-
"you are not expected to understand this"
Leading technologists, historians, and journalists reveal the stories behind the computer coding that touches all aspects of life—for better or worseFew of us give much thought to computer code or how it comes to be. The very word “code” makes it sound immutable or even inevitable. “You Are Not E...
Read MoreRegular price $19.95Sale price $19.95 Regular price $19.95Unit price per -
Ai needs you
A humanist manifesto for the age of AIArtificial intelligence may be the most transformative technology of our time. As AI’s power grows, so does the need to figure out what—and who—this technology is really for. AI Needs You argues that it is critical for society to take the lead in answering th...
Read MoreRegular price $24.95Sale price $24.95 Regular price $24.95Unit price per -
An entertainment for angels
An Entertainment for Angels, rather than for Men, one observer called electricity, and it proved to be the most significant scientific discovery of the Enlightenment. Lecturers attracted huge audiences who marveled at sparkling fountains, flaming drinks, pirouetting dancers, and electrified boys....
Read MoreRegular price $30.00Sale price $30.00 Regular price $30.00Unit price per -
Asia's space race
James Clay Moltz explores efforts by China, Japan, India, South Korea, and ten other countries to boost their civil, commercial, and, in some cases, military profiles in orbit. He investigates these nations’ divergent goals and their tendency to focus on national solutions rather than on regionw...
Read MoreRegular price $28.00Sale price $28.00 Regular price $28.00Unit price per -
Being human
Challenging commonly held biological, religious, and ethical beliefs, internationally well known historian of science Roger Smith boldly argues that human nature is not some "thing" awaiting discovery but is active in understanding itself. According to Smith, "being human" is a self-creation made...
Read MoreRegular price $55.00Sale price $55.00 Regular price $55.00Unit price per -
Clio wired
In these pathbreaking essays, Roy Rosenzweig charts the impact of new media on teaching, researching, preserving, presenting, and understanding history. Negotiating between the "cyberenthusiasts" who champion technological breakthroughs and the "digital skeptics" who fear the end of traditional h...
Read MoreRegular price $34.00Sale price $34.00 Regular price $34.00Unit price per -
Devil in the stack
From internationally-bestselling author and journalist Andrew Smith, an immersive, alarming, sharp-eyed journey into the bizarre world of computer code, told through his sometimes painful, often amusing attempt to become a coder himself Throughout history, technological revolutions have been dri...
Read MoreRegular price $28.00Sale price $28.00 Regular price $28.00Unit price per -
Digital culture shock
How culture shapes the design and use of technology—and how we can resist the one-size-fits-all approach to technology designRobots that encroach on your personal space, baffling emojis, a chatbot that gives you an answer that seems terribly rude—does any of this sound familiar? If so, you may kn...
Read MoreRegular price $35.00Sale price $35.00 Regular price $35.00Unit price per -
Down the asphalt path
Imagine a world without automobiles, traffic lights, and interstate highways. Or the words commuter and parking. For a nation that prides itself on the freedom of movement and the long weekend, this seems nearly impossible.In Down the Asphalt Path, Clay McShane examines the uniquely American rela...
Read MoreRegular price $36.00Sale price $36.00 Regular price $36.00Unit price per -
Exterranean
Exterranean concerns the extraction of stuff from the Earth, a process in which matter goes from being sub- to exterranean. By opening up a rich archive of nonmodern texts and images from across Europe, this work offers a bracing riposte to several critical trends in ecological thought. By shifti...
Read MoreRegular price $39.00Sale price $39.00 Regular price $39.00Unit price per -
Fixing the sky
As alarm over global warming spreads, a radical idea is gaining momentum. Forget cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, some scientists argue. Instead, bounce sunlight back into space by pumping reflective nanoparticles into the atmosphere. Launch mirrors into orbit around the Earth. Make clouds thick...
Read MoreRegular price $24.95Sale price $24.95 Regular price $24.95Unit price per -
Hollywood lighting from the silent era to film noir
Lighting performs essential functions in Hollywood films, enhancing the glamour, clarifying the action, and intensifying the mood. Examining every facet of this understated art form, from the glowing backlights of the silent period to the shaded alleys of film noir, Patrick Keating affirms the ro...
Read MoreRegular price $36.00Sale price $36.00 Regular price $36.00Unit price per -
Hollywood science
Whether depicting humans battling aliens or a brave geologist saving lives as a volcano erupts, science-fiction films are an exciting visual and sensuous introduction to the workings of science and technology. These films explore a range of complex topics in vivid and accessible ways, from space ...
Read MoreRegular price $23.95Sale price $23.95 Regular price $23.95Unit price per -
Industry and intelligence
The conceptual artist Liam Gillick writes a genealogy of contemporary art, arguing that we need to appreciate its engagement with history. He takes a broad view of artistic creation from 1820 to today, underscoring the industry and intelligence of artists as they have responded to incremental dev...
Read MoreRegular price $25.00Sale price $25.00 Regular price $25.00Unit price per -
Kompositionen für hörbaren raum / compositions for audible space
The integration of audible space is a central aspect of electroacoustic music. Ever since the earliest analogue days of electroacoustic music, pioneers of the genre – including Pierre Schaeffer, Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Luigi Nono – used special devices and methods for their com...
Read MoreRegular price $40.00Sale price $40.00 Regular price $40.00Unit price per -
Laws of the land
A groundbreaking history of fengshui’s roles in public life and law during China’s last imperial dynastyToday the term fengshui, which literally means “wind and water,” is recognized around the world. Yet few know exactly what it means, let alone its fascinating history. In Laws of the Land, Tris...
Read MoreRegular price $45.00Sale price $45.00 Regular price $45.00Unit price per -
Mankind beyond earth
Seeking to reenergize Americans' passion for the space program, the value of further exploration of the Moon, and the importance of human beings on the final frontier, Claude A. Piantadosi presents a rich history of American space exploration and its major achievements. He emphasizes the importan...
Read MoreRegular price $29.00Sale price $29.00 Regular price $29.00Unit price per -
On the screen
Ariel Rogers rethinks the history of moving images by exploring how experiments with screen technologies in and around the 1930s changed the way films were produced, exhibited, and experienced. She challenges conventional narratives about the novelty of the twenty-first-century multiscreen enviro...
Read MoreRegular price $35.00Sale price $35.00 Regular price $35.00Unit price per -
Sex, botany, and empire
Enlightenment botany was replete with sexual symbolism—to the extent that many botanical textbooks were widely considered pornographic. Carl Linnaeus's controversial new system for classifying plants based on their sexual characteristics, as well as his use of language resonating with erotic allu...
Read MoreRegular price $28.00Sale price $28.00 Regular price $28.00Unit price per -
The computers that made britain
The home computer boom of the 1980s brought with it now-iconic machines such as the ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, and Commodore 64. Those machines would inspire a generation and foster the creation of a booming British software industry that continues to this day.With the help of hefty government disco...
Read MoreRegular price $24.99Sale price $24.99 Regular price $24.99Unit price per -
The computers that made the world
Discover the birth of the technological world we now live in through the origins of 12 influential computers built between 1939 and 1950.In 1940, a computer was someone who ploughed through grueling calculations each day. A decade later, a computer was a buzzing machine that filled a room. This ...
Read MoreRegular price $24.99Sale price $24.99 Regular price $24.99Unit price per -
The consulting engineers
The Consulting Engineers is an ideal purchase for any engineer interested in the history of their industry. It will appeal to professional engineers, academics, students of engineering, historians and the wider public who are interested in the social and industrial history of Great Britain, and i...
Read MoreRegular price $65.00Sale price $65.00 Regular price $65.00Unit price per -
The discovery of the germ
From the time of Hippocrates to that of Louis Pasteur, the medical profession relied on plausible but almost wholly mistaken ideas about the causes of and best treatments for infectious illness. Bleeding, purging, and mysterious nostrums remained staple remedies, and surgeons, often wearing filth...
Read MoreRegular price $27.00Sale price $27.00 Regular price $27.00Unit price per -
The end of the soul
On October 19, 1876 a group of leading French citizens, both men and women included, joined together to form an unusual group, The Society of Mutual Autopsy, with the aim of proving that souls do not exist. The idea was that, after death, they would dissect one another and (hopefully) show a dire...
Read MoreRegular price $36.00Sale price $36.00 Regular price $36.00Unit price per -
The firearm revolution
A groundbreaking account of how firearms changed Europe and the worldIn Renaissance Italy, the gun was not only a tool of war but also a desirable object, a luxury item carried at court. Guns were in use on the battlefield by 1440; later in that century Leonardo da Vinci sketched a design for a f...
Read MoreRegular price $35.00Sale price $35.00 Regular price $35.00Unit price per -
The geological unconscious
Already in the nineteenth century, German-language writers were contending with the challenge of imagining and accounting for a planet whose volatility bore little resemblance to the images of the Earth then in circulation. The Geological Unconscious traces the withdrawal of the lithosphere as a ...
Read MoreRegular price $36.00Sale price $36.00 Regular price $36.00Unit price per -
The glory of the rails
In this brilliant essay the historian Tony Judt describes the singular contribution made by railways to the development of our shared way of life.
Regular price $8.00Sale price $8.00 Regular price $8.00Unit price per -
The horse, the wheel, and language
"A fascinating look into the origins of modern man."—Publishers WeeklyA book that solves the mystery of the people who spread the ancient mother tongue that gave us English and the other languages spoken by half of humanity today"Authoritative."—New York Times • "A masterpiece."—Wilson QuarterlyR...
Read MoreRegular price $29.95Sale price $29.95 Regular price $29.95Unit price per -
The irrational decision
How the computer revolution shaped our conception of rationality—and why human problems require solutions rooted in human intuition, morality, and judgmentIn the 1940s, mathematicians set out to design computers that could act as ideal rational agents in the face of uncertainty. The Irrational De...
Read MoreRegular price $29.95Sale price $29.95 Regular price $29.95Unit price per -
The manhattan project
Launched in 1942, the Manhattan Project was a well-funded, secret effort by the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada to develop an atomic bomb before the Nazis. The results—the bombs named "Little Boy" and "Fat Man"—were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945.A vast state wi...
Read MoreRegular price $28.00Sale price $28.00 Regular price $28.00Unit price per -
The origins of the new
A visionary look at how novel attributes arise and become transformative innovations in nature, culture, and technologyThe Origins of the New presents a revolutionary approach to evolutionary success in all realms of life. In this groundbreaking book, Douglas Erwin takes readers on a dazzling exc...
Read MoreRegular price $45.00Sale price $45.00 Regular price $45.00Unit price per -
The persistence of technology
Telling the stories of, among others, China’s power grid, Colombian roads, American telephones, German automobiles, and India’s ship breaking business, the contributions in this volume stress the long lives of technologies and show that maintenance and repair are not obsolete in modern industries...
Read MoreRegular price $45.00Sale price $45.00 Regular price $45.00Unit price per -
The red taylorist
This biography traces the adult life, works and relationships of the Taylorist, Walter Polakov, focusing on his socialist scientific management, his ideals and dreams, and how these were constrained by conventionality in the USA in the first half of the twentieth century.
Regular price $104.99Sale price $104.99 Regular price $104.99Unit price per -
The technology trap
"Made me look at the industrial revolution, invention, sleeping beauties, contexts and the forces that shape our societies differently."—David Byrne, New York Times Book ReviewHow the history of technological revolutions can help us better understand economic and political polarization in the age...
Read MoreRegular price $29.95Sale price $29.95 Regular price $29.95Unit price per -
The transformation of the world
A panoramic global history of the nineteenth centuryA monumental history of the nineteenth century, The Transformation of the World offers a panoramic and multifaceted portrait of a world in transition. Jürgen Osterhammel, an eminent scholar who has been called the Braudel of the nineteenth centu...
Read MoreRegular price $35.00Sale price $35.00 Regular price $35.00Unit price per -
Try turning it off and on again
A fun and fact-filled guide for anyone who has ever wondered why a technology that runs virtually every aspect of our lives is so bafflingly weirdSoftware is an engineering material that has transformed human society in profound ways. It can truly work marvels—except when it doesn’t work. Part of...
Read MoreRegular price $29.95Sale price $29.95 Regular price $29.95Unit price per -
Watt's perfect engine
As the inventor of the separate-condenser steam engine—that Promethean symbol of technological innovation and industrial progress—James Watt has become synonymous with the spirit of invention, while his last name has long been immortalized as the very measurement of power. But contrary to popular...
Read MoreRegular price $29.00Sale price $29.00 Regular price $29.00Unit price per -
Why the hindenburg had a smoking lounge
Essays by international bestselling author Edward Tenner that explore both the negative and positive surprises of human ingenuityHow did the addition of lifeboats after the Titanic shipwreck contribute to another tragedy in Chicago harbor three years later? How efficient are wild animals as inves...
Read MoreRegular price $34.95Sale price $34.95 Regular price $34.95Unit price per -
Wiring the world
Wiring the World is a cultural and social history that explores how the large Anglo-American cable companies won out over alternative visions. Through telegram prices, visions for world peace, scientific innovation, and the role of the nation-state, Simone M. Müller traces globalization's diverse...
Read MoreRegular price $65.00Sale price $65.00 Regular price $65.00Unit price per -
Worlds without end
An exciting look at contemporary scientific cosmologies and their relationship to philosophy and religion.
Regular price $25.00Sale price $25.00 Regular price $25.00Unit price per
Something went wrong
Please try again
