Oil-soaked birds in Prince William Sound. The “crying Indian” in a 1970s anti-littering ad. A lonely polar bear on an Arctic ice floe. Such environmental images have proliferated over the past half-century, and have played a pivotal role in alerting the public about ecological problems and galvanizing public action. Yet scholars are more likely to focus on the science related to environmental problems or the policy responses to them. Finis Dunaway‘s new book, Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images (University of Chicago, 2015) takes such images seriously. He examines these iconic photos and films, as well as many others, and he argues that they were crucial in developing popular environmentalism. Dunaway, associate professor of history at Trent University, shows how such images were produced and traces the effect they had on American culture. More importantly, he argues that such images implicitly or explicitly encouraged consumer-based, individually-oriented responses to the ecological crisis rather than actions focusing on the structural roots of environmental problems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eva Illouz is professor of sociology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and president of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her book Hard-Core Romance: Fifty Shades of Grey, Best Sellers, and Society (University of Chicago Press, 2014), provides a feminist-sociological analysis of the soft pornographic novel Fifty Shades of Grey. The book, and its two sequels written by E.L. James, began as fan fiction and subsequently reached record-breaking sales as an e-book. With two central characters, a sexual ingenue and a powerful enigmatic anti-hero, the novel is poorly written and formulaic, yet managed to capture the imagination of millions of women. Illouz tells us how the novel was the perfect combination of fantasy and self-help delivered to an audience increasingly confuse and uncertain in negotiating their heterosexual relationships. With its sadomasochistic sex and images of female submission and male dominance, Fifty Shades of Grey, is a gothic romance adapted to modern sexual dilemmas and emotional confusion. Combining the romantic fantasy and self-help genres, it acts a catalyst for renegotiating heterosexual relationships. By placing the novel within the history of the commodification of the book, the dynamics of the sexual marketplace, and the sociology of sexuality, Illouz locates Fifty Shades of Grey in the contemporary context. The reader of Hard-Core Romance will find an intriguing argument for why after feminism and the sexual revolution dominance and submission, resistance and surrender, remain as enigmas of modern relationships. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christopher J. Phillips‘ new book is a political history of the “New Math,” a collection of curriculum reform projects in the 1950s & 1960s that were partially sponsored by the NSF and involved hundreds of mathematicians, teachers, professors, administrators, parents, and students. The New Math: A Political History (University of Chicago Press, 2015) explores the formation of an idea of the “American subject” in an environment where math was considered to be a component of intelligent citizenship. As classrooms became sites shaped by Cold War politics, efforts to reform mathematics curricula were bound up in ideas of subjectivity and discipline. Phillips pays special attention to the work of the School Mathematics Study Group (SMSG) in this context, looking closely at the textbooks that the SMSG produced for children studying at a range of levels. Importantly, The New Math explores not just the production of these textbooks but also what happened when they were actually brought into American classrooms and engaged by teachers, students, and parents. As a result, in addition to being a fascinating political history it’s also a model of how we can treat the archaeology of the classroom as a way to approach the history of science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Migraine is real, and it is pervasive–at least 12% of Americans suffer some form of this spectrum disorder. Still, migraine remains a conflicted illness–people routinely dispute the legitimacy of both the experience and its sufferers. In Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Joanna Kempner sets out to explore “how migraine can simultaneously disrupt so many lives and continue to be questioned and trivialized by the culture at large.” Kempner begins by tracing the changing biomedical understandings of migraine over the past three hundred years, discovering a long history of “migraine’s association with weak, gendered personalities.” Kempner then turns to four contemporary figures and cases: headache specialists, migraine advocates, pharmaceutical companies, and the case of cluster headaches (a disorder commonly associated with men). Throughout, she shows how the recent recasting of migraine from a “disorder of neurotic women” to a neurobiological disease has done little to change the cultural meaning of headache disorders because “even as a ‘brain disease,’ migraine remains plagued by gendered images, metaphors, and stereotypes.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A. Mark Smith‘s new book is a magisterial history of optics over the course of two millennia. From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics (University of Chicago Press, 2015) suggests that the transition from ancient toward modern optics was accompanied by a turn in optical studies from a concern with explaining sight to a focus on light by optical scholars. The book argues that Kepler’s theory of retinal imaging was instrumental in this turn. In the course of an amazingly comprehensive narrative of optical studies from Aristotle through the seventeenth century, From Sight to Light offers clear and persuasive discussions of the historical understanding of color and of visual illusions, the use of mirrors as optical devices, the relationships between physical and psychological theories of visual perception, and the study of reflection and refraction. Smith pays special attention to explaining the mathematical bases of optical theories, and he highlights the formative role that Arabic scientists and translation played in the history of optics. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of sight, vision, light, and the study thereof Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nick Wilding's new book is brilliant, thoughtful, and an absolute pleasure to read. Galileo's Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and The Politics of Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2014) takes an unusual approach to understanding Galileo and his context by focusing its narrative on his closest friend, student, and patron, the Venetian Gianfrancesco Sagredo. Though most readers might be familiar with Sagredo largely as one of the protagonists of Galileo's 1632 Dialogue upon the Two Main Systems of the World, here he takes center stage. In order to bring Sagredo to life and help us understand his significance both for Galileo and for early modern science in context more broadly conceived, Wilding has worked with an impressive range of materials that include poems, paintings, ornamental woodcuts, epistolary hoaxes, intercepted letters, murder case files, and more. After a chapter that reads like a detective story as Wilding tracks down and expertly reads missing portraits of Sagredo, subsequent chapters explore the Venetian's role in major disputes involving the Jesuits, his family's mining interests, his time as treasurer for a fortress and a consul to Syria, and his performance as a "rich, old, slightly batty widow" in the context of a rather hilarious epistolary hoax. We also come to understand Galileo anew, as Wilding pays careful attention to his use of scribal publication to control and disseminate his writing and the relationship between instrument and text in his work. (In one wonderful chapter, Wilding reads woodcuts associated with the Sidereus nuncius in order to reframe how we understand the history of production and publication of this text in the context of transalpine book smuggling.) Along the way, the chapters make significant interventions in the historiography of science, suggesting ways that Sagredo helps us think anew about the use of visual sources, the agency of "intermediaries and go-betweens" in creating their own networks, the importance of understanding the sense of humor of our historical actors, the social nature of early modern authorship, and the need to reassess the historiography of the global scientific network of the Jesuits. There are also some really, horribly, wonderfully bad puns. (Consider yourselves forewarned.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Professor Robert P. Burns of Northwestern University School of Law offers an insightful critique of the modern American criminal justice system in his new work Kafka’s Law: ‘The Trial’ and American Criminal Justice (University of Chicago Press 2014). This interview explores the characteristics of Kafka’s “Law” and exposes where and how these characteristics exist within the American criminal justice system. Burns leads us through the absurd regime The Trial‘s protagonist must navigate after he finds himself accused of an unknown crime. Kafka’s dystopian law is unknowable, ubiquitous, overly bureaucratic and yet overly informal. In the story’s world the law functions like God and guilt is inevitable. These legal characteristics may appear to be part of an absurd dystopian fantasy world derived from the same wild imagination that produced a story in which a man metamorphoses into a bug. However, we learn in the second half of the interview that the dystopian themes in The Trial capture a present-day reality for many who are accused of crimes in America. Burns’s work exposing Kafkaesque aspects of our legal system and his search to find the most effective means of remedying these situations is vastly important to the societal goal of narrowing the gap between justice and law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kimberly A. Hamlin is an associate professor in American Studies and history at Miami University in Oxford Ohio. Her book from Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age in America (University of Chicago Press, 2014), provides a history of how a group of women’s rights advocates turned to Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory to answer the eternal “woman question.” Hamlin’s fascinating intellectual history uncovers how the new evolutionary science provided multiple arguments by which to advance the cause of women’s rights in the home and society. Many scholars are familiar with the Enlightenment, religious, and socialist origins of feminist thought. Hamlin suggests another significant strand of thought offered by the science of human origins. She argues that Darwinism, often with unorthodox interpretations, was effective in overturning a central ideological obstacle to women’s equality–the biblical story of Eve. Charles Darwin’s theory, against his own conservative views, turned upside down traditional ideas about women. Freethinkers, socialist, sexologist seized on evolutionary science to build arguments against recalcitrant traditional views. They asserted that their contemporary culture was a construct of erroneous ideas calling for change, in order to live in accordance to the evolutionary laws of nature. As “reform Darwinists,” Hamlin’s subjects stood against social Darwinism, religious teaching, and custom. Yet, evolutionary science under male control was deployed to reassert women’s subordination. Sex difference as interpreted by many male scientists pointed to female intellectual inferiority. Women, mostly outside the science establishment, called on the evidence of “woman’s experience” against claims of scientific men.Hamlin offers a lucid narrative of how a group of women intervened in a period between the demise of Eve, as the metanarrative for the meaning of womanhood, and the masculinist consolidation of evolutionary science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Commercial interests are often understood as impinging upon the ethical norms of medicine. In his new book, Medical Monopoly: Intellectual Property Rights and the Origins of the Modern Pharmaceutical Industry (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Joe Gabriel shows how the modernization of American medicine was bound up in the ownership, manufacture, and marketing of drugs. Gabriel unearths the early history of intellectual property concerns as they entered the domain of medical practice itself. Through his careful marshaling of evidence, he takes readers back to a time when the norms and legal structures of commercial capitalism in the U.S. were just as much at issue as those of the professionalization of medicine. This fascinating book serves as a pointed reminder that the sources of therapeutic rationale are just as much tied to the production and regulation of therapies as the collective decision-making on ethical practice. Along with my previous interview with Jeremy Greene, this discussion will hopefully make accessible a broad perspective on the development of medicine in the 20th century by focusing on its ties to industry. Medical Monopoly charts the history of property rights over medicines at the dawn of the 19th century through World War I. The important broader transition here is that while before the Civil War–at least in medicine–patents were seen as tantamount to granting problematic monopoly, by the end of the 19th century they were understood as the best available regulatory mechanism for preventing more problematic imitation. Whereas patent medicines had previously been linked to quackery, the emergence and rapid expansion of the “ethical” pharmaceutical industry after the Civil War was due to its adherents advocating for more effective regulation of commerce within medicine. Rather than reverting to secrecy, firms began to circulate and publish information on new remedies and the results of studies to physicians. As the explosion of new medicines remained at pace with the boom of consumer goods in the late 19th century, patenting and corporate investment in monopolistic practices became understood as a mechanism to advance the public good. The expansion of laboratory science and norms of chemical manufacturing in the 20th century only bolstered this union further.Medical Monopoly is a fascinating and important read that people interested in medical policy should pay attention to. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Show me how it doos.” Such were the words of a young James Clerk “Dafty” Maxwell (1831-79), an inquisitive child prone to punning who grew into a renowned physicist known for his work on electromagnetism. After learning to juggle and conducting experiments on falling cats, Maxwell went on to have an intense conversion experience that brought him to evangelicalism. The young T.H. Huxley (1825-95), on the other hand, busied himself at “delivering sermons from tree stumps” as a young boy, before joining the navy, studying jellyfish, eventually launching an assault against the Anglican Church and gaining world renown as the biologist who was “Darwin’s Bulldog.” Matthew Stanley’s wonderful new book introduces us to Maxwell and Huxley as they embodied theistic and naturalistic science, respectively, in Victorian Britain. Moving well beyond the widespread assumption that modern science and religion are and always have been fundamentally antithetical to one another, Huxley’s Church & Maxwell’s Demon: From Theistic Science to Naturalistic Science (University of Chicago Press, 2014) offers a history of scientific naturalism that illustrates the deep and fundamental commonalities between positions on the proper practice of science that began to diverge relatively late and in very particular historical circumstances. Beginning at a point when Maxwell’s theistic science was the “standard” and Huxley was the “challenger,” and ending at the point when Huxley “won,” Stanley goes on to guide readers through some of the major topics of debate that characterized Victorian science (including the nature of miracles and of consciousness, the limits of science, the origin of the universe, the question of intellectual freedom, the morality of education, the possibility of free will) to show the gradual divergence of perspectives that were always rooted in concerns about scientific practice, and to consider the ramifications of this history for how we understand and conduct debates over Intelligent Design and related issues today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The 1960s marked a “new era of vaccination,” when Americans eagerly exposed their arms and hind ends for shots that would prevent a range of everyday illnesses–not only prevent the lurking killers, like polio. Medical historian Elena Conis shows that Americans’ gradual acceptance of vaccination was far from a medical fait accompli: it was–and remains–a political accomplishment that has stemmed from a patchwork of efforts to expose children, in particular, to compulsory vaccine programs. Grown in the culture of postwar American politics, vaccines deliver more than prophylactics. They succor a set of assumptions about economic inequality, racial difference, sexual norms, and gendered divisions of labor. Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship with Immunization (University of Chicago, 2014) is a timely and accessible social history of American policy and practices towards vaccination that shows how support for vaccination has rarely advanced for medical reasons alone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The work of Theodore Adorno is well established as a crucial resource for understanding the complexities of contemporary capitalism, playing a foundational role in Critical Theory. Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno’s most well known text written with Max Horkheimer, is reassessed in a new book of philosophy by Martin Shuster. Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism and Modernity (University of Chicago Press, 2014) considers how autonomy might exist under the conditions of contemporary capitalism, following the disastrous inhumanity of events in the twentieth century. Shuster explores the nature of autonomy in four ways. The book opens with a re-reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment, as a means to engage and critique Kant’s notion of autonomy. The text then turns to consider a potential ‘response’ from Kant, in the form of Kant’s conception of a rational theology. It is here where Shuster considers the importance of God to Kantian ethics, most notably the role of God as establishing the value of humanity in the categorical imperative. The categorical imperative is juxtaposed with Adorno’s later work, which Shuster argues provides a way to think about autonomy that moves beyond and between the totalizing dialectic of enlightenment and Kant’s rational theology. The book closes with a consideration of Hegel’s relationship to this reading of Adorno, reassessing topics such as the teleology of history in Hegel through to the contemporary work of Stanley Cavell. The conclusion provides a practical call to arms based on the conception of autonomy developed in the book. The chapter on Dialectic of Enlightenment provides a stimulating reassessment of a text central to the critical theory tradition and should attract a general readership looking to add depth to their knowledge of this work. However the book itself will also be of interest to all readers of contemporary philosophy, holocaust studies and those wondering how we should live now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Last month on New Books in Geography, historian Susan Schulten discussed the development of thematic maps in the nineteenth century. Such maps focused on a particular topic such as disease, immigration, or politics and raised questions about society and geography. In many ways, these nineteenth-century maps were the predecessors to the maps made through Geographic Information Systems (GIS). In the past decade, geographers and historians have begun using GIS for innovative historical research. Among the most innovative scholars using this technology is Anne Knowles, professor of geography at Middlebury College. Her new books Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry, 1800-1868 (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and Geographies of the Holocaust (co-edited with Tim Cole and Alberto Giordano) are superb examples of how scholars can use GIS to better understand the past. In this podcast, Professor Knowles discusses the iron industry in Antebellum America, the Holocaust, and how GIS can help illuminate previously unknown facets of both. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones are the authors of The Politics of Information: Problem Definition and the Course of Public Policy in America (University of Chicago Press, 2014). Baumgartner is the Richard J. Richardson Distinguished Professor of Political Science at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill and Jones is the J. J. “Jake” Pickle Regents Chair in Congressional Studies and Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. The Politics of Information picks up where the authors’ last book, The Politics of Attention, leaves off. They explore how information enters into the policy process and how that has evolved over time, focusing on what they call the “paradox of search”. They make extensive use of the publicly available data that they have collected over the last decade called the Policy Agendas Project. They argue that: “Information determines priorities, and priorities determine action” (p. 40). They discover is that the policy process is replete with information – not all high quality – and that different policy problems integrate information in different ways. They also find that the government has “broadened” – addressing an ever growing array of issues – rather than just “thickening” – through growth in the overall size of government. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In lucid prose that’s a real pleasure to read, Karen Rader and Victoria Cain‘s new book chronicles a revolution in modern American science education and culture. Life on Display: Revolutionizing U. S. Museums of Science & Natural History in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2014) guides readers through a transformation in American science and nature museums as museums moved from a nineteenth-century focus on research and specimen collections to a twentieth-century emphasis on public engagement and display. Written collaboratively over nearly a decade, Life on Display simultaneously develops an argument for a “renegotiation of the relationship between display, research, and education in American museums of nature and science,” and opens up an archive of fascinating (and at times hilarious and moving) stories of members of the museum-going public (some of who gifted dog fleas and dead pets to their local museums), non-human inhabitants of interactive museum displays (including an owl with a penchant for riding in cars and “trim, up-on-their-toes cockroaches”), and museum professionals who painted, debated, made dioramas, invented “Exploratoria,” and occasionally wrote limericks. This is a book for anyone interested in American history, museum studies, visual culture, science studies, the history of education, grasshopper surgery, or Jurassic Park (among many, many other fields it contributes to). It’s a wonderfully engaging history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Erik Braun‘s recent book, The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw (University of Chicago Press, 2013), examines the spread of Burmese Buddhist meditation practices during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the social, political, and intellectual historical contexts that gave rise to this development. Braun accomplishes this by focusing on the role that the Burmese monk Ledi Sayadaw (1846-1923) played in this movement, drawing primarily on Ledi Sayadaw’s own writings, three biographies, polemical responses to Ledi Sayadaw’s writings, and contemporaneous periodicals. Central to the book is the importance of the Abhidhamma (Buddhist metaphysics or psychology) in Burmese Buddhist monasticism and, more specifically, the way in which Ledi Sayadaw spread the study of the Abhidhamma among the laity and used it as the foundation for insight meditation. In contrast to many recent proponents of insight meditation (both Asian and not), who emphasize technique at the expense of study and theory, Ledi Sayadaw saw insight meditation and study of the Abhidhamma as an inseparable pair, with the latter serving as a basis for the former. Braun places Ledi Sayadaw’s approach in the larger context of Buddhist and Burmese theories about meditation, exploring the different views on the relationships among samatha (concentration meditation), the jhanas (stages of meditative absorption), insight meditation as direct awareness of sensory and mental experience, and insight meditation as discursive thinking informed by Abhidhammic categories. Exploring the cultural milieu of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Burma, Braun demonstrates that Ledi Sayadaw exhibits characteristics that we would regard as traditional (e.g., the importance he grants to literary competence, his belief in Buddhist cosmology) as well as those we might think of as modern (e.g., his charismatic style of preaching, his focus on the laity). In addition, as opposed to Buddhist reformers who argued that Buddhism was in fact applicable to and accorded with modernity (being synonymous with the West, in most such cases), Ledi Sayadaw flipped this relationship on its head by asserting that modernity (e.g., Western science) was in agreement with Buddhism. In so doing he avoided the usual contradictions between Buddhism and modernity but without apparently compromising the Buddhist worldview in the process. Braun places Ledi Sayadaw’s thoughts on these matters in the larger historical context of colonialism: Burma was annexed by the British (in three stages: 1826, 1852, 1886) and many Burmese believed that Buddhism’s final days were nigh. Ledi Sayadaw’s theories, then, were in part a response to a new environment in which Buddhist monks were losing their traditional position as educators, and in which the age-old relationship between the sa Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We often think of South Africa or America when we hear the word ‘segregation.’ Or — a popular view — that social groups have always chosen to live apart.But as Carl H. Nightingale shows in his new book, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (University of Chicago Press, 2012), the racial phenomenon is both modern and international. To be sure, laws and informal practices separating individuals by membership in a caste can be found everywhere in the ancient and medieval world. Those with or seeking wealth and power have always sought to preserve or increase their position by disuniting people on the grounds of social category. Yet the idea of “race” and the enduring belief that human beings can be distinguished in such terms has its origins in the rise of European colonialism, starting with British rule in Madras (Chennai) and the East India Company’s decision to split Calcutta (Kolkata) into “White Town” and “Black Town.” The word ‘segregation’ itself comes from techniques used in Hong Kong and Bombay (Mumbai) in the 1890’s, part of a viral “mania” that, Nightingale explains, pivoted around the challenges of mass urbanization and sent the institution north, south, east, and west — even to Latin American cities like Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, where the distinction between ‘white’ and ‘black’ was murky at best. This globalization depended heavily on imperialist governments, and often just as importantly relied on multinational corporations (real estate especially) and intellectual networks, which provided in the first case institutional precedent and protocol and in the second rationalization and legitimacy for the pseudo-scientific notion of ‘race.’ Yet, as this ambitious work demonstrates, segregation appeared under every form of government, with and without the help of capitalism. The line betweende facto and de jure was often hard to tell or irrelevant. (One might note here, for example, that, contrary to popular belief, most businesses in the Old South were not forced by law to put up those ‘Whites Only’ signs.) Indeed, there is more than a bit of paradox and irony in this tragic story. And while the late 1900’s saw the rise of powerful movements opposed to segregation, the world’s population is now majority-urban for the first time, and still lives with these awful legacies. Attempts to rollback segregation will have to grapple with this complex and global history. Thankfully, Nightingale has given us a very useful starting point. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Conventional thinking tells us that private school education is better than public schooling in the US. Why else would parents pay the hefty price tag often associate with private education, especially at very elite schools? But, Dr. Christopher Lubienski and Dr. Sarah Lubienski question this assumption in their new book, entitled The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools (University of Chicago Press, 2013). In this publication, the authors use two large-scale datasets on mathematics outcomes to isolate the effects of schooling on children and they find that public schools actually score better than their private school counterparts in this measure when the proper variables are held constant. To explain their findings, Lubienski and Lubienski argue that public school usually have better certified teachers and more often teach with more modern pedagogical methods. While the book does not contend that all public schools are great, the authors would like their findings that show traditional public schools do in fact show positive outcomes to be considered alongside a policy discourse that is increasingly dominated by calls of privatization and autonomy–such as vouchers and charter schools. Dr. Christopher Lubienski joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can follow him and the host of this podcast on Twitter at @CLub_edu and @PoliticsAndEd, respectively. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our everyday lives are saturated with maps. We use maps on our smart phones to help us navigate from place to place. Maps in the newspaper and online show us the spread of disease, the state of the planet, and the conflicts among nations. Susan Schulten‘s Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2012) examines how the very idea of a map radically changed it the nineteenth century. Author Susan Schulten shows the pivotal role maps played in nineteenth-century American life, from helping Americans forge a national identity and better understand their past to showing the pervasiveness of slavery in different parts of the South and the prospect for emancipation. Those with a keen interest in cartography–or even a passing interest–will find her book and this interview fascinating. Professor Schulten has also created an excellent companion site for the book, www.mappingthenation.com. There you will find hi-resolution digital copies of the maps she examines in the book and that we discuss in our interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel Margocsy‘s beautiful new book opens with a trip to Amsterdam by Baron Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, and closes with a shopping spree by Peter the Great. These two trips bookend a series of fascinating forays into the changing world of entrepreneurial science in the early modern Netherlands. Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age (University of Chicago Press, 2014) considers scientific knowledge as a commodity, looking carefully at how the growth of global trade in the Dutch Golden Age shaped anatomy and natural history as commercial practices. Margocsy argues that commercialization stimulated “a debate over the epistemological status of visual facts in natural history & anatomy,” transforming the concept of visual representation in the process. While learning about these debates and transformations, readers are guided on a tour through a world of seashells, forgeries, and wax-filled cadavers, evidence of a commercially-driven proliferation of ways to represent living and dead bodies and a series of heated debates about them. Commercial Visions convincingly demonstrates that paying attention to the commercial aspects of early modern science can inform how we think about early modern circulation, the history of “objectivity,” and the concept of the public sphere. Don’t miss the beautiful color plates nestled in the midst of the book! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Carolyn L. Kane’s new book traces the modern history of digital color, focusing on the role of electronic color in computer art and media aesthetics since 1960. Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code (University of Chicago Press, 2014) places color at the center of media studies, exploring some amazing works of art and technology to understand the changing history of the relationship between color as embodied in machine code and screen interface. Using a methodology called “media archaeology” that is informed by the work of Foucault, Nietzsche, Kittler, Heidegger, Stiegler, and others, Chromatic Algorithms traces a transformation of color from optics to algorithms. The chapters trace a history of synthetic color in Western aesthetics and philosophy, the rise of Day-Glo, the aesthetics of color in video art from the 1960s and 1970s, the technology of color TVs, the connection between color and notions of transcendence and utopia, “democratic color” and Salvador Dalí’s urinated-upon pen, the early history of art/engineering at Bell Labs, the technology of digital infrared visualization, the aesthetics of “Photoshop cinema,” bioart and its glow-in-the-dark bunnies, and the work of some amazing artists including Lillian Schwartz, Jeremy Blake, and many many others. It is a gorgeous and fascinating study of color, technology, visualization, the digital, and beyond. As you work through the book, I highly recommend searching the Web for some of the amazing work described in its chapters. I’m based in Canada and so some of the following links may not work for you: in that case, just try searching on your own for the title: The rock opera Battle for Milkquarious! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zDMhwq3pcA Jeremy Blake, Winchester Redux http://vimeo.com/16485005 Zbigniew RybczyÅ„ski, Tango http://vimeo.com/9033947 Paper Rad: http://www.paperrad.org/ This site has some clips from Lillian Schwartz’z Proxima Centauri: http://lillian.com/kinetic/ You can browse video clips from WGBH’s New Television Workshop here: http://main.wgbh.org/wgbh/NTW/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Philosophy does not have to be stuck in the clouds. It can have relevance in everyday life, for everyday people, and Scott Samuelson attempts to do just that in his book, entitled The Deepest Human Life: An Introduction to Philosophy for Everyone (University of Chicago Press, 2014). Samuelson weaves in a personal narrative from his experience teaching at Kirkwood Community College, Cedar Rapids, Iowa and a deep historical exploration of philosophy. His students provide interesting and everyday lessons that the author forges into the foundation for complex philosophical issues. The book is organized into four sections that each focus on a single question, yet vast question: What is Philosophy? What is Happiness? Is Knowledge of God Possible? and What is the Nature of Good and Evil?. From Socrates, to Pascal, from the Stoics to Epicureans, Samuelson allows for an easier understanding of advanced philosophical discourse, and without watering down the complexity. He joins New Books in Education for the interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After the Second World War, the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs described National Socialism as a triumph of irrationalism and a “destruction of reason.” It has since become commonplace to interpret modern European intellectual history as a prolonged struggle between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The Enlightenment is generally valorized as identical with rationality, mechanism, cosmopolitanism, liberalism, progress, optimism, and secularism, while Romanticism is often connected to holism, irrationality, conservatism, nationalism, myth, pessimism and, eventually, fascism. John Tresch (University of Pennsylvania) questions these dichotomies in his new book The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (University of Chicago Press, 2012). In our interview we discuss what made steam engines Romantic, which technical illusions awaited early nineteenth-century Parisian theatergoers and how Saint-Simonians could envisage future society as a Romantic machine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrea Louise Campbell is the author of Trapped in America’s Safety Net: One Family’s Struggle (University of Chicago Press, 2014). Campbell is professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Trapped in America’s Safety Net sheds light on the reality of means-tested programs in the United States. Following an accident that left her sister-in-law paralyzed, Campbell sees the vast array of federal and California state assistance programs up close. The book highlights the peculiar aspects of these programs, including the burden of asset tests that compel disabled Americans – and others receiving benefits – to liquidate assets and prevents them from saving for the future. The book is at once deeply personal, but also a great overview of how social policy actually works and often fails. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beth Linker is the author of War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America (University of Chicago Press, 2011). As she reveals, the story of individual rehabilitation from war-related injury was intertwined with other political concerns at multiple levels. These century-old accounts matter greatly, as the First World War was that point where modern rehabilitative medicine and social policy was born, with many of the attitudes and aspects of this early response lingering to the present day. Beth’s book is an insightful consideration of the conflicted responses Americans presented to the unanticipated challenges of post-war reconstruction and rehabilitation for the nation’s thousands of veterans, standing in no small way as a cautionary tale as America winds down from its latest conflicts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Michael Osborne offers a new way to think about and practice the history of colonial medicine. Eschewing pan-European or Anglo-centric models of the history of colonial medicine, Osborne’s book focuses on the centrality, transformations, and ultimate demise of naval medicine in France in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Motivating the central arguments and narrative of the book is a concern with place, places, and emplacement, and Osborne explores maritime medical practices and the ecology of disease in French provincial port cities, on ships, in prisons, in hospitals and schools, and beyond. The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France pays special attention to how the study and conception of race, and its connection with health and disease, was formed and reformed in these settings. Readers with a special interest in the relationship between medicine and the military will find much to enjoy here, as will those who come to the book wanting to know more about the maritime history of diseases like Yellow Fever, lead poisoning, and Malaria. There’s also some wonderful storytelling here, including a fascinating account of a book-bomber in Chapter 4. It is a beautifully written account, and it should be required reading for those interested in the history of medicine and healing, of France, of the colonial medical past, and of place and locality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Tresch‘s beautiful new book charts a series of transformations that collectively ushered in a new cosmology in the Paris of the early-mid nineteenth century. The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (University of Chicago Press, 2012) narrates the emergence of a new image of the machine, a new concept of nature, a new theory of knowledge, and a new political orientation through a series of chapters that each use the work of a single figure to open up a world of romantic machines. Part 1 of the book looks at the work of physical scientists whose model of precision experiment and math was transformed by an encounter with romantic philosophy and aesthetics, and introduces the electro-magnetic work of physicist AndreMarie Ampre, the instrumental practices of Prussian geophysical researcher Alexander von Humboldt, and the labor theory of knowledge in relation to the instruments of astronomer and politician Francois Arago. Part 2 looks at the impact of technology on theories of the self and the human, focusing on the fantastic arts and public spectacles featuring new discoveries in optics, mechanics, and natural history. (Readers will find lively discussions of dioramas, hallucinatory opera, symphonies, museums, magic shows, and expositions, here.) Part 3 treats the utopian thinkers and engineer-scientists of the late Restoration and the July Monarchy, looking at religiously-inflected social technologies of conversion, communication, and temporal coordination in the work and thought of Saint-Simon and his followers, printer and literary critic Pierre Leroux’s work and theories, and Auguste Comte’s instruments of thought and paper. It is a rich, elegantly argued work that offers not just a history of science and technology, but also a tracing of the roots of some contemporary continental philosophy, as well. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daryn Lehoux‘s new book will forever change the way you think about garlic and magnets. What Did the Romans Know?: An Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking (University of Chicago Press, 2012) is a fascinating account of the co-production of facts and worlds, taking readers into the sciences of Rome from the first century BC to the second century AD. Masterfully blending approaches from the history and philosophy of science, Lehoux traces the significance of the “threefold cord” of nature, law, and the gods in making up the early Roman world. The chapters use the works of Cicero, Seneca, Galen, Ptolemy, and others to explore topics making up the foundation of a history of Roman science, including the importance of divination to Roman politics and natural knowledge, the relationship between optics and ethics in the Roman world, and the entanglements of law, nature, and witnessing. What Did the Romans Know? also contributes to philosophical debates over the theory-ladenness of observation, scientific and historical realism, and relativism. Lehoux ends his account as an “epistemological coherentist,” suggesting a model for thinking about and with the sciences in history and beyond. On top of all of this, the language of the text sparkles. It’s a wonderfully enjoyable read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mary Terrall‘s new book is a beautifully-written, carefully-researched, and compellingly-argued account of the practices of natural history in the eighteenth-century francophone world. Catching Nature in the Act: Reaumur and the Practice of Natural History in the Eighteenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2014) explores this world via the work of Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur and his vast and varied networks of correspondents, assistants, colleagues, and co-naturalists. As we read, we follow this loose network across the bakeries, gardens, tidepools, hedges, studies, academies, kitchens, poultry yards, specimen collections, and other spaces of quotidian life and their associated practices of natural history. As these men and women observed, chased, collected, dissected, preserved, painted, described, and tested, they practiced the production of knowledge about the natural world as a part of their intimate, daily lives. The chapters of Terrall’s book observe them as they in turn observe aphids, mayflies, sea anemones, chickens, and other creatures as a means to understand larger questions about the nature of generation, metamorphosis, reproduction, and other lived behaviors and processes. They feed material from inside the quills of young pigeon feathers to spiders in order to study spider silk and its commercial potential. They glue glass to cocoons to create windows into the metamorphoses of the butterflies inside. They use hog bristles to turn tiny polyps inside-out and observe how they responded. They draw, they incubate, and they incorporate practices and materials from the physical sciences to do so. Catching Nature in the Act contributes thoughtfully to several interrelated historiographical threads in the history of science – the histories of practice and place, the importance of the household as a space of observation and experiment, the role of networks of correspondence and collaboration, the relationship between natural science and theology – and offers helpful revisions of dominant approaches to each of those historiographies of science and its histories. It is a must-read for historians of science, and a fascinating narrative for any interested reader. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Omar W. Nasim‘s new book, a series of fascinating characters sketch, paint, and etch their way toward a mapping of the cosmos and the human mind. Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2013) examines the history of observation of celestial nebulae in the nineteenth century, exploring the relationships among the acts of seeing, drawing, and knowing in producing visual knowledge about the heavens and its bodies. Observing by Hand treats not just published images, but also argues for the centrality of “working images” to the histories of science and observation, paying special attention to personal drawings in private notebooks as instruments of individual and collective observation. Nasim’s approach blends the history and philosophy of science in a study that informs the histories of astronomy, images, and paperwork, and that emphasizes the importance of the philosophy of mind and its history in shaping this heavenly narrative. His transdisciplinary approach spans several media that include maps and portraits, oil paintings and etchings, private drawings and collectively-produced published images. The book helped me see Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, and the starry night above, with new eyes and a new appreciation for the vision and visioning of nineteenth century astronomical observers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you imagine a gourmet experience, what comes to mind? An elegant restaurant, perhaps, with a single candle flickering at the center of a luminous white tablecloth? Maybe a quartet plays somewhere in the romantic distance, as the waiter slips a perfectly plated appetizer of escargot before you, and you proceed to nuzzle them out of their shells with silver tongs and that dainty fork? Perhaps this isn’t your image. Perhaps yours includes a view of the Pacific shore or the skyline of Manhattan or a wine list as long as actuarial table. But does your image include a taco truck? When Food & Wine magazine declared Roy Choi on of its “Best New Chefs” of 2010 for the food he was serving up in his Kogi BBQ truck, it signaled something like a sea change had happened in our idea of gourmet eating. And that’s the very change that Alison Pearlman explores in her book, Smart Casual: The Transformation of Gourmet Restaurant Style in America (University of Chicago, 2013). As she puts it, “Between 1975 and 2010, the style of gourmet dining in America transformed. Increasingly, restaurants of ‘fine’ dining incorporated food, décor, and other elements formally limited to the ‘casual’ dining experience.” The result, as Pearlman shows us, is a gourmet experience “replete with eroded hierarchies and pointed style contrasts, convergences of haute and ordinary.” And, we might add, taco trucks. In a keen investigation of every element of the dining experience, from menus to molecular gastronomy, Pearlman’s book reveals the surprising nature of what fine dining means for us today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The work of Charles Darwin, together with the writing of associated scholars of society and its organs and organisms, had a particularly global reach in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Marwa Elshakry‘s new book offers a fascinating window into the ways that this work was read and rendered in modern Arabic-language contexts. Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2013) invites us into a late nineteenth-century moment when the notions of “science” and “civilization” mutually transformed one another, and offers a thoughtful and nuanced account of the ways that this played out for scholars working and writing in Syria and Egypt. The early chapters of Elshakry’s book focus on the central role played by popular science journals like Al-Muqtataf (The Digest) in translating and disseminating Darwin’s ideas. We meet Ya’qub Sarruf and Faris Nimr, young teachers at the Syrian Protestant College who were instrumental in translating scientific works into Arabic there and, later, in Egypt. An entire chapter looks closely at Isma’il Mazhar’s work producing the first verbatim translation of Darwin’s Origin of Species into Arabic, but the book also looks well beyond Darwin to consider broader Arabic discourses on the relationship between science and society, as those discourses were shaped by engagements with the work of Herbert Spencer, and many others. Elshakry pays special attention to the ways that this story is embedded in the histories of print culture, the politics of empire, and debates over educational reform, materialism, and socialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and concludes with a consideration of the continuing reverberations of these issues into late twentieth century Egypt and beyond. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the entanglements of science, translation, and empire in the modern world, and it will change the way we understand the place of Arabic interlocutors in the history of modern science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

During the Great Fire of London in September 1666, Samuel Pepys went out to the garden and dug some holes. There he placed his documents, some wine, and “my parmezan cheese” for safekeeping as the buildings and streets of his city were licked and then consumed by flames. We know this thanks to a diary in which he recorded these burnings and burials. In his new book, Richard Yeo contextualizes the diary-keeping and document-organizing practices of men like Pepys within a rich, detailed account of notes and note-taking among early modern English virtuosi. Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science (University of Chicago Press, 2014) offers a fascinating glimpse into practices of information management as they allowed English scholars to bridge text and memory, print media and manuscripts, journals and commonplace books, reading and observation, the individual and the collective. Yeo’s book explores the relationship between early modern methods of collecting and storing information and the larger project of Baconian natural history, paying special attention to the ways that Bacon and several Fellows of the Royal Society used notebooks and other note-keeping technologies. Beyond this, Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science is also deeply embedded in the history of memory and its (dis)contents, and engages (especially in a chapter on Samuel Hartlib and his circle) the historiography of epistolary networks and early modern histories of correspondence. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Social phenomena that some people like to call ‘religion’ has long shaped Chinese culture. In the twentieth century, defining the boundaries of what constitutes ‘religion’ has been central to the construction of a modern nation. In this far reaching book, The Religious Question in Modern China (University of Chicago Press, 2011), authors Vincent Goossaert, directeur d’etudes in Chinese religions at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, and David A. Palmer, professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong, help us tread the complex field of phenomena where ‘religion’ is the central question. The question is answered again and again by intellectuals, politicians, and practitioners each seeking their own objective in classifying particular social activities as religious or not. The authors lead us through the debates revolving around what various practices entailed and if they merit the classification ‘religion,’ such as athletic practices, lay Buddhist activity, traditional medicine, Confucian movements, self-cultivation, evangelic Christianity, dietary practices, and Falun Gong. Of course, the answer depends on who you asked and when. This rich book offers a detailed analysis of Chinese questions about religion, secularity, and modernity in a global world. It has garnered wide recognition and made an important contribution to the study of Chinese religions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jamie Cohen-Cole‘s new book explores the emergence of a discourse of creativity, interdisciplinarity, and the “open mind” in the context of Cold War American politics, education, and society. The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (University of Chicago Press, 2014) considers how open-mindedness took on a political role (as a model of citizenship contrasted with that of totalitarian states), an academic role (as a model of a scientist or thinker), and a broader role as a model of human nature in the mid-late twentieth century. Cohen-Cole’s book not only offers a fascinating glimpse into the development of mid-century psychology and cognitive science, but also shows the deep connections among what was happening in what might otherwise be considered separate social and political spaces that include laboratories, classrooms, cocktail parties, conferences, academic departments, and various physical and textual loci of political and social engagement. It is exceptionally clear in its narrative structure, prose style, and argument, and it offers a fresh perspective on how we understand the co-creation of science and society in Cold War America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Abena Dove Osseo-Asare‘s wonderful new book is a thoughtful, provocative, and balanced account of the intersecting histories and practices of drug research in modern Ghana, South Africa, and Madagascar. Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2014) tells the stories of six plants, all sourced in African countries, that competing groups of plant specialists have tried to transform into pharmaceuticals since the 1880s. The leaves and roots and seeds of the book’s narrative collectively map the contours of a story that emerges from a crucial and germinal tension: on the one hand, much of the history of the plant sciences in these African spaces is motivated by a race for patents and scientific credit; at the same time, the mobility of plants across the borders of Osseo-Asare’s study has complicated efforts to assign priority of discovery to individuals or groups, and in fact challenges the very notion of a “traditional” or “indigenous” body of knowledge in the first place. Simultaneously a carefully situated ethnography and a history informed by a material archive that encompasses pages and petals, the book explores that tension in a critical assessment of what it means to talk about “African” science or “local” knowledge. Bitter Roots will deservedly have a wide audience in African studies, science studies, and the histories of medicine, pharmacy, and botany. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nicholas Carnes is the author of White-Collar Government: The Hidden Role of Class in Economic Policy Making (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Carnes is an assistant professor of public policy in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. There is surprisingly little in the research literature on the link between social class and legislative behavior. For a topic that seems so ripe for investigation, Carnes’ data collection and analysis open new ground and answer pressing questions. He shows that formerly blue collar workers who serve in Congress behave differently than formerly white collar workers. Blue collar workers are in the extreme minority in numbers, meaning their efforts to pass legislation that tilts towards the working class are often stymied. Carnes offers fresh insight into why this matters for representation more generally and several recommendations for how to rectify this in the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sarah Anzia is the author of Timing and Turnout: How Off-Cycle Elections Favor Organized Groups (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Anzia is assistant professor of public policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC-Berkeley. Why are some elections held in November and others in May, June, or July? Why are some elections timed to correspond with the congressional schedule, but others on odd years? When elections occur has long been known to strongly relate to voter turnout, but little research has pushed beyond this simple conclusion. Anzia’s book explores the motivations behind moving local elections from “on-cycle” – held to correspond with presidential or congressional elections in November — to “off-cycle”. She explores the history of the issue and the ways Progressive Era reformers saw advantages in holding municipal elections separate from national and state elections. She tracks that history up to today with excellent data on the relationship between when an election is held and certain policy outcomes. She finds that interest groups stand to benefit from off-cycle election. Teacher pay is substantially higher in school districts that hold elections off-cycle, rather than on. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The pages of Matthew C. Hunter‘s wonderful new book are full of paper fish, comets, sleepy-eyed gazes, drunk ants, and a cast full of fascinating (and sometimes hilarious) members of the experimental community of Restoration London. Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London (University of Chicago Press, 2013) maps the visual traces of drawing, collecting, and building practices between 1650 and 1720 to narrate the emergence of a particular kind of intelligence that was formed by visualization techniques. Hunter’s book pays close attention to the work of Robert Hooke while situating Hooke within a community of painters, architects, writers, customs brokers, telescope makers, and other fashioners of early modern experiments of all sorts. A significant contribution to both the histories of science and of art, Wicked Intelligence pays equal attention to the flat spaces of the imaged page and the built spaces of the museum, the city, and the “laboratory of the mind.” It is a beautifully written book based on a gorgeously weird archive. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Americans are moving to the ocean. Every year, more and more Americans move to–or are born in– the coasts and fewer and fewer remain in–or are born in–the interior. The United States began as a coastal nation; it’s become one again. According to John R. Gillis‘s provocative new book The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History (University of Chicago Press, 2012), the same may be said of the entire world. Humans, he says, started–or rather quickly became after they evolved in eastern Africa 200,000 ago–a coastal species. We stayed very close to the oceans and seas until the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago. Thereafter, we moved into various interiors. Now, he says, we are moving back to the shore in force. We are transforming it and, alas, destroying much of it. Gillis calls on us to think of the shore not as a place to settle, but a habitat that is essential to our future prosperity and, one might say, survival. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Parapsychology. You may have heard of it. You know, telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis. Spoon-bending and that sort of thing. If you have heard of it, you probably think of it as a pseudoscience. And indeed it is. But it wasn’t always so. There was a time in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when practitioners and advocates of parapsychology abounded. William James, one of the very founders of modern psychological science, was a fan. Most of the founders of modern psychology, of course, weren’t fans. They considered the parapsychologists frauds peddling cheap tricks to gullible people. These con-men, they said, gave true psychological science a bad name. There was only one thing to do: unmask them. As Michael Pettit shows in his fascinating book The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America (University of Chicago Press, 2013), that is precisely what the scientific psychologists did, or at least tried to do. They worked hard to create a firm boundary between their legitimate practice and what they considered illegitimate trickery. In so doing, they developed a science of deception, one that had far reaching implications for science, the law, and commerce in the United States. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The notion of secularism is something that has a ubiquitous presence in contemporary society. And while there is a general everyday use of this term, meaning ‘not religious,’ the understanding of this term has shifted throughout time. In Secularism in Antebellum America (University Of Chicago Press, 2011) we are presented with a complex narrative that examines the vocabularies, styles of reasoning, and imaginings of social life that enabled people to engage “True Religion.” John L. Modern, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College, employs secularism as an analytical lens to examine different aspects of modernity, especially whether people defined themselves as religious or not. Rather than seeking the causes of secularism, Modern offers a thick genealogical investigation of “novel experiences” or the local effects of secularism, which he found in evangelicalism, Unitarianism, phrenology, spiritualism, early anthropology, and prison reform. This rich book about nineteenth century U.S. religious history is too expansive to try to summarize and in our conversation we barely scratched the surface of the amazing history Modern offers. During the interview we discussed Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, metaphors, ghosts, spirituality, machines, ethnographic inquiry, Sing Sing Penitentiary, personal agency versus structural power, technology, storytelling, Vinyl Prayers, and John Murray Spear’s sexual encounter with the New Motive Power. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hallam Stevens‘s new book is a rich and fascinating ethnographic and historical account of the transformations wrought by integrating statistical and computational methods and materials into the biological sciences. Life Out Of Sequence: A Data-Driven History of Bioinformatics (University of Chicago Press, 2013) follows the data through the physical and virtual spaces from which the “new epistemic things” of bioinformatics have emerged. As computers were introduced into biology, they changed the nature of biological questions. Hallam traces the resulting reshaping of the practices, problems, and objects of biology, guiding readers through the pipeline to watch the transformation from material to digital as biological samples move through computational programs, get translated into ontologies, and become data. The histories of biology, computing, database technology, and bioinformatic imaging all play a role in this wonderfully trans-disciplinary story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new collection of wonderfully engaging and provocative set of essays on Darwin and Darwinians, Robert J. Richards explores the history of biology and so much more. The eight essays collected in Was Hitler a Darwinian?: Disputed Questions in the History of Evolutionary Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2013), include reflections on Darwin’s theories of natural selection and divergence, Ernst Haeckel’s life and work, the evolutionary ideas of Herbert Spencer, the linguistic theories of August Schleicher, and the historical tendency to relate Hitler’s Nazism to Darwinian evolutionary theory. Individually, the essays are models of close and careful reading of the documentary traces of the life and work of Darwin, Haeckel, and others, and include some exceptionally affecting and tragic moments. Many of them touch on evolutionary theory’s moral character, its roots in Romanticism, and its conception of mankind. In addition to offering a fascinating set of case studies in the history of biology, the essays and appendices also collectively raise some important questions about how historians understand the past and bring it into narrative existence. What kind of thing is the past? What sets the history of science apart from other historical disciplines? Is it reasonable to use contemporary science to help construe the past? What is a scientific theory and where is it located? What does it mean to ask (and what might it look like to carefully answer) a question like, Was Hitler a Darwinian? The essays in Richards’ collection are wonderfully reflective considerations that reward the time and attention of both specialists in the history of biology and thoughtful general readers alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joshua Mitchell is the author of Tocqueville in Arabia: Dilemmas in a Democratic Age (University of Chicago Press 2013). Mitchell is professor of political science in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. He has written several previous books including: The Fragility of Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy, and the American Future (University of Chicago Press, 1995). Mitchell writes as a political theorist but also as a memoirist. He weaves his personal history in the region with his experiences in 2005 teaching Tocqueville in the Georgetown campus in Doha, Qatar. What he produces then is both a re-introduction to Democracy in America, but also an introduction to a country and a generation of students. This is a book of theory, of travel, but also of pedagogy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Angela Creager‘s deeply researched and elegantly written new book is a must-read account of the history of science in twentieth-century America. Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine (University of Chicago Press, 2013) traces a history of radioisotopes as military and civilian objects, for experimentation and therapeutic use, from the 1930s through the late twentieth century. Creager follows the emergence of a political and economic market for radioisotopes, looking carefully at their use as controversial political instruments, as representations of the benefits of atomic energy for US citizens, and as commodities. After six chapters that trace these broader contexts of the production and circulation of radioisotopes, the second half of the book offers a set of fascinating case studies that explore representative users and uses of the technology in biochemistry, molecular biology, medicine, and ecology. Aspects of the story touch on the history of scientific and medical research using human and animal subjects, the early history of radiation therapy, and the history of ecology and environmental science. Not only is it a historiographically important and meticulously crafted work based on exhaustive research, but it’s also a great set of stories. The pages of Life Atomic are full of guinea pigs, scientific vaudeville, and stories and characters from many different fields of the modern life sciences, expertly weaving them together into a compelling set of arguments. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the podcast over the last few months, we’ve heard from Phil Krestedemas, Ron Schmidt, Shannon Gleeson about various aspects of immigration and immigrants in the US. Adding to this impressive list is Natalie Masuoka and Jane Junn are authors of The Politics of Belonging: Race, Public Opinion, and Immigration (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Masuoka is assistant professor of political science at Tufts University. Junn is professor of political science at the University of Southern California and has previously published Education and Democratic Citizenship in America (University of Chicago Press, 1996). Masuoka and Junn marshal a variety of data sources to unpack how immigrants in the US form political identity and beliefs. They argue that the relative placement of immigrant groups and the unique history and experiences of racialization by group as important factors related to public opinion on immigration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The story begins with Davy Crockett and his hunting dogs chasing a bear in 1826. The bear gets caught in an earthquake crack, an effect of the great Mississippi Valley earthquakes of 1811-1812 that are now collectively known as the New Madrid earthquakes. In The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Conevery Bolton Valencius beautifully narrates a riveting tale of the production and forgetting of knowledge surrounding these earthquakes, massively disruptive events that liquefied the soil in much of the Mississippi floodplain and briefly made the Mississippi River flow backward. Valencius situates these events in the New Madrid seismic zone within their past, present, and possible futures. We are treated to the perspectives of those who experienced the quakes and their transformation of New Madrid into a hinterland, from river travelers and writers to the “Shawnee Prophets” Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa. Because of the wide range of historical actors treated in the book, the account is of relevance not only to the histories of early American science and environmental studies, but also to the histories of religious practice and native American politics and culture. Undoubtedly a rich and fascinating story, The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes is also a special pleasure to read, thanks to the warm (and often very funny) asides and anecdotes with which Valencius peppers the book. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices