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New Books in the History of Science

New Books Network

Interviews with historians of science about their new books

arts books

All Episodes

62:08

Frederick Crews, "Freud: The Making of an Illusion"...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2024/12/31

The figure of Sigmund Freud has captivated the Western imagination like few others. One hundred and twenty-five years after the publication of Studies on Hysteria, the good doctor from Vienna continues to stir controversy in institutions, academic circles, and nuclear households across the world. Perhaps Freud’s sharpest and most adamant critic, Frederick Crews has been debating Freud’s legacy for over thirty years. His latest work, Freud: The Making of an Illusion (Picador, 2018) challenges us

67:43

Michael Bresalier, "Modern Flu: British Medical...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2024/12/27

Ninety years after the discovery of human influenza virus, Modern Flu: British Medical Science and the Viralisation of Influenza, 1890—1950 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) by Dr. Michael Bresalier traces the history of this breakthrough and its implications for understanding and controlling influenza ever since. Examining how influenza came to be defined as a viral disease in the first half of the twentieth century, it argues that influenza’s viral identity did not suddenly appear with the discovery of

67:03

AI: How We Got Here in Three Powerful Tales

New Books in the History of Science ·

2024/12/26

This episode is based upon three readings: Alan Turing’s Computing Machinery and Intelligence aka The Turing Test paper. Turing starts his paper by asking “can machines think?” before deciding that’s a meaningless question. Instead, he invents something he calls “the imitation game” - a text conversation where the player has to guess whether they are chatting with another person or with an AI. ChatGPT was such a bombshell because it easily and consistently passes this “Turing Test” by giving

41:15

Donald R. Prothero, "The Story of Earth's Climate in...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2024/12/14

Over 4.5 billion years, Earth's climate has transformed tremendously. Before our more temperate recent past, the planet swung from one extreme to another--from a greenhouse world of sweltering temperatures and high sea levels to a "snowball earth" in which glaciers reached the equator. During this history, we now know, living things and the climate have always influenced and even shaped each other. But the climate has never changed as rapidly or as drastically as it has since the Industrial

66:40

Renée Bergland, "Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson,...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2024/12/13

Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin were born at a time when the science of studying the natural world was known as natural philosophy, a pastime for poets, priests, and schoolgirls. The world began to change in the 1830s, while Darwin was exploring the Pacific aboard the Beagle and Dickinson was a student in Amherst, Massachusetts. Poetry and science started to grow apart, and modern thinkers challenged the old orthodoxies, offering thrilling new perspectives that suddenly felt radical—and too

67:26

David J. Collins, SJ, "Disenchanting Albert the...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2024/12/12

David J Collins, SJ joins Jana Byars to talk about Disenchanting Albert the Great: the Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Magician (Penn State Press, 2024). Albert the Great (1200–1280) was a prominent Dominican friar, a leading philosopher, and the teacher of Thomas Aquinas. He also endorsed the use of magic. Controversial though that stance would have been, Albert was never punished or repudiated for what he wrote. Albert’s reception followed instead a markedly different course, leading ultimately

65:53

Caroline Winterer, "How the New World Became Old: The...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2024/12/10

In How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America (Princeton UP, 2024), Caroline Winterer, William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies at Stanford University, takes her reader on a journey through the historical strata of the United States’ relationship with deep time. From the early days of the republic to the first half of the twentieth century, Winterer retraces how the study of the continent’s geological past provided Americans with “a vocabulary with which

67:34

Katherine C. Epstein, "Analog Superpowers: How...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2024/11/24

At the beginning of the twentieth century, two British inventors, Arthur Pollen and Harold Isherwood, became fascinated by a major military question: how to aim the big guns of battleships. These warships—of enormous geopolitical import before the advent of intercontinental missiles or drones—had to shoot in poor light and choppy seas at distant moving targets, conditions that impeded accurate gunfire. Seeing the need to account for a plethora of variables, Pollen and Isherwood built an integrated

31:51

Ken Krimstein, "Einstein in Kafkaland: How Albert...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2024/11/23

Between 1911 and 1912, Prague was home to Albert Einstein and Franz Kafka, two of the twentieth-century’s most influential minds. During this brief but remarkable period, their lives intertwined in surprising ways, driven by a shared intellectual restlessness and a desire to confront life’s most profound questions. Einstein in Kafkaland: How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up with the Universe (Bloomsbury, 2024) brings to life the overlapping journeys of these two men, exploring how their

35:03

Fiona Smyth, "Pistols in St Paul's: Science, Music,...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2024/11/22

On a winter's night in 1951, shortly after Evensong, the interior of St Paul's Cathedral echoed with gunfire. This was no act of violence but a scientific demonstration of new techniques in acoustic measurement. It aimed to address a surprising question: could a building be a musical instrument?Pistols in St Paul's: Science, Music, and Architecture in the Twentieth Century (Manchester University Press, 2024) by Dr. Fiona Smyth tells the fascinating story of the scientists, architects and musicians

42:29

Ian Miller, "Self-Esteem: An American History"...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2024/11/17

By the end of the twentieth century, the idea of self-esteem had become enormously influential. A staggering amount of psychological research and self-help literature was being published and, before long, devoured by readers. Self-esteem initiatives permeated American schools. Self-esteem became the way of understanding ourselves, our personalities, our interactions with others. Nowadays, however, few people think much about the concept of self-esteem—but perhaps we should.Self-Esteem: An American

43:08

Adam Bobbette, "The Pulse of the Earth: Political...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2024/11/15

In The Pulse of the Earth: Political Geology in Java (Duke UP, 2023), Adam Bobbette tells the story of how modern theories of the earth emerged from the slopes of Indonesia's volcanoes. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, scientists became concerned with protecting the colonial plantation economy from the unpredictable bursts and shudders of volcanoes. Bobbette follows Javanese knowledge traditions, colonial geologists, volcanologists, mystics, Theosophists, orientalists, and revolutionaries

43:08

Adam Bobbette, "The Pulse of the Earth: Political...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2024/11/15

58:03

Anthony Grasso, "Dual Justice: America's Divergent...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2024/11/11

The United States incarcerates its citizens for property crime, drug use, and violent crime at a rate that exceeds any other developed nation – and disproportionately affects the poor and racial minorities. Yet the U.S. has never developed the capacity to consistently prosecute corporate wrongdoing. This disjuncture between the treatment of street and corporate crime is often narrated as hypocrisy. Others suggest that the disparity is rooted in a conservative backlash after the civil rights movement

64:37

Stuart Anderson, "Pharmacopoeias, Drug Regulation,...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2024/11/06

The word "pharmacopoeia" has come to have many meanings, although it is commonly understood to be a book describing approved compositions and standards for drugs. In 1813 the Royal College of Physicians of London considered a proposal to develop an imperial British pharmacopoeia - at a time when separate official pharmacopoeias existed for England, Scotland, and Ireland. A unified British pharmacopoeia was published in 1864, and by 1914 it was considered suitable for the whole

53:50

Jerry Brotton, "Four Points of the Compass: The...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2024/11/05

North, south, east and west: almost all societies use the four cardinal directions to orientate themselves, to understand who they are by projecting where they are. For millennia, these four directions have been foundational to our travel, navigation and exploration and are central to the imaginative, moral and political geography of virtually every culture in the world. Yet they are far more subjective and various – sometimes contradictory – than we might realise.Four Points of the Compass: The

81:24

Salem Elzway and Jason Resnikoff on Automation

New Books in the History of Science ·

2024/11/04

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Salem Elzway, postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at University of Southern California, and Jason Resnikoff, assistant professor of contemporary history at the University of Groningen, about the history of automation. The discussion takes as its launching point an essay Elzway and Resnikoff published in the journal Labor titled, “Whence Automation?: The History (and Possible Futures) of a Concept.” The conversation approaches

32:51

Jonathan A. Allan, "Uncut: A Cultural Analysis of the...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2024/11/02

The “uncut” penis is viewed by some as attractive or erotic, and by others as ugly or undesirable. Secular parents of male infants worry about whether or not the foreskin should be removed so their little boy can grow up to “look like dad” or to avoid imagined bullying in the locker room. Medical experts and public health organisations argue back and forth about whether circumcision is medically necessary, while “intactivists” advocate that removing an infant’s foreskin without their consent is

55:32

Nicholas Spencer, "Magisteria: The Entangled...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2024/11/01

Most things you 'know' about science and religion are myths or half-truths that grew up in the last years of the nineteenth century and remain widespread today.The true history of science and religion is a human one. It's about the role of religion in inspiring, and strangling, science before the scientific revolution. It's about the sincere but eccentric faith and the quiet, creeping doubts of the most brilliant scientists in history - Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Darwin, Maxwell, Einstein. Above all

60:01

Peter Harrison, "Some New World: Myths of...

New Books in the History of Science ·

2024/10/29

In his famous argument against miracles, David Hume gets to the heart of the modern problem of supernatural belief. 'We are apt', says Hume, 'to imagine ourselves transported into some new world; where the whole form of nature is disjointed, and every element performs its operation in a different manner, from what it does at present.' This encapsulates, observes Peter Harrison, the disjuncture between contemporary Western culture and medieval societies. In the Middle Ages, people saw the hand of

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