New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

A new idea of the future emerged in eighteenth-century France. With the development of modern biological, economic, and social engineering, the future transformed from being predetermined and beyond significant human intervention into something that could be dramatically affected through actions in the present. In The Time of Enlightenment: Constructing the Future in France, 1750 to Year One (Univ...

As we mark the one-year anniversary of the COIVD-19 pandemic, take the time to listen to this discussion of previous efforts to fight yellow fever, cholera, and plague pandemics. Lukas Engelmann and Christos Lynteris’s Sulfuric Utopias: A History Maritime Fumigation (MIT Press, 2020) tells the story of the international dream of stopping the spread of infectious disease in global shipping networks...

Contemporary media leads us more than ever to an ‘acting at a distance,’ an acting entangled with the materiality of communication and the mediality of transmission. Action at a Distance (Meson Press, 2020) this crucial phenomenon thereby introducing urgent questions of human interaction, the binding and breaking of time and space, and the entanglement of the material and the immaterial. Three viv...

In 2015, the Islamic State released a video of men smashing sculptures in Iraq’s Mosul Museum as part of a mission to cleanse the world of idolatry. The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet (University of Chicago Press, 2020) unpacks three key facets of that event: the status and power of images, the political importance of museums, and the efficacy of videos in furthering an ideological ag...

An Organ of Murder: Crime, Violence, and Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century America (Rutgers UP, 2021) explores the origins of both popular and elite theories of criminality in the nineteenth-century United States, focusing in particular on the influence of phrenology. In the United States, phrenology shaped the production of medico-legal knowledge around crime, the treatment of the criminal within...

Ann Blair and Kaspar von Greyerz have edited an outstanding volume that breaks important new ground in the history of early modern science and religion. As the contributors to this volume demonstrate, the long-standing discussion of natural theology gave way in the mid-seventeenth century to a new conversation about physico-theology, a distinctive genre of science and religion writing that emphasi...

In 1524, Pope Clement VII gave two condemned criminals to his physician to test a promising new antidote. After each convict ate a marzipan cake poisoned with deadly aconite, one of them received the antidote, and lived—the other died in agony. In sixteenth-century Europe, this and more than a dozen other accounts of poison trials were committed to writing. Alisha Rankin tells their little-known s...

Normally we write blogposts that try to convince you to listen to a conversation with an author about their fascinating book. In the time of COVID-19, it doesn't seem necessary to have to sell you on why you should listen to this podcast. Suffice it to say that Mitchell Hammond’s excellent survey of a dozen deadly diseases is a must-read primer to make sense of epidemic history. In Epidemics and t...

Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation (Duke University Press, 2018) presents a multi-species ethnography of orangutans and humans that probes the shared susceptibilities of both species in the face of future extinction. In a series of provocative chapters, the book interweaves intimate entanglements in the workings of an orangutan rehabilitation centre with reflecti...

How did telecommunications shape Victorian London? In Serving a Wired World London's Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital Katie Hindmarch-Watson, an Assistant Professor in history at Johns Hopkins University, tells the history of London through the lenses of technology, gender, class, and sexuality. The book offers a rethinking of liberal subjectivity and the city at...

Prison abolition and decarceration are increasingly debated, but it is often without taking into account the largest exodus of people from carceral facilities in the twentieth century: the closure of disability institutions and psychiatric hospitals. Decarcerating Disability (2020, University of Minnesota Press) provides a much-needed corrective, combining a genealogy of deinstitutionalization wit...

Listen to this interview of David Payne, who is Chief Careers Editor at Nature. We talk about high quality writing, about the gracious community of scientists, and about diversity, diversity, diversity. Interviewer : "What is the one thing you hope, for sure, that every piece of Careers content will achieve?" David Payne : "Oh, that's a question, isn't it? You know what, I think it is about emotio...

John Heilbron, professor of history and vice-chancellor emeritus of the University of California, Berkeley, is one of our most distinguished - and prolific - historians of science. His latest book, The Ghost of Galileo In a Forgotten Painting from the English Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2021), records how, during a tour of an English country house, he stumbled across what might be the earl...

In the Anthropocene, the thawing of frozen earth due to global warming has drawn worldwide attention to permafrost. Contemporary scientists define permafrost as ground that maintains a negative temperature for at least two years. But where did this particular conception of permafrost originate, and what alternatives existed? The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet S...

Of all forms of alternative medicine, chiropractic is the one that is most generally accepted. In the UK, for instance, chiropractors are regulated by statute and even have their own ‘Royal College of Chiropractic’. In the US, chiropractic’s country of origin, most chiropractors carry the title ‘doctor’ and many consumers believe they are medically trained. Despite this high level of acceptance, c...

John M. Janzen's Health in a Fragile State: Science, Sorcery, and Spirit in the Lower Congo (Wisconsin University Press, 2019) offers a granular and insightful view of the state of healthcare services in the Manianga region of the Lower Congo (Democratic Republic of Congo), and examines the extent to which said services are able to improve the health of the communities that inhabit this region.  T...

Today on New Books in History, Dr. Evan Friss, associate professor of history at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia in the US to talk about The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s (University of Chicago Press, 2015). This book was originally released in 2015 by the University of Chicago press and we are chatting on the occasion of its paperback release in January....

Today I talked to Ming-Hui Huang about her book (coauthored with Roland T. Rust), The Feeling Economy: How Artificial Intelligence Is Creating the Era of Empathy (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021) This episode covers the movement of the economy from brawn to brains to hearts. Put another way, the focus here is on the movement from the Physical Economy (farming, factories, etc.) to the Thinking Economy to...

Listen to this interview of Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, creators of the website newlearningonline.com and also professors at the College of Education, University of Illinois. We talk about monastic instruction in the sixth century, we talk about textbook learning in the sixteenth century, and we talk about cybersecurity education in the twenty-first century, but overall we talk about imbalances...

Alzheimer’s disease, a haunting and harrowing ailment, is one of the world’s most common causes of death. Alzheimer’s lingers for years, with patients’ outward appearance unaffected while their cognitive functions fade away. Patients lose the ability to work and live independently, to remember and recognize. There is still no proven way to treat Alzheimer’s because its causes remain unknown. Mind...

An exposé of the corruption of medicine by the pharmaceutical industry at every level, from exploiting the vulnerable destitute for drug testing, through manipulation of research data, to disease mongering and promoting drugs that do more harm than good. Authors, Professor Jon Jureidini and Dr Leemon McHenry, made critical contributions to exposing the scientific misconduct in two infamous trials...

Ronald Deibert is a professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto and the Director of The Citizen Lab, a public interest research organization that uncovers privacy and human rights abuses on the internet. In his latest book, Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society (House of Anansi Press, 2020), Deibert unites a growing corpus of academic literature on the perils of surveill...

Digital dualism, or a sharp division between online and offline activity as "virtual" or "real" has long been a feature of liturgical studies and discussions around worship gatherings for theorists and practitioners alike. Teresa Berger's new book @Worship: Liturgical Practices in Digital Worlds (Routledge, 2017) provides a manifesto for more nuanced thinking about digital mediation, materiality,...

Would your dog eat you if you died? What are face mites? Why do clowns creep us out? In this illuminating collection of grisly true science stories, journalist Erika Engelhaupt, the writer of National Geographic’s highly acclaimed Gory Details blog, shares the answers to these questions and many more. Gory Details: Adventures from the Dark Side of Science (National Geographic, 2020) explores the s...

Based on a viral article, the gripping medical mystery story of Ron Davis, a world-class Stanford geneticist who has put his career on the line to find the cure for chronic fatigue syndrome, the disease killing his son. For the past six years, Whitney Dafoe has been confined to a bedroom in the back of his parents' home, unable to walk, to eat, to speak. The sound of music causes him pain. At one...