People dreamed of cosmic exploration -- winged spaceships and lunar voyages; space stations and robot astronauts -- long before it actually happened. Space and the American Imagination traces the emergence of space travel in the popular mind, its expression in science fiction, and its influence on national space programs.Space exploration ......
Although the idea that all human beings are descended from Adam is a longstanding conviction in the West, another version of this narrative exists: human beings inhabited the Earth before, or alongside, Adam, and their descendants still occupy the planet.In this engaging and provocative work, David N. Livingstone traces the history of the idea of ......
The science of ballistics has a long history and starts with one question: How does a projectile move through the air? Even before physicists worked that one out, military engineers had been tinkering with ballistic devices for centuries. The trebuchet of the Middle Ages has given way to rocket power, and the science of ballistics has evolved to ......
Commonly translated as ''The SelfTaught Philosopher'' or ''The Improvement of Human Reason,'' IbnTufayl's story Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan inspired debates about autodidacticism in a range of historical fields from classical Islamic philosophy through Renaissance humanism and the European Enlightenment. Avner BenZaken's account of how the text traveled ......
Technologies of Tracking and the Making of Modern Wildlife
American wildlife biologists first began fitting animals with radio transmitters in the 1950s. By the 1980s the practice had proven so useful to scientists and nonscientists alike that it became global. Wired Wilderness is the first booklength study of the origin, evolution, use, and impact of these nowcommonplace tracking technologies.Combining ......
Jose Celestino Mutis and the Dawn of Natural History in the New World
One of the earliest New World naturalists, José Celestino Mutis began his professional life as a physician in Spain and ended it as a scientist and natural philosopher in modernday Colombia. Drawing on new translations of Mutis's nearly forgotten writings, this fascinating story of scientific adventure in eighteenthcentury South America ......
Navies have always been technologically sophisticated, from the ancient world's trireme galleys and the Age of Sail's shipsoftheline to the dreadnoughts of World War I and today's nuclearpowered aircraft carriers and submarines. Yet each large technical innovation has met with resistance and even hostility from those officers who, adhering to ......
Nature, God, and Human Understanding from the Middle Ages to Early Modern Europe
Change in human understanding of the natural world during the early modern period marks one of the most important episodes in intellectual history. This era is often referred to as the scientific revolution, but recent scholarship has challenged traditional accounts. Here, in Reconfiguring the World, Margaret J. Osler treats the development of the ......
