Titles

The "conflict thesis"—the idea that an inevitable and irreconcilable conflict exists between science and religion—has long been part of the popular imagination. In The Warfare between Science and Religion, Jeff Hardin, Ronald L. Numbers, and Ronald A. Binzley have assembled a group of distinguished historians who explore the origin of the thesis, its reception, the responses it drew from various faith traditions, and its...

For hundreds of years, the shorefront of Manhattan Island served as the country's center of trade, shipping, and commerce. With its maritime links across the oceans, along the Atlantic coast, and inland to the Midwest and New England, Manhattan became a global city and home to the world's busiest port. It was a world of docks, ships, tugboats, and ferries, filled with cargo and freight, a place where millions of immigrants entered the Promised Land. In Waterfront...

Two generations after the founding, Americans still disagreed on the nature of the Union. Was it a confederation of sovereign states or a nation headed by a central government? To South Carolina Senator Robert Y. Hayne and others of his mindset, only the vigilant protection of states' rights could hold off an attack on the southern way of life, which was undergirded by slavery. Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster, on the other hand, believed that the...

It has become all too easy to disparage the role of the US government today. Many Americans are influenced by a simplistic anti-government ideology that is itself driven by a desire to roll back the more democratically responsive aspects of public policy. But government has improved the lives of Americans in numerous ways, from providing income, food, education, housing, and healthcare support, to ensuring cleaner air, water, and food, to providing a vast infrastructure upon which economic...

Our lives are governed by chance. But what, exactly, is chance? In this book, accomplished statistician and storyteller Bart K. Holland takes us on a tour of the world of probability. Weaving together tales from real life—from the spread of the bubonic plague in medieval Europe or the number of Prussian cavalrymen kicked to death by their horses, through IQ test results and deaths by voodoo curse, to why you have to wait in line for rides...

In the 1740s, two quite different developments revolutionized Anglo-American life and thought—the Enlightenment and the Great Awakening. This book takes an encounter between the paragons of each movement—the printer and entrepreneur Benjamin Franklin and the British-born revivalist George Whitefield—as an opportunity to explore the meaning of the beginnings of modern science and rationality on one hand and...

Whether you are a student in a wildlife degree program or a professional wildlife biologist, you will find all the up-to-date information on wildlife damage in the pages of this clear, comprehensive text. Wildlife Damage Management covers every imaginable topic including: •pertinent biological and ecological concepts •individual-, population-, and ecosystem-level effects •survey techniques •management methods •human...

While China has achieved extraordinary economic success as it has moved toward open markets and international trade, its leadership maintains an authoritarian grip, repressing political movements, controlling all internet traffic, and opposing any democratic activity. Because of its huge population, more than half the people in the world who lack political freedom live in China. Its undemocratic example is attractive to other authoritarian regimes. But can China...

Linguistics, or the science of language, emerged as an independent field of study in the nineteenth century, amid the religious and scientific ferment of the Victorian era. William Dwight Whitney, one of that period's most eminent language scholars, argued that his field should be classed among the social sciences, thus laying a theoretical foundation for modern sociolinguistics. William Dwight Whitney and the Science of Language offers a full-length study of America's...

From the early days of the republic, American leaders knew that an unpredictable time bomb—the question of slavery—lay at the heart of national politics. An implicit understanding between North and South helped to keep the issue at bay: northern states, where slavery had been set on course for extinction via gradual emancipation, tacitly agreed to respect the property rights of southern slaveholders; in return, southerners essentially promised to view slaveholding as a practical evil...

Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood explores when, how, and why women were accepted as filmmakers in the 1910s and why, by the 1920s, those opportunities had disappeared. In looking at the early film industry as an industry—a place of work—Mahar not only unravels the mystery of the disappearing female filmmaker but untangles the complicated relationship among gender, work culture, and business within modern industrial organizations. In the early 1910s, the film industry followed a theatrical...

The third volume of Margaret W. Rossiter's landmark survey of the history of American women scientists focuses on their pioneering efforts and contributions from 1972 to the present. Central to this story are the struggles and successes of women scientists in the era of affirmative action. Scores of previously isolated women scientists were suddenly energized to do things they had rarely, if ever, done before—form organizations and recruit new members, start rosters...

From sexist jokes about women drivers to such empowering icons as Amelia Earhart and Rosie the Riveter, representations of the relationship between women and modern technology in popular culture have been both demeaning and celebratory. Depictions of women as timid and fearful creatures baffled by machinery have alternated with images of them as being fully capable of technological mastery and control—and of lending sex appeal to machines as...

In Women's Experience of Modernity, 1875–1945, literary scholars working with a variety of interdisciplinary methodologies move feminine phenomena from the margins of the study of modernity to its center. Analyzing such cultural practices as selling and shopping, political and social activism, urban field work and rural labor, radical discourses on feminine sexuality, and literary and artistic experimentation, this volume contributes to the rich vein of current feminist...

In the two centuries before Columbus, mapmaking was transformed. The World Map, 1300–1492 investigates this important, transitional period of mapmaking. Beginning with a 1436 atlas of ten maps produced by Venetian Andrea Bianco, Evelyn Edson uses maps of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to examine how the discoveries of missionaries and merchants affected the content and configuration of world maps. She finds that both the makers and users of maps...

In Writing to the World, Rachael Scarborough King examines the shift from manuscript to print media culture in the long eighteenth century. She introduces the concept of the "bridge genre," which enables such change by transferring existing textual conventions to emerging modes of composition and circulation. She draws on this concept to reveal how four crucial genres that emerged during this time—the newspaper, the periodical, the novel, and the...