Books in the Science.Culture series

In this classic of science history, Shapin takes into account the culture - the variety of beliefs, practices, and influences - that in the 1600s shaped the origins of the modern scientific worldview.

Establishing the fundamental importance of geography in both the generation and the consumption of scientific knowledge, this work does so with historical examples of the many places where science has been practised.

"This is a book about waste transformed, and reuse, repurposing, and recycling -- and how we consume the products of our industry. Through the story of shoddy, Hanna Rose Shell takes up these provocative topics and offers a new way for us to think critically about them. Shoddy is a global potpourri of textile waste manufactured into a saleable commodity: for example, wool that has been sorted, scoured, stuffed into rag-grinding machines, and remade into new clothes and textile and upholstery products. Both of-the-moment and truly historical, the book sends us back to West Yorkshire, 1812 and the birth of the commodification of waste through processing, before pushing us forward again with interviews and images from shoddy towns, waste dumps, textile labs, and rag shredding factories in the US and UK. Along the way we see exposed the political, ethical, environmental, and other ways shoddy has transformed lives and landscapes"--

An account of how small machines and consumer goods that originated in Europe and North America became objects of everyday use in India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It examines the assimilation and appropriation of bicycles, rice mills, sewing machines, and typewriters in India.

In 1965 English scientist James Lovelock had a flash of insight: the Earth is not just teeming with life; the Earth, in some sense, is life. In this book, the author uses Gaia and its history, its supporters and detractors, to illuminate the nature of science itself.

How did one create and maintain for oneself the persona of scientist at the beginning of the twentieth century? What special conditions bore upon scientific women, and on married women in particular? This book provides a composite picture not only of the making of Marie Curie, but the making of modern science itself.

In Human-Built World, Thomas P. Hughes restores to technology the richness and depth it deserves by writing its intellectual history.

Based on the observation that the enterprise of science is, and has been, directed toward two distinct but frequently conflated ends - doing and knowing, this title considers how science as such has evolved, and how it has marshaled itself to make sense of the world. It is designed for aficionados, as well as historians of science.