History of Science & Knowledge

The Empire of Climate: A History of an Idea David N. Livingstone

How the specter of climate has been used to explain history since antiquity

Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America Beth Linker

The strange and surprising history of the so-called epidemic of bad posture in modern America—from eugenics and posture pageants to today’s promoters of “paleo posture”

Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science Renée Bergland

A captivating portrait of the poet and the scientist who shared an enchanted view of nature

The Man Who Organized Nature: The Life of Linnaeus Gunnar Broberg

A new biography of Carl Linnaeus, offering a vivid portrait of Linnaeus’s life and work

Radical by Nature: The Revolutionary Life of Alfred Russel Wallace James T. Costa

A major biography of the brilliant naturalist, traveler, humanitarian, and codiscoverer of natural selection

The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire George Steinmetz

A new history of French social thought that connects postwar sociology to colonialism and empire

Classical Probability in the Enlightenment, New Edition Lorraine Daston

An award-winning history of the Enlightenment quest to devise a mathematical model of rationality

The Einsteinian Revolution: The Historical Roots of His Breakthroughs Jürgen Renn and Hanoch Gutfreund

How the Einsteinian revolution can be understood as the result of a long-term evolution of science

The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein: The Far East, Palestine, and Spain, 1922–1923 Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein’s travel diary to the Far East and Middle East

Birthing Romans: Childbearing and Its Risks in Imperial Rome Anna Bonnell Freidin

How Romans coped with the anxieties and risks of childbirth