New Books in the History of Science

Andrew Wright Hurley talks about the life and afterlife of the Prussian explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, a man whose reputation has shifted to reflect the changing cultures of Australia and Germany over the past 160 years. Hurley is an associate professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney. He’s the author of Ludwig Leichhardt’s Ghosts: The Strange Career of a Traveling Myth (Camden House, 2018).After the renowned Prussian scientist and explorer Ludwig Leichhardt left the Australian frontier in 1848 on an expedition to cross the continent, he disappeared without a trace. Andrew Hurley's book complicates that view by undertaking an afterlife biography of "the Humboldt of Australia." Although Leichhardt's remains were never located, he has been sought and textually "found" many times over, particularly in Australia and Germany. He remains a significant presence, a highly productive ghost who continues to "haunt" culture.Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Violet Moller has written a narrative history of the transmission of books from the ancient world to the modern. In The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found (Doubleday, 2019), Moller traces the histories of migration of three ancient authors, Euclid, Ptolemy and Galen, from ancient Alexandria in 500 to Syria and Constantinople, to Baghdad in 800, and then to Renaissance Venice in the 15th century. Moller demonstrates how tenuous were the chances of such ancient works’ survival, from the depredations of invading armies to the hazards of fire and flooding, to the problems of translation through multiple languages over the centuries. The migration of ancient texts from Greece to the Middle East and back to medieval Europe is a fascinating story of how knowledge was preserved when certain conditions were met, such as political stability, the willingness of itinerant scholarly “manuscript hunters” to risk life and limb to find obscure, ancient texts, and the openness to tolerate and embrace knowledge derived from other cultures and civilizations. Moller’s book is the story of how the texts upon which the modern world was built were acquired through fortuitous accident and scholarly diligence.Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vanessa Heggie talks about the history of biomedical research in extreme environments. Heggie is a Fellow of the Institute for Global Innovation at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Higher and Colder: A History of Extreme Physiology and Exploration(University of Chicago Press, 2019).During the long twentieth century, explorers went in unprecedented numbers to the hottest, coldest, and highest points on the globe. Taking us from the Himalaya to Antarctica and beyond, Higher and Colder presents the first history of extreme physiology, the study of the human body at its physical limits. Each chapter explores a seminal question in the history of science, while also showing how the apparently exotic locations and experiments contributed to broader political and social shifts in twentieth-century scientific thinking.Unlike most books on modern biomedicine, Higher and Colder focuses on fieldwork, expeditions, and exploration, and in doing so provides a welcome alternative to laboratory-dominated accounts of the history of modern life sciences. Though centered on male-dominated practices—science and exploration—it recovers the stories of women’s contributions that were sometimes accidentally, and sometimes deliberately, erased. Engaging and provocative, this book is a history of the scientists and physiologists who face challenges that are physically demanding, frequently dangerous, and sometimes fatal, in the interest of advancing modern science and pushing the boundaries of human ability.Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Can science be seductive? According to Tita Chico, the answer is a resounding yes. In her new book, The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment(Stanford University Press, 2018), Dr. Chico’s new book upends the traditional, modern dichotomies which enforce strict separations between literature and science. Rather than solely bound to rigorous, self-effacing protocols, scientific practice is instead revealed to be deeply tethered to imaginative, figurative, and aesthetic epistemologies. Much like science, literature produces its own forms of knowledge about the world – for, as Dr. Chico puts it, they are epistemological siblings. This is a book that will interest anyone seeking to question, historicize, and expand the meaning of scientific knowledge by way of recovering its early modern capaciousness. Not only did natural philosophers also write poetry, but natural philosophy could be poetic as well. Readers interested in exploring the possibilities of metaphor, figuration, the imagination, and aesthetics in science will find fertile ground in this book; whilst those seeking to engage in generative conversations about problems like objectivity, truth, and fact will not walk away disappointed either. The Experimental Imagination is, in sum, not only a very rich book, but a book that will surely generate many enriching conversations in e.g. the fields of literary studies, history of science, feminist STS, and eighteenth-century studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John D. Hawks talks about new developments in paleoanthropology – the discovery of a new hominid species Homo Naledi in South Africa, the Neanderthal ancestry of many human populations, and the challenge of rethinking anthropological science’s relationship with indigenous peoples and the general public. Hawks is the Vilas-Borghesi Achievement Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is author (with Lee Berger) of Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story (National Geographic, 2017).Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Could cancer be a contagious disease? Although this possibility might seem surprising to many of us, it has a long history. In fact, efforts to develop a cancer vaccine drew more money than the Human Genome Project. In his first book, MIT historian of science Robin Wolfe Scheffler takes readers through the twists and turns of the American effort to identify human cancer viruses— a search which made fundamental contributions to molecular biology. In this podcast, we discuss how this was an effort which raises fundamental questions regarding how we think about disease in the laboratory and the legislature.Dr. Robin Scheffler’s book is called A Contagious Cause: The American Hunt for Cancer Viruses and the Rise of Molecular Medicine(University of Chicago Press, 2019).Dr. Dorian Deshauer is a psychiatrist, historian, and assistant professor at the University of Toronto. He is associate editor for the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Canada’s leading peer-reviewed general medical journal and is one of the hosts of CMAJ Podcasts, a medical podcast for doctors and researchers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Historian of Science Philip W. Clements discusses the 1963 American Mount Everest Expedition. His book, Science in an Extreme Environment: The American Mount Everest Expedition, is now out with University of Pittsburgh Press (2018).Part I, originally posted in November 2017, focuses on the goals and events of the expedition. Part II offers new material from the interview in which Clements discusses the expedition party’s scientific findings and treatment of local Sherpas. It also discusses the expedition’s broader relevance to the study of environmental history and climate change.Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel Nemser’s Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico(University of Texas Press, 2017) examines the long history of how Spanish imperial rule depended upon spatial concentration – the gathering of people and things into centralized spaces – to control populations and consolidate power. Through four case studies spanning nearly 300 years of Spanish rule in colonial Mexico, Nemser illustrates how different modes of concentration -- centralized towns, disciplinary institutions, segregated neighborhoods, and general collections – reflected the prerogatives and imperatives of domination and expropriation. Compellingly, Infrastructures of Race argues that these spatial infrastructures and strategies were central and instrumental in the creation of racial identities and their inscription upon colonial subjects. Through designed and engineered spaces, racial identities were lived, sensed, and experienced, and as the built environment faded into barely noticeable infrastructure, race as well became naturalized. Infrastructures of Race provides essential historical background for present-day interrogations of how infrastructures – from aged water pipes to search engine algorithms – reinforce persistent racial inequalities. The challenges of de-racializing these often unnoticed foundations require a deep understanding of how race became so imbricated with technological environments. Through Nemser’s case studies, we can better apprehend the hundreds of years of oppression that have been built into our material lives.Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over the past four decades, the volumes published in the landmark History of Cartography series have both chronicled and encouraged scholarship about maps and mapping practices across time and space. As the current director of the project that has produced these volumes, Matthew H. Edney has a unique vantage point for understanding what “cartography” has come to mean and include.In this book Edney disavows the term cartography, rejecting the notion that maps represent an undifferentiated category of objects for study. Rather than treating maps as a single, unified group, he argues, scholars need to take a processual approach that examines specific types of maps—sea charts versus thematic maps, for example—in the context of the unique circumstances of their production, circulation, and consumption. To illuminate this bold argument, Edney chronicles precisely how the ideal of cartography that has developed in the West since 1800 has gone astray. By exposing the flaws in this ideal, his book challenges everyone who studies maps and mapping practices to reexamine their approach to the topic. The study of cartography will never be the same.Matthew Edney is the Osher Professor in the History of Cartography at the University of Southern Maine. In addition to Cartography: The Ideal and Its History (University of Chicago Press, 2019) he is the author of Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (University of Chicago Press, 1997). Since 2005, Matthew has directed the History of Cartography Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the co-editor with Mary S. Pedley of Cartography in the European Enlightenment, a massive compilation (at 1,920 pages!) now in press as Volume Four of Chicago’s The History of Cartography series. (Volumes 1, 2, 3, and 6 are already available on open access. Matthew also run a personal blog, Mapping as Process, which features his commentary on the study of map production, circulation, and consumption.Steven Seegel is a Professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Phytotron” is such a great name for something that is, when you look at it, a high-tech greenhouse. But don’t sell it short! The phytotron was not only at the center of post-war plant science, but also connected to the Cold War, commercial agriculture, and long-duration space flight. Today I speak with David Munns, professor of history at John Jay College, about his new book, Engineering the Environment: Phytotrons and the Quest for Climate Control in the Cold War (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), but we also talk about Matt Damon, shitting in space, and growing pot in your dorm room.Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices