Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900
In this pioneering study of the first major challenges to Darwinism, Bowler examines the completing theories of evolution, identifies their intellectual origins, and describes the process by which the modern concept of evolution emerged.
From about 1600 to 1800 scientists and mariners made increasingly sophisticated attempts to understand the earth's magnetic field and use it in navigation. Europeans had long understood the difference between magnetic and true north, but why did it vary as one traversed the sea? Could this variation be used to pinpoint longitude? Drawing on a ......
Incremental Technology in Twentieth-Century America
The commonly accepted history of FM radio is one of the twentieth century's iconic sagas of invention, heroism, and tragedy. Edwin Howard Armstrong created a system of wideband frequency-modulation radio in 1933. The Radio Corporation of America (RCA), convinced that Armstrong's system threatened its AM empire, failed to develop the new technology ......
This comprehensive treatment should appeal to not only specialists but anyone who is interested in how diagnoses of mental illness have evolved over the past seven decades-from unwanted and often imposed labels to resources that lead to valued mental health treatments and social services.
Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England
The draining of the Fens in eastern England was one of the largest engineering projects in seventeenth-century Europe. A series of Dutch and English ""projectors,"" working over several decades and with the full support of the Crown, transformed hundreds of thousands of acres of putatively barren wetlands into dry, arable farmland. The drainage ......
"This work considers the spectrum of face recognition from face blindness to super-recognizers and the influence of face evaluation on race, gender, class and ability judgments"--
The Emergence of Ornithology as a Scientific Discipline, 1760-1850
Discovering Birds, Paul Lawrence Farber rejects the view that eighteenth-century natural history disappeared with the rise of nineteenth-century biology. In this penetrating case study of the history of ornithology, Farber demonstrates interesting continuities: as natural history evolved into individual sciences (botany, geology, and zoology) and ......
Can a Scientist Really Be a Believer?: A Geneticist Responds to Francis
In his bestselling book, "The Language of God", Francis Collins attempted to harmonise the findings of scientific research with Christian belief. This title presents a point-by-point rebuttal of "The Language of God", arguing that there is no scientifically acceptable evidence to support belief in a personal God and much that discredits it.
For most of the 19th and much of the 20th centuries, railroads dominated American transportation. They transformed life and captured the imagination. Yet by 1907 railroads had also become the largest cause of violent death in the country, that year claiming the lives of nearly twelve thousand passengers, workers, and others. In Death Rode the ......