics is simultaneously viewed as the key to diagnosing and curing inherited disease, while also posing a threat to individual privacy and raising concerns over the reappearance of racialized thinking in scientific research. In Mestizo Genomics: Race Mixture, Nation, and Science in Latin America (Duke University Press, 2014), editors Peter Wade, Carlos Lopez Beltran, Eduardo Restrepo, and Ricardo Ventura Santos ask how ideas of race, ethnicity, nation, and gender enter into the work of genetic scientists? Conducting ethnographic research in genetics laboratories located in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, the authors question the perceived divide between the scientific community and society at large in the production of knowledge. This important work illuminates how the concepts of race, nation, and gender are continually reproduced, challenged, and reformulated in both scientific and public discourse. David-James Gonzales (DJ) is a Doctoral Candidate in History at the University of Southern California. He is a historian of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, Civil Rights, and Latino Identity & Politics. DJs dissertation examines the influence of Mexican American civic engagement and political activism on the metropolitan development of Orange County, CA from 1930 to 1965.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sabine Arnaud‘s new book explores a history of discursive practices that played a role in the construction of hysteria as pathology. On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 and 1820 (University of Chicago Press, 2015) considers a wide range of issues that are both specific to the particular history of hysteria, and more broadly applicable to the history medicine. Arnaud pays special attention to the role played by language in the definition of any medical category, basing her analysis on a masterful analysis of a spectrum of written medical genres (including dialogue, autobiography, correspondence, narrative, and polemic) that have largely been forgotten by the history of medicine. Arnaud asks, “What made it possible to view dozens of different diagnoses as variants of a single pathology, hysteria?” The answer can be found in a long process of rewriting and negotiation over the definition of these diagnoses enabled this retrospective assimilation, which was driven by enormously diverse political and epistemological stakes. In a series of fascinating chapters, the book interweaves the history of hysteria with studies of gender, class, literature, metaphor, narrative, and and religion. It’s an expertly-researched and compellingly-written account that will amply reward readers interested in the histories of medicine and gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Miranda Brown‘s new book takes a sustained look at the role and significance of the medical fathers in the historiography of Chinese medicine. Paying careful attention to the ubiquity and persistence of figures including Bian Que, Chunyu Yi, Liu Xiang, Zhang Ji, and more, The Art of Medicine in Early... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his 1948 essay, “Harlem is Nowhere,” Ralph Ellison decried the psychological disparity between formal equality and discrimination faced by Blacks after the Great Migration as leaving “even the most balanced Negro open to anxiety.” In Under the Strain of Color: Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry (Cornell University Press, 2015), Gabriel Mendes undertakes an engaging study of race and mental health in the 20th century through the lens of an overlooked Harlem clinic. While providing the first in-depth history of the Lafargue Clinic (1946-58), the book focuses on the figures who came together in a seemingly unlikely union to found it: Richard Wright, the prominent author; Fredric Wertham, a German Jewish emigre psychiatrist now known for his advocacy for censorship of comic books; and The Reverend Shelton Hale Bishop, an important Harlem pastor. Wright’s literary prowess, work for the Communist party, and brush with Chicago School sociology met with Wertham’s socially-conscious and uncompromising brand of psychoanalysis to challenge mainstream psychiatric theory and its discriminatory practices in the Jim Crow North. Those who could afford it were charged 25 cents for sessions in the basement of St. Philip’s Episcopal church in Harlem, and 50 cents for court testimonials. A thoroughgoing grassroots effort, ignored by philanthropists and state funding, the Lafargue Clinic throws mid-20th Century mental health and race relations into relief, and is sure to stir interest in the untold stories of projects like it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael F. Robinson‘s new book is such a pleasure to read, I cant even. It’s not just because you get to say Gambaragara over and over again if you read it aloud. (I recommend doing this, even if just with that one word.) It’s not just because its a beautifully crafted work of prose. And it’s not just because its quite literally a page-turner. The Lost White Tribe: Explorers, Scientists, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016) is also a masterful biography of an idea: the life story of the Hamitic hypothesis and its relationship to to the histories of exploration, science, ideas of human origins, and much much more. Robinson’s book opens with an account of reporter David Ker going to the London mansion of Henry Morton Stanley in 1885 to interview the man who was at that point the world’s most famous explorer. (As Robinson puts it, Stanley resided in London, but in truth he lived nowhere.) As the story unfolds we learn about Stanley’s encounter with the white race of Gambaragara and its imbrication with a set of larger questions (Where did the human species originate? Why had it split into separate races? And how had these races come to settle the different regions of the planet?) as we meet some fascinating and compelling figures. The Lost White Tribe also has mummies, ruins, skulls, adventure fiction, and Freud. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rebecca Lemov‘s beautifully written Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity (Yale University Press, 2015) is at once an exploration of mid-century social science through paths less traveled and the tale of a forgotten future. The book is anchored around the story of Harvard-trained social scientist Bert Kaplan, who embarked on, in her words, a dizzyingly ambitious 1950s-era project to capture peoples dreams in large amounts and store them in an experimental data bank. While unique in scope, Kaplan’s project can be characterized as the culmination of efforts to apply techniques of personality capture–projective testing, dream analysis, and life history–in cross-cultural research on indigenous peoples, an effort to account for the full spectrum of human life amidst the encroachment of modernity upon cultures based, for example, in oral traditions. Richly documenting the entanglements of Kaplan and others in their attempts to render subjects as data, Lemov throws the transactional nature of anthropology into relief. A data point for an ethnographer can be many things for a research subject: cash for buying American niceties, a beer, a dream lost in the act of recounting, even a permanent mark of distrust. The book is also a history of a technology which never came to fruition: the futuristic reader for Kaplan’s Microcards was never realized, and the boxes of cards became dispersed and lost their value as a total archive of human personality. Lemov argues that we would do well to regard the fate of Kaplan’s database as a parable for our age by calling attention to the information loss upon which the technologies of documentation that saturate our present rely. What, then, will become of our compressed audio files, forgotten social media accounts, and backup hard drives stashed in the back corners of drawers? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David J. Meltzer‘s new book is a meticulous study of the controversy over human antiquity in America, a dispute that transformed North American archaeology as a practice and discipline, tracing it from 1862-1941. The Great Paleolithic War: How Science Forged an Understanding of Americas Ice Age Past (University of Chicago Press, 2015) traces the heated and multi-disciplinary debates over the existence of a Pleistocene human antiquity in North America. Meltzer’s book is a thick history that introduces readers not only to the major conceptual, epistemological, and methodological issues at stake in the controversy, but also to the figures who debated the nature and scope of human antiquity in America. Anyone with an interest in the history of archaeology or the study of human origins should check it out! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sigrid Schmalzer‘s new book is an excellent and important contribution to both science studies and the history of China. Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China (University of Chicago Press, 2016) reframes how we understand the relationships between science and politics in history by looking closely at the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Justin E. H. Smith‘s new book is a fascinating historical ontology of notions of racial difference in the work of early modern European writers. Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2015) argues that “in order to understand the forces that shaped thinking about racial difference in early modern philosophy, we must look to the philosophers’ own interest in a scientific classification and physical anthropology, with an eye to the way these projects were influenced by early modern globalization and by the associated projects of global commerce, collection, and systematization of the order of nature.” The resulting book is a thoughtful contribution to both the history of philosophy and science in early modernity, and to the modern history of concepts of race and identity, and is highly recommended to readers and teachers in both fields. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Carin Berkowitz‘s new book takes readers into the world of nineteenth century London to explore the landscape of medicine and surgery along with Charles Bell, artist-anatomist-teacher-natural philosopher. Charles Bell and the Anatomy of Reform (University of Chicago Press, 2015) looks closely at the involvement of Bell and others in a project of conservative reform in nineteenth century British medical education. We follow Berkowitz not only into the pages of the works that made Bell famous, but also into the classrooms in which Bell advocated a pedagogy that trained hand and eye together and developed his interest in systems of all sorts, including the nerves, education, and display. Readers will learn about the growth of a new genre of medical weeklies that changed the public face of medicine, the founding of new institutions that changed the teaching of medicine, and the controversy over motor and sensory nerves that accompanied major transformations in the medical science of Bell’s lifetime. It is a fascinating story that honors the importance of the history of education in shaping the histories of science and medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire (Harvard University Press, 2016), Erik Linstrum examines how the field of psychology was employed in the service of empire. Linstrum explores the careers of scientists sent to the South Pacific, India, and Africa to verify and define characteristics of white racial superiority. Far from confirming the inferiority of the colonized, psychologists exposed flaws in Britain’s civilizing mission, often doubting or subverting its underlying assumptions. Linstrum exposes a fundamental tension between the authoritarian goals of state and the role of science, showing how expert knowledge could be adapted as a tool of colonization just as it could be undermined by scientific discovery. Despite its critics, Linstrum shows how psychology mobilized to take part in Britain’s counter-insurgency campaigns in Kenya and Malaya. Colonial administrators borrowed tools from psychology to conduct interrogations and suppress dissent. The colonial state attempted to cast doubt on the psychological maturity of the colonized, articulating Third World nationalism itself as a kind of pathology. Britain’s representatives aimed to actively reshape thoughts and feelings in their quest to win “hearts and minds.” Linstrum’s book challenges rigid definitions of scientists in the service of empire, complicating earlier narratives which portrayed psychologists as powerful supporters of colonial discourse. Psychology’s intended role was to aid the technocratic administration of a waning empire. While attempting to make the colonized knowable and predictable, British psychologists unintentionally exposed the dysfunctions inherent in European society, challenging the notion of an irrational, inferior “other.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices