In Silver by Fire, Silver by Mercury: A Chemical History of Silver Refining in New Spain and Mexico, 16th to 19th Centuries, Saul Guerrero combines historical research with geology and chemistry to refute the current prevailing narrative of a primitive effort dominated by mercury and its copious emissions to the air. Based on quantitative historical data, visual records and geochemical fundamentals, Guerrero analyses the chemical and economic reasons why two refining processes had to share production, creating along the way major innovations in the chemical recipes, milling equipment, mercury recycling practice, and industrial architecture and operations. Their main environmental impact was lead fume and the depletion of woodlands from smelting, and the transformation of mercury into calomel during the patio process.

Lost Knowledge: The Concept of Vanished Technologies and Other Human Histories examines the idea of lost knowledge, reaching back to a period between myth and history. It investigates a peculiar idea found in a number of early texts: that there were civilizations with knowledge of sophisticated technologies, and that this knowledge was obscured or destroyed over time along with the civilization that had created it. This book presents critical studies of a series of early Chinese, South Asian, and other texts that look at the idea of specific "lost" technologies, such as mechanical flight and the transmission of images. There is also an examination of why concepts of a vanished "golden age" were prevalent in so many cultures. Offering an engaging and investigative look at the propagation of history and myth in technology and culture, this book is sure to interest historians and readers from many backgrounds.

Ecce Homo: A Survey in the Life and Work of Jesus Christ, published anonymously in 1865, alarmed some readers and delighted others by its presentation of a humanitarian view of Christ and early Christian history. Victorian Jesus explores the relationship between historian J. R. Seeley and his publisher Alexander Macmillan as they sought to keep Seeley's authorship a secret while also trying to exploit the public interest. Ian Hesketh highlights how Ecce Homo's reception encapsulates how Victorians came to terms with rapidly changing religious views in the second half of the nineteenth century. Hesketh critically examines Seeley's career and public image, and the publication and reception of his controversial work. Readers and commentators sought to discover the author's identity in order to uncover the hidden meaning of the book, and this engendered a lively debate about the ethics of anonymous publishing. In Victorian Jesus, Ian Hesketh argues for the centrality of this moment in the history of anonymity in book and periodical publishing throughout the century.

Historically, the idea that the stars and planets influence the Earth and its inhabitants has proved powerful in almost every culture, offering an important context for the use of mathematical and astronomical instruments. In the past, however, historians of astronomy have paid relatively little attention to astrology and other "non-scientific" topics, while historians of astrology have tended to concentrate on the analysis of texts rather than surviving artefacts, scientific instruments in particular. Heaven and Earth United is an attempt to redress the balance through an exploration of the astrological contexts in which instruments once found a place. Contributors are Silke Ackermann, Marisa Addomine, Jim Bennett, Marvin Bolt, Louise E. Devoy, Richard Dunn, Seb Falk, Stephen Johnston, Richard L. Kremer, Gunther Oestmann, Josefina Rodriguez-Arribas, Petra G. Schmidl, Giorgio Strano, and Sylvia Sumira.

It began with plutonium, the first element ever manufactured in quantity by humans. Fearing that the Germans would be the first to weaponise the atom, the United States marshalled brilliant minds and seemingly inexhaustible bodies to find a way to create a nuclear chain reaction of inconceivable explosive power. In a matter of months, the Hanford nuclear facility was built to produce the enigmatic and deadly new material that would fuel atomic bombs. In the desert of eastern Washington State, far from prying eyes, scientists Glenn Seaborg, Enrico Fermi and thousands of others-the physicists, engineers, labourers and support staff at the facility-manufactured plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and for the bombs in the current American nuclear arsenal, enabling the construction of weapons with the potential to end human civilisation. With his characteristic blend of scientific clarity and storytelling, Steve Olson asks why Hanford has been largely overlooked in histories of the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. Olson, who grew up just twenty miles from Hanford's B Reactor, recounts how a small Washington town played host to some of the most influential scientists and engineers in American history as they sought to create the substance at the core of the most destructive weapons ever created. The Apocalypse Factory offers a new generation this dramatic story of human achievement and ultimately, of lethal hubris. *2020 marks the 75th anniversary of the United States' detonation of nuclear weapons over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945.

One of the most eclectic and enigmatic of the philosophes, Denis Diderot left an intellectual legacy that has the capacity to stimulate, perplex and even confound. Particularly challenging are his writings on the natural sciences, an area largely neglected by scholars over the past fifty years. In Diderot: natural philosopher Kurt Ballstadt examines the entirety of Diderot's scientific works from the Lettre sur les aveugles to the Elements de physiologie, investigating his fascination with mathematics, experimental physics, chemistry, natural history and medicine, and drawing out the crucial points of contact between these disciplines. Diderot is shown to have a well-constructed philosophy of science and an integrated, sophisticated vision of how the world functions. We are led away from the image of a radical Diderot, champion of disorder, to an analysis of a more systematic thinker whose underlying search for structure characterized both his attitude to the world around him, and the way he wrote about it. Situating these writings on natural philosophy in the intellectual landscape of the Enlightenment, this book will engage Diderot scholars and historians of eighteenth-century science alike.

Researching and writing its history has always been one of the tasks of the university, particularly on the occasion of anniversary celebrations. Through case studies of Prague (1848, 1948), Oslo (1911), Cluj (from 1919), Leipzig (2009) and Trondheim (2010), this book shows the continuity of the close relationship between jubilees and university historiography and the impact of this interaction on the jubilee publications and academic heritage. Up to today, historians are faced with the challenge of finding a balance between an engaged, celebratory approach and a more distant, academically critical one. In its third part, the book aims to go beyond the jubilee and presents three other ways of writing university history, by focusing on the university as an educational institution. Contributors are: Thomas Brandt, Pieter Dhondt, Marek Durcansky, Jonas Floeter, Jorunn Sem Fure, Trude Maurer, Emmanuelle Picard, Ana-Maria Stan and Johan OEstling.

Questioning hegemonic masculinity in literature is not novel. In the nineteenth century, under the July Monarchy (1830 1848), several French writers depicted characters who did not conform to gender expectations: hermaphrodites, castrati, homosexuals, effete men and mannish women. This book investigates the historical conditions in which these protagonists were created and their success during the July Monarchy. It analyses novels and novellas by Balzac, Gautier, Latouche, Musset and Sand in order to determine how these literary narratives challenged the traditional representations of masculinity and even redefined genders through their unconventional characters. This book also examines the connections and the disparities between these literary texts and contemporary scientific texts on sexual difference, homosexuality and intersexuality. It thus highlights the July Monarchy as a key period for the redefinition of gender identities.

Who are we? Where did we come from and where are we going? What is the meaning of life and death? Can we abolish death and live forever? These "big" questions of human nature and human destiny have boggled humanity's best minds for centuries. But they assumed a particular urgency and saliency in 1920s Russia, just as the country was emerging from nearly a decade of continuous warfare, political turmoil, persistent famine, and deadly epidemics, generating an enormous variety of fantastic social, scientific, and literary experiments that sought to answer these "perpetual" existential questions. This book investigates the interplay between actual (scientific) and fictional (literary) experiments that manipulated sex gonads in animals and humans, searched for "rays of life" froze and thawed butterflies and bats, kept alive severed dog heads, and produced various tissue extracts (hormones), all fostering a powerful image of "science that conquers death." Revolutionary Experiments explores the intersection between social and scientific revolutions, documenting the rapid growth of science's funding, institutions, personnel, public resonance, and cultural authority in the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. It examines why and how biomedical sciences came to occupy such a prominent place in the stories of numerous litterateurs and in the culture and society of post-revolutionary Russia more generally. Nikolai Krementsov argues that the collective, though not necessarily coordinated, efforts of scientists, their Bolshevik patrons, and their literary fans/critics effectively transformed specialized knowledge generated by experimental biomedical research into an influential cultural resource that facilitated the establishment of large specialized institutions, inspired numerous science-fiction stories, displaced religious beliefs, and gave the millennia-old dream of immortality new forms and new meanings in Bolshevik Russia.