Between 1800 and 1870 meteorology emerged as both a legitimate science and a government service in America. Challenging the widely held assumption that meteorologists were mere ''data-gatherers'' and that U.S. scientists were inferior to their European counterparts, James Rodger Fleming shows how the 1840s debate over the nature and causes of ......
The Boott Cotton Mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, 1835-1955
Studies of American industry frequently cite Lowell, Massachusetts, as an early model for business practices. Scholars have sought to explain the city's rise to prominence, the impact of its textile mills on workers and on commerce, and its part in regional development and American prosperity. Laurence Gross looks beyond these issues. Focusing on ......
Information Processing for the Pentagon, 1962-1986
Over the course of several decades, the Pentagon's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) helped transform computing from a cumbersome enterprise based on batch processing to the instantly interactive, graphically rich, highly intelligent computing of today. With the purpose of improving command and control systems for the military, IPTO ......
For nearly 600 years, from the battles of the early fourteenth century to the dropping of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima, firearms derived from gunpowder and other chemicals defined the frightful extent of war. The apparatus and materials used in World War I would have been familiar to our remote ancestors. In this classic work, first published in ......
Awarded the Dexter Prize for Best Book in the History of Technology ''This truly outstanding book will become required reading in the history of technology. The story of steel is important in its own right, and Thomas Misa writes with remarkable clarity and succinctness . . . The emphasis upon user-producer interactions allows Misa to focus on the ......
''Highly readable and exquisitely informative. Rossiter's documentation of this gloomy chapter in the history of women striving to make a place for themselves in science serves as a pungent antidote for questions concerning the fairness of affirmative action.''Journal of American History''What we have here is a remarkable example of historian as ......
A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe
The first volume of Cosmos, his five-volume survey of the universe, appeared in 1845, though Humboldt had labored on the entire work for nearly half a century. He scrupulously sent sections of the work to other experts for suggestions and corrections. The last volume, put together from his notes after his death, appeared in 1861. The volumes were ......
''More than anyone else, [Rosenberg] has moved medicine from the periphery of the historical enterprise to a position much nearer the center. Around the world he is recognized as the leading medical historian of the late twentieth century.''Ronald L. Numbers, Isis In its original edition, No Other Gods offered a pioneering and influential ......
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 ......
