New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

In Corn Crusade: Khrushchev’s Farming Revolution in the Post-Stalin Soviet Union (Oxford University Press, 2018), Aaron Hale-Dorrell re-evaluates Khrushchev’s corn campaign as the cornerstone of his reformation programs. Corn was key to Khrushchev’s promises of providing everyone with the abundance required for achieving communism, which included the introduction of a varied diet rich in meat and dairy (which would be corn fed) following decades of austerity during collectivization and WWII. Khrushchev touted corn as crucial to building a society equal to the US in material abundance. Hale-Dorrell discusses Khrushchev’s plan to implement industrial farming in the collective and state farm system through increased mechanization, adoption of American techniques, a rejection of Lysenkoism, and mass mobilization of the Komsomol and other youth. But still the corn crusade failed to achieve the transformation that Khrushchev promised. Unlike other historians who have focused on Khrushchev being at fault for this failure, Hale-Dorrell examines the bureaucratic attitudes, lack of resources, and the widespread Soviet campaign mentality frustrated the implementation of Khrushchev’s policies. Regional and local officials interpreted central directives to suit their own needs. Their policies took on a life of their own and a local flavor that often resulted in policies substantially different from and less transformative than Khrushchev had intended. In some places, local and regional officials relied on outright fraud or deception to meet quotas or avoid planting corn. What emerges through all this is a portrait of the Soviet Union that is chaotic, progressive if only slowly and deeply interconnected with other countries through the exchange of trade goods and scientific knowledge, all of which flies in the face of the traditional view of the USSR as isolated, backwards and governed by top down, command style party and state bureaucracy. Listen in! Samantha Lomb is an Assistant Professor at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia. Her research focuses on daily life, local politics and political participation in the Stalinist 1930s. Her book, Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the Draft 1936 Constitution, is now available online. Her research can be viewed here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

This is the third of three interviews with Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer about their duo-graph, Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Also listen to my individual interviews with Howe and Boyer about their separate volumes, Ecologics and Energopolitics. In this interview, I talk to both authors together about their experiences with collaborative research and writing, and about the wider significance of their scholarship. Ecologics and Energopolitics follow the development of wind power in southern Mexico and the social, political, and environmental ramifications of moving towards renewable sources of energy. Jointly, anthropologists Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe conducted fieldwork among the many stakeholders -- including farmers and fishers, indigenous activists, bureaucrats, investors, and non-human animals – as the state of Oaxaca became the site of the largest concentration of wind parks in the hemisphere. Through three case studies – La Ventosa, a traditional and successful public-private partnership; Yansa-Ixtepec, an innovative but perpetually stymied attempt at community-owned wind power; and Mareña Renovables, a monumental but failed mega-project – Boyer and Howe demonstrate that while wind power is a necessary and positive antidote to global warming, how it is implemented and with whose participation matters. The transition to renewable energy technologies could be an opportunity to counteract the inequalities and injustices underwritten by fossil fuels; or the transition could leave those structures of power intact and reinforced. Together, Ecologics and Energopolitics make a bold intervention in how we understand the changing relationship between political power and energy generation and are required reading for anyone interested in how humanity will make the infrastructural transformations that global warming demands. Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

It is common to see science and religion portrayed as mutually exclusive and warring ways of viewing the world, but is that how actual scientists see it? For that matter, which cultural factors shape the attitudes of scientists toward religion? Could scientists help show us a way to build collaboration between scientific and religious communities, if such collaborations are even possible? The book we’re looking at today, Secularity and Science: What Scientists Around the World Really Think About Religion (Oxford University Press, 2019), aims to answer these questions and more. Scholars Elaine Howard Ecklund, David Johnson, Brandon Vaidyanathan, Kirstin Matthews, Steven Lewis, Robert Thomson Jr, and Di Di collaborated to complete the most comprehensive international study of scientists' attitudes toward religion ever undertaken, surveying more than 20,000 scientists and conducting in-depth interviews with over 600 of them. From this wealth of data, the authors extract the real story of the relationship between science and religion in the lives of scientists around the world. The book makes four key claims: there are more religious scientists then we might think; religion and science overlap in scientific work; scientists––even atheist scientists––see spirituality in science; and finally, the idea that religion and science must conflict is primarily an invention of the West. Throughout, the book couples nationally representative survey data with captivating stories of individual scientists, whose experiences highlight these important themes in the data. Secularity and Science leaves inaccurate assumptions about science and religion behind, offering a new, more nuanced understanding of how science and religion interact and how they can be integrated for the common good. Elaine Howard Ecklund is the Herbert S. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at Rice University, as well as founding director of the Religion and Public Life Program there. David Johnson is an assistant professor of higher education leadership at the University of Nevada Reno in the College of Education. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

This is the second of three interviews with Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer about their duo-graph, Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Also listen to my interview with Howe about her volume, Ecologics, as well as my interview with both authors together about collaborative research and the wider implications of their work. Dominic Boyer’s Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2019) and its partner volume, Ecologics, by Cymene Howe, follow the development of wind power in southern Mexico and the social, political, and environmental ramifications of moving towards renewable sources of energy. Jointly, anthropologists Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe conducted fieldwork among the many stakeholders -- including farmers and fishers, indigenous activists, bureaucrats, investors, and non-human animals – as the state of Oaxaca became the site of the largest concentration of wind parks in the hemisphere. Through three case studies – La Ventosa, a traditional and successful public-private partnership; Yansa-Ixtepec, an innovative but perpetually stymied attempt at community-owned wind power; and Mareña Renovables, a monumental but failed mega-project – Boyer and Howe demonstrate that while wind power is a necessary and positive antidote to global warming, how it is implemented and with whose participation matters. The transition to renewable energy technologies could be an opportunity to counteract the inequalities and injustices underwritten by fossil fuels; or the transition could leave those structures of power intact and reinforced. In Energopolitics, Boyer examines the politics of wind development in Mexico to think through how the energy and environmental crises of global warming require new approaches to political theory. Following the windmills upstream from farmers’ fields to regional and national capitals and overseas to international investors and green energy corporations, Boyer provides a unique, full picture of the participants, negotiations, and conflicts involved. In doing so, he arrives at a compelling description of how new energic infrastructures are reshaping political experience. Together, Ecologics and Energopolitics make a bold intervention in how we understand the changing relationship between political power and energy generation and are required reading for anyone interested in how humanity will make the infrastructural transformations that global warming demands. Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Emily Lakdawalla talks about the design and construction of Curiosity, formally known as the Mars Science Laboratory, one of the most sophisticated machines ever built. Curiosity landed on Mars in 2012 where it has been conducting research within the ancient Gale Crater. This book describes the most complex machine ever sent to another planet: Curiosity. It is a one-ton robot with two brains, seventeen cameras, six wheels, nuclear power, and a laser beam on its head. No one human understands how all of its systems and instruments work. This essential reference to the Curiosity mission explains the engineering behind every system on the rover, from its rocket-powered jetpack to its radioisotope thermoelectric generator to its fiendishly complex sample handling system. Its lavishly illustrated text explains how all the instruments work -- its cameras, spectrometers, sample-cooking oven, and weather station -- and describes the instruments' abilities and limitations. It tells you how the systems have functioned on Mars, and how scientists and engineers have worked around problems developed on a faraway planet: holey wheels and broken focus lasers. And it explains the grueling mission operations schedule that keeps the rover working day in and day out. Lakdawalla is a senior editor at the Planetary Society where she writes and blogs about planetary exploration. She is a frequent guest on Planetary Radio. She is also the author of The Design and Engineering of Curiosity: How the Mars Rover Performs Its Job (Springer, 2018). Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

This is the first of three interviews with Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer about their duo-graph, Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2019). Also listen to my interview with Boyer about his volume, Energopolitics, as well as my interview with both authors together about collaborative research and the wider implications of their work. Cymene Howe’s Ecologics and its partner volume, Energopoltics by Dominic Boyer follow the development of wind power in southern Mexico and the social, political, and environmental ramifications of moving towards renewable sources of energy. Jointly, anthropologists Boyer and Howe conducted fieldwork among the many stakeholders -- including farmers and fishers, indigenous activists, bureaucrats, investors, and non-human animals – as the state of Oaxaca became the site of the largest concentration of wind parks in the hemisphere. Through three case studies – La Ventosa, a traditional and successful public-private partnership; Yansa-Ixtepec, an innovative but perpetually stymied attempt at community-owned wind power; and Mareña Renovables, a monumental but failed mega-project – Boyer and Howe demonstrate that while wind power is a necessary and positive antidote to global warming, how it is implemented and with whose participation matters. The transition to renewable energy technologies could be an opportunity to counteract the inequalities and injustices underwritten by fossil fuels; or the transition could leave those structures of power intact and reinforced. In Ecologics, Howe examines the aborted Mareña Renovables wind park to understand the resistance of indigenous residents to renewable energy development and to analyze the consequences of their exclusion from the decisions that impact their lives. Howe further argues that a full accounting for the dynamics of energy development and its consequences cannot be achieved without including the nonhuman beings, technomaterial objects, and geophysical forces that shape and are shaped by wind power. Together, Ecologics and Energopolitics make a bold intervention in how we understand the changing relationship between political power and energy generation and are required reading for anyone interested in how humanity will make the infrastructural transformations that global warming demands. Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In the 1980s, fires burned an average of two million acres per year. Today the average is eight million acres and growing. Scientists believe that we could see years with twenty million acres burned, an area larger than country of Ireland. Today I talked to Michael Kodas about the phenomenon of megafires, forest fires that burn over 100,000 acres, and why the number of these fires is increasing every year. Kodas is the deputy director of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado-Boulder. He is also an award winning photojournalist and reporter. His book Megafire: The Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) recently won the Colorado Book Award. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Matthew James talks about the 1905 Galapagos Expedition organized by the California Academy of Sciences. James is a professor of geology at Sonoma State University. He is the author of Collecting Evolution: The Galapagos Expedition that Vindicated Darwin (Oxford University Press, 2017). In 1905, eight men from the California Academy of Sciences set sail from San Francisco for a scientific collection expedition in the Galapagos Islands, and by the time they were finished in 1906, they had completed one of the most important expeditions in the history of both evolutionary and conservation science. These scientists collected over 78,000 specimens during their time on the islands, validating the work of Charles Darwin and laying the groundwork for foundational evolution texts like Darwin's Finches. Despite its significance, almost nothing has been written on this voyage, lost amongst discussion of Darwin's trip on the Beagle and the writing of David Lack. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Cars promise freedom, autonomy, and above all, movement but leave whole cities stuck in traffic, breathing polluted air, exposed of deadly crashes, and dependent on vast the vast infrastructures of road networks, and oil production. Postcolonial Automobility: Car Culture in West Africa (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) examines the paradoxes and ambivalences of automobility through the lens of West African films, novels, plays, and poems. From the melodramas of Nollywood to the socialist realism of Ousmane Semebene, African artists have delved into the pleasures and anxieties of the road to theorize capitalist development, globalization, patriarchy, and the ethics of accumulation. In this episode of New Books in Anthropology, Lindsey Green-Simms joins host Jacob Doherty to discuss how West African entrepreneurs appropriated colonial technologies, how stalled cars embodied the crises of structural adjustment, and what new, feminist, mobilities and imaginaries emerge from the pages, screens, and stages of West African popular and literary culture. Lindsey Green-Simms is an associate professor of Literature at American University with a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Minnesota. She specializes in post-colonial film and literature with particular emphasis on issues of gender, sexuality, globalization, and mobility. Her work has appeared in Transition, Journal of African Cinemas, Camera Obscura, and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. She is currently working on a project on African queer cinema. Jacob Doherty is a research associate in urban mobility at the Transport Studies Unit, University of Oxford, and, most recently, the co-editor Labor Laid Waste, a special issue of International Labor and Working Class History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In this episode of New Books in Buddhist Studies, I am joined by Daniel Veidlinger to discuss his exciting new book From Indra’s Net to Internet: Communication, Technology, and the Evolution of Buddhist Ideas (University of Hawaii Press, 2018), which offers a theoretically compelling exploration of the types communicative “ecosystems” in which Buddhist ideas have flourished throughout history. Drawing inspiration from evolutionary biology and media theory, Veidlinger’s book begins by isolating some particular traits that were unique to (or at least most well-developed in) early Buddhism, and then tracing how these traits were particular well-suited for transmission in two specific historical, cultural, and communicative contexts: namely, communities in early India and along the Silk Road in the first centuries of the Common Era. His book concludes with a lengthy exploration of the ways that the Internet Age represents a third such epoch, and propounds the provocative theory that the technological, discursive and affective aspects of internet use can make frequent users more receptive to Buddhist ideas. Given this contemporary focus, we conclude our interview by considering the way(s) that Veidlinger’s theory can accommodate, and even respond to, the fact that the internet has also been used to foment hatred and divisiveness in the last three years of American history. Christopher Jensen teaches Buddhism and Chinese Religions at Carleton University. He can be reached at: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

For all of his fame as one of the seminal figures of the Industrial Revolution, James Watt is a person around whom many misconceptions congregate. In The Life and Legend of James Watt: Collaboration, Natural Philosophy, and the Improvement of the Steam Engine (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), David Philip Miller separates the man from the myth by detailing his numerous accomplishments and showing how the misconceptions formed. The son of a Scottish ships’ chandler, Watt demonstrated interest in both mathematics and technology at an early age. Trained in London as an instrument maker, Watt progressed into civil engineering after his return to Glasgow before turning his attention to improving the efficiency of the steam engines then in existence. His famous innovations proved enormously successful, and Watt’s development of the enhanced engines in partnership with Matthew Boulton made him wealthy enough to devote more time to scientific experimentation. As Miller demonstrates, many of Watt’s achievements were the product of collaboration rather than of a lone genius, a fact that was overshadowed by Watt’s growing reputation in his later years and the veneration of his memory after his death in 1819. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Once upon a time, or so we’ve been told, medical ethics were confined to the patient-doctor relationship. As long as doctors were true to their Hippocratic oaths, as long as they acted with compassion and wisdom, then all expectations were met. Life is more complicated today, and so is healthcare: an undertaking, like all others, that is influenced by social, political, legal and cultural factors. Nothing is value-free. In Bioethics and Biopolitics in Israel: Socio-legal, Political and Empirical Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Professor Shai Lavi and his colleagues have produced a groundbreaking work that offers a novel understanding of Israeli bioethics. It is a milestone in the comparative literature of bioethics. Bringing together a range of experts, the book's interdisciplinary structure employs a contemporary, sociopolitical-oriented approach to bioethics issues, with an emphasis on empirical analysis, that will appeal not only to scholars of bioethics, but also to students of law, medicine, humanities, and social sciences around the world. Its focus on the development of bioethics in Israel serves as a template for cross-cultural and transcultural research into the moral, ethical, political and social aspects of bioethics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Andrew Wright Hurley talks about the life and afterlife of the Prussian explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, a man whose reputation has shifted to reflect the changing cultures of Australia and Germany over the past 160 years. Hurley is an associate professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney. He’s the author of Ludwig Leichhardt’s Ghosts: The Strange Career of a Traveling Myth (Camden House, 2018). After the renowned Prussian scientist and explorer Ludwig Leichhardt left the Australian frontier in 1848 on an expedition to cross the continent, he disappeared without a trace. Andrew Hurley's book complicates that view by undertaking an afterlife biography of "the Humboldt of Australia." Although Leichhardt's remains were never located, he has been sought and textually "found" many times over, particularly in Australia and Germany. He remains a significant presence, a highly productive ghost who continues to "haunt" culture. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

The clerk attended his desk and counter at the intersection of two great themes of modern historical experience: the development of a market economy and of a society governed from below. Who better illustrates the daily practice and production of this modernity than someone of no particular account assigned with overseeing all the new buying and selling? In Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made (U Chicago Press, 2018), Michael Zakim has written their story, a social history of capital that seeks to explain how the “bottom line” became a synonym for truth in an age shorn of absolutes, grafted onto our very sense of reason and trust. This is a big story, told through an ostensibly marginal event: the birth of a class of “merchant clerks” in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century. The personal trajectory of these young men from farm to metropolis, homestead to boarding house, and, most significantly, from growing things to selling them exemplified the enormous social effort required to domesticate the profit motive and turn it into the practical foundation of civic life. As Zakim reveals in his highly original study, there was nothing natural or preordained about the stunning ascendance of this capitalism and its radical transformation of the relationship between “Man and Mammon.” Lukas Rieppel teaches history at Brown University. His new book, Assembling the Dinosaur, has recently been published by Harvard University press. You can find him online at https://sites.google.com/view/lukasrieppel/ or on twitter @lrieppel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Video games are a significant part of popular entertainment in the twenty-first century. From Words with Friends to Grand Theft Auto, most people spend at least some of their leisure time with video games. In his book, Unlimited Replays: Video Games and Classical Music (Oxford University Press, 2018), William Gibbons examines the intersection between video games and classical music. From close readings of the scores of specific games to an analysis of games with characters related to classical music, Gibbons asks what happens when highbrow art meets lowbrow entertainment. Often classical music enhances the visual and storytelling elements of a game by sonically marking characters or situations as wealthy or sophisticated, as also happens in film and TV scores. Gibbons finds unexpected connections and layering of signification as video game scores exploit musical references from sources as far flung as Stanley Kubrick’s films to Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin. He ends the book with an account of how orchestras are trying to use the immense popularity of gaming to raise money and attract new audiences by playing concerts of video game music. William Gibbons is an associate professor of musicology and Associate Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Texas Christian University. His research centers on how canonical classical music repertoires function outside their initial time of compositions. In addition to his first book, Building the Operatic Music (University of Rochester Press), he has published numerous journal articles including in American Music, 19th-Century Music Review, and Opera Quarterly, and has co-edited a volume on video game music published in 2014 and another forthcoming later this year both from Routledge Press. Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Stefan Al, PhD, is a native of the Netherlands, a low-lying county that would not exist without flood protection, is an architect, urban designer, and infrastructure expert at global design at Kohn Pedersen Fox in New York. He has served as a TED resident, advisor to the United Nations High Level Political Forum on sustainable development and Professor of urban design at the University of Pennsylvania. Adapting Cities to Sea Level Rise: Green and Gray Strategies(Island Press, 2018) is a tool kit for adapting and managing sea level rise and storm events for metropolitan cities and smaller communities. It’s a “how to” guide to create better comprehensive strategies and ideas for implementation. The beautiful and simple diagrams illustrate the difference responses possible for cities and the pros and cons of each. The book makes the argument that collaboration is the key to finding successful solutions for all stakeholders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In 1978, doctors in Denver, Colorado observed several healthy children who suddenly and mysteriously developed a serious, life-threatening illness with no visible source. Their condition, which doctors dubbed ‘toxic shock syndrome’ (TSS) was rare, but observed with increasing frequency over the next few years in young women, and was soon learned to be associated with a bacterium and the use of high-absorbency tampons that had only recently gone on the market. In 1980, the Centers for Disease Control identified Rely tampons, produced by Procter & Gamble, as having the greatest association with TSS over every other tampon, and the company withdrew them from the market. To this day, however, women are frequently warned about contracting TSS through tampon use, even though very few cases are diagnosed each year. Historian Sharra Vostral’s Toxic Shock: A Social History (NYU Press, 2018) is the first and definitive history of TSS. Vostral shows how commercial interests negatively affected women’s health outcomes; the insufficient testing of the first super-absorbency tampon; how TSS became a ‘women’s disease,’ for which women must constantly monitor their own bodies. Further, Vostral discusses the awkward, veiled and vague ways public health officials and the media discussed the risks of contracting TSS through tampon use because of social taboos around discussing menstruation, and how this has hampered regulatory actions and health communication around TSS, tampon use, and product safety. A study at the intersection of public health and social history, Toxic Shock brings to light the complexities behind a stigmatized and under-discussed issue in women’s reproductive health. Importantly, Vostral warns that as we move forward with more and more joint replacements, implants, and internal medical devices, we must understand the relationship of technology to bacteria and recognize that both can be active agents within the human body. In other words, unexpected consequences and risks of bacteria and technology interacting with each other remain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

After the discoveries of dinosaur fossils in the American West in the late nineteenth century, the United States became world renown for vertebrate paleontology. In his new book Assembling the Dinosaur: Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle(Harvard University Press, 2019), Lukas Rieppel explains how the discoveries projected American exceptionalism and, at the height of the Gilded Age, became symbols of industrial capitalism. As Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan funded paleontology fieldwork and philanthropic museums, they bolstered their own reputations within the scientific community, and popularized creatures like the Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops. These American business magnates and tycoons soon counted on the eye-catching displays of ferocious dinosaurs, not to justify the cut-throat nature of capitalism in their own times, but to symbolize man’s progress and ascent from the depths of the prehistoric past. Ryan Driskell Tate is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Rutgers University. He teaches courses on modern United States history, environmental history, and histories of labor and capitalism. He is completing a book on energy development in the American West. @rydriskelltate Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

How the rise of the car, the symbol of American personal freedom, inadvertently led to ever more intrusive policing-with disastrous consequences for racial equality in our criminal justice system. When Americans think of freedom, they often picture the open road. Yet nowhere are we more likely to encounter the long arm of the law than in our cars. Sarah Seo reveals how the rise of the automobile led us to accept-and expect-pervasive police power. As Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom (Harvard University Press, 2019) makes clear, this radical transformation in the nature and meaning of American freedom has had far-reaching political and legal consequences. Before the twentieth century, most Americans rarely came into contact with police officers. But with more and more drivers behind the wheel, police departments rapidly expanded their forces and increased officers' authority to stop citizens who violated traffic laws. The Fourth Amendment-the constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures-did not effectively shield individuals from government intrusion while driving. Instead, jurists interpreted the amendment narrowly. In a society dependent on cars, everyone-the law-breaking and law-abiding alike-would be subject to discretionary policing. Seo overturns prevailing interpretations of the Warren Court's due process revolution. The justices' efforts to protect Americans did more to accommodate than to limit police intervention, and the new criminal procedures inadvertently sanctioned discrimination by officers of the law. Constitutional challenges to traffic stops largely failed, and motorists "driving while black" had little recourse to question police demands. Seo shows how procedures designed to safeguard us on the road ultimately undermined the nation's commitment to equal protection before the law. Stephen Colbrook is a graduate student at University College London, where he is researching a dissertation on the interaction between HIV/AIDS and state policy-making. This work will focus on the political and policy-making side of the epidemic and aims to compare the different contexts of individual states, such as California, Florida, and New Jersey. Stephen can be contacted at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Violet Moller has written a narrative history of the transmission of books from the ancient world to the modern. In The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found (Doubleday, 2019), Moller traces the histories of migration of three ancient authors, Euclid, Ptolemy and Galen, from ancient Alexandria in 500 to Syria and Constantinople, to Baghdad in 800, and then to Renaissance Venice in the 15th century. Moller demonstrates how tenuous were the chances of such ancient works’ survival, from the depredations of invading armies to the hazards of fire and flooding, to the problems of translation through multiple languages over the centuries. The migration of ancient texts from Greece to the Middle East and back to medieval Europe is a fascinating story of how knowledge was preserved when certain conditions were met, such as political stability, the willingness of itinerant scholarly “manuscript hunters” to risk life and limb to find obscure, ancient texts, and the openness to tolerate and embrace knowledge derived from other cultures and civilizations. Moller’s book is the story of how the texts upon which the modern world was built were acquired through fortuitous accident and scholarly diligence. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Okezi Otovo’s Progressive Mothers, Better Babies: Race, Public Health, and the State in Brazil, 1850-1945 (U Texas Press, 2016) explores the intersecting histories of race, gender, and class in modern Brazil. Between 1850 and 1945, the period covered in the book, Brazil experienced a range of profound socio-political transformations: from the end of the transatlantic slave trade (1850), to the wholesale abolition of slavery (1988), the demise of the monarchy followed by the rise of a republican system of government, and the ultimate inauguration of the Vargas dictatorship. Set in Bahia, the book considers the impact of these changes in the lives of black mothers and their children by following the rise of the maternalist movement in Brazil and its relationship to international discourses on race, public health reform, and national modernity. In addition to tracking changes to medical ideas about motherhood and children, Okezi Otovo gives agency to these black and brown mothers and considers both how they acted and were acted upon by physicians, public health reformers, and newly-formed welfare institutions. Progressive Mothers, Better Babies provides an important contribution to scholarship working at the intersections of race, class, gender, public health, and medical thought. It will be an important read to anyone seeking to grapple with the essential role assigned to mothers – specifically to black and brown, poor women – by physicians and public health reformers in a deeply patriarchal society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Vanessa Heggie talks about the history of biomedical research in extreme environments. Heggie is a Fellow of the Institute for Global Innovation at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Higher and Colder: A History of Extreme Physiology and Exploration(University of Chicago Press, 2019). During the long twentieth century, explorers went in unprecedented numbers to the hottest, coldest, and highest points on the globe. Taking us from the Himalaya to Antarctica and beyond, Higher and Colder presents the first history of extreme physiology, the study of the human body at its physical limits. Each chapter explores a seminal question in the history of science, while also showing how the apparently exotic locations and experiments contributed to broader political and social shifts in twentieth-century scientific thinking. Unlike most books on modern biomedicine, Higher and Colder focuses on fieldwork, expeditions, and exploration, and in doing so provides a welcome alternative to laboratory-dominated accounts of the history of modern life sciences. Though centered on male-dominated practices—science and exploration—it recovers the stories of women’s contributions that were sometimes accidentally, and sometimes deliberately, erased. Engaging and provocative, this book is a history of the scientists and physiologists who face challenges that are physically demanding, frequently dangerous, and sometimes fatal, in the interest of advancing modern science and pushing the boundaries of human ability. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Personalized healthcare―or what the award-winning author Donna Dickenson calls "Me Medicine"―is radically transforming our longstanding "one-size-fits-all" model. Technologies such as direct-to-consumer genetic testing, pharmacogenetically developed therapies in cancer care, private umbilical cord blood banking, and neurocognitive enhancement claim to cater to an individual's specific biological character, and, in some cases, these technologies have shown powerful potential. Yet in others they have produced negligible or even negative results. Whatever is behind the rise of Me Medicine, it isn't just science. So why is Me Medicine rapidly edging out We Medicine, and how has our commitment to our collective health suffered as a result? In her cogent, provocative book Me Medicine vs. We Medicine: Reclaiming Biotechnology for the Common Good(Columbia University Press, 2016), Dickenson examines the economic and political factors fueling the Me Medicine phenomenon and explores how, over time, this paradigm shift in how we approach our health might damage our individual and collective well-being. Historically, the measures of "We Medicine," such as vaccination and investment in public-health infrastructure, have radically extended our life spans, and Dickenson argues we've lost sight of that truth in our enthusiasm for "Me Medicine." Dickenson explores how personalized medicine illustrates capitalism's protean capacity for creating new products and markets where none existed before―and how this, rather than scientific plausibility, goes a long way toward explaining private umbilical cord blood banks and retail genetics. Drawing on the latest findings from leading scientists, social scientists, and political analysts, she critically examines four possible hypotheses driving our Me Medicine moment: a growing sense of threat; a wave of patient narcissism; corporate interests driving new niche markets; and the dominance of personal choice as a cultural value. She concludes with insights from political theory that emphasize a conception of the commons and the steps we can take to restore its value to modern biotechnology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life (W. W. Norton & Co., 2018), Dr. David R. Montgomery portrays hope amidst the backdrop that for centuries, agricultural practices have eroded the soil that farming depends on, stripping it of the organic matter vital to its productivity. Once a self-proclaimed dark green eco-pessimist, Dr. Montgomery finds this new hope as he travels the world, meeting farmers at the forefront of an agricultural movement to restore soil health. Readers join him driving passed no-till, precision agriculture fields in Kansas to walking around The Centre for No-Till Agriculture in Kumasi, Ghana. Each step of the way we are reminded that adopting the three tenets of conservation agriculture—ditching the plow, planting cover crops, and growing a diversity of crops—is the solution to align agricultural production and environmental outcomes. Throughout the book, evidence mounts -- maybe farmers and ranchers can feed the world, cool the planet, reduce pollution, and return profitability to the farm. What’s unique and refreshing, Dr. Montgomery cuts through the typical debates about conventional versus organic farming. Instead, Montgomery explores why practices based on the principles of conservation agriculture help restore soil health and fertility – naturally reducing the reliance on herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers. Chris Gambino works at the intersection of science and policy in hopes of creating more informed decision-making. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Can science be seductive? According to Tita Chico, the answer is a resounding yes. In her new book, The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment(Stanford University Press, 2018), Dr. Chico’s new book upends the traditional, modern dichotomies which enforce strict separations between literature and science. Rather than solely bound to rigorous, self-effacing protocols, scientific practice is instead revealed to be deeply tethered to imaginative, figurative, and aesthetic epistemologies. Much like science, literature produces its own forms of knowledge about the world – for, as Dr. Chico puts it, they are epistemological siblings. This is a book that will interest anyone seeking to question, historicize, and expand the meaning of scientific knowledge by way of recovering its early modern capaciousness. Not only did natural philosophers also write poetry, but natural philosophy could be poetic as well. Readers interested in exploring the possibilities of metaphor, figuration, the imagination, and aesthetics in science will find fertile ground in this book; whilst those seeking to engage in generative conversations about problems like objectivity, truth, and fact will not walk away disappointed either. The Experimental Imagination is, in sum, not only a very rich book, but a book that will surely generate many enriching conversations in e.g. the fields of literary studies, history of science, feminist STS, and eighteenth-century studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

How are markets made? In Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers, and the Making of Electronic Markets (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, an assistant professor in sociology at the University of California, San Diego, explores the history of the finance industry to understand the role of markets and technologies in contemporary capitalism. The book offers a detailed theoretical engagement with the personalities and technological changes underpinning the modern system of automated finance. It uses the case study of the development of the London Stock Exchange, looking at the social relations embedded in financial markets, before moving to look at the global, American system. Charting the move from trading floors to trading screens, the book considers individuals and broader social systems shaping enabling and constraining behaviour in the world of finance. Overall the book offers a rethinking of the meaning of markets, and is essential reading across social science, history, and management studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

John D. Hawks talks about new developments in paleoanthropology – the discovery of a new hominid species Homo Naledi in South Africa, the Neanderthal ancestry of many human populations, and the challenge of rethinking anthropological science’s relationship with indigenous peoples and the general public. Hawks is the Vilas-Borghesi Achievement Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is author (with Lee Berger) of Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story (National Geographic, 2017). Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

The machines have taken over.... For many operating in investment management, it can certainly seem that way: factor investing, algorithmic investing, dynamic hedging instruments, risk management derivatives driven by changes in market prices, etc. dominate much of the investment narrative. And now and again these supposedly superior investment approaches get blamed for causing big blow ups. If portfolio insurance led to a wave of computer selling in 1987, then the chaos generated by the models in 2008-2009 was incomparably larger. So say the critics. But in Financial Models and Society: Villains or Scapegoats (Elgar, 2018), Ekaterina Svetlova begs to differ. She looks at how quantitative models are actually used by investors and finds a whole space where human judgment, intuition and non-model based factors come into play as to when and how and to what degree financial models are actually implemented. This social social of finance is well known in academia; it needs to be better known among practitioners. Listen to her interview here. Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Over the past forty years, U.S. prisons and jails have used various psychotropic drugs. In this interview, Anthony Ryan Hatch discusses the need to think deeply about mass incarceration, pharmaceuticals, and psychiatry. He talks about the role of pharmacies and drug experiments in prison settings, and he underlines the ways that institutions themselves can be addicted to drugs. These are just a few of the topics that he examines in his recent book, Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America(University of Minnesota Press, 2019). And, importantly, he also offers thoughts about recovery from this addiction. Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Lina del Castillo’s book explores scientific, geographic, and historiographic inventions in nineteenth-century Colombia. In this fascinating book, well-known figures of Colombia’s history (such as Francisco José de Caldas, and José María Samper) are cast under new light, while unexplored institutions such as the Instituto Caldas and the Colegio Militar are analyzed in-depth and with striking clarity. By bring such wide array of historical actors and institutions, del Castillo provides a nuanced historical narrative were liberal and conservative elites are not portrayed as ideological rivals, but as allies in the collective enterprise of republicanism, a project unrivaled at the time. But Crafting a Republic for the World: Scientific, Geographic and Historiographic Inventions of Colombia (University of Nebraska, 2018) is more timely and original is in its analysis of colonial legacies. How, and to what purposes, were colonial legacies invented in Colombia during the nineteenth century? For del Castillo, ‘colonial legacies’ have been a powerful lens to interpret not just Colombian history, but Latin American history more generally. This way of understanding Latin America has portrayed the region as a static place shackled to the past by the pervasive legacies of Spanish colonialism. Ultimately, del Castillo invites us to reconsider not only the way we interpret Latin American history, but also how we understand the history of the United States, its relationship with British colonialism, and its ties with the history of Latin America and the Caribbean. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

More than half of American adults and more than seventy-five percent of young Americans believe in intelligent extraterrestrial life. This level of belief rivals that of belief in God. In American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology (Oxford University Press, 2019), professor Diana Pasulka examines the mechanisms at work behind the thriving belief system in extraterrestrial life, a system she asserts is changing and even supplanting traditional religions. Over the course of a six-year ethnographic study, Pasulka interviewed successful and influential scientists, professionals, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who believe in extraterrestrial intelligence, thereby disproving the common misconception that only fringe members of society believe in UFOs. She argues that widespread belief in aliens is due to a number of factors including their ubiquity in modern media such as The X-Files, which can influence memory, and the believability lent to that media by the search for planets that might support life. American Cosmic explores the intriguing question of how people interpret unexplainable experiences and argues that the media is replacing religion as a cultural authority that offers believers answers about non-human intelligent life. Diana Walsh Pasulka is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion. Her research focuses on religion and technology, including supernatural belief and its connections to digital technologies and environments. She is also a history and religion consultant for movies and television, including The Conjuring (from 2013). Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Could cancer be a contagious disease? Although this possibility might seem surprising to many of us, it has a long history. In fact, efforts to develop a cancer vaccine drew more money than the Human Genome Project. In his first book, MIT historian of science Robin Wolfe Scheffler takes readers through the twists and turns of the American effort to identify human cancer viruses— a search which made fundamental contributions to molecular biology. In this podcast, we discuss how this was an effort which raises fundamental questions regarding how we think about disease in the laboratory and the legislature. Dr. Robin Scheffler’s book is called A Contagious Cause: The American Hunt for Cancer Viruses and the Rise of Molecular Medicine(University of Chicago Press, 2019). Dr. Dorian Deshauer is a psychiatrist, historian, and assistant professor at the University of Toronto. He is associate editor for the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Canada’s leading peer-reviewed general medical journal and is one of the hosts of CMAJ Podcasts, a medical podcast for doctors and researchers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), Greta LaFleur invites readers to consider a different body. The book effectively historicizes categories that are often take for granted (sex, race, vice, habit), and shows us not only their temporal contingency, but by inviting the reader to delve into the strangeness of early modern ontologies and epistemologies. Prof. LaFleur ultimately crafts a space of possibility for different futures as well. These are futures of greater intersectional solidarity in which we are invited to think about the collective, and move past the dominance of the individual, the subjective and modern biopoliticized body. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Dr. Anna Rose Alexander’s City on Fire: Technology, Social Change, and the Hazards of Progress in Mexico City, 1860-1910 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) looks at fire as an active agent of change in the urban environment (a catalyst for change). She examines the approaches to dealing with the ever-present threat of fire in Mexico City in an era in which technology and modernity were transforming the city in fundamental ways. Using a methodology borrowed from “hazard studies,” Alexander looks not at the major disasters as agents of fundamental change, but the everyday conflagrations as creating a kind of “culture of disaster” in the porfirian city. Alexander highlights the efforts of fire inspectors and other officials in the realm of public safety to approach fire risk reduction from a perspective that ensured all capitalinos access to fire safety, as a matter of public safety. Julian Dodson is a Post-doctoral Teaching Fellow at Washington State University. His research interests include nineteenth and twentieth-century Mexican history, specifically the period of the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1940. Other interests include the history of the U.S.-Mexico border, U.S.-Mexico diplomatic relations, environmental, transnational, gender, and cultural history. Julian is the author of Fanáticos, Exiles, and Spies: Revolutionary Failures on the U.S-Mexico Border, 1923-1930 (Texas A&M University Press, 2019). Follow Julian on Twitter @JulianDodson4. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

What is the social role of data? In The Data Gaze: Capitalism, Power and Perception (Sage, 2019), David Beer, a professor of sociology at the University of York, considers this question by introducing the concept of the data gaze. The book is the third in Beer’s loose trilogy of work on data. It draws on Foucault’s work in The Birth of the Clinic to think through various theoretical and empirical examples of how the data gaze functions. The book considers theories of temporality and acceleration, along with the practices of analysts, engineers, and organisations in data capitalism, with the aim of questioning the objectivity assumed to be inherent in ‘data’. It will be essential reading to anyone seeking to understand contemporary, data, society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Historian of Science Philip W. Clements discusses the 1963 American Mount Everest Expedition. His book, Science in an Extreme Environment: The American Mount Everest Expedition, is now out with University of Pittsburgh Press (2018). Part I, originally posted in November 2017, focuses on the goals and events of the expedition. Part II offers new material from the interview in which Clements discusses the expedition party’s scientific findings and treatment of local Sherpas. It also discusses the expedition’s broader relevance to the study of environmental history and climate change. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Daniel Nemser’s Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico(University of Texas Press, 2017) examines the long history of how Spanish imperial rule depended upon spatial concentration – the gathering of people and things into centralized spaces – to control populations and consolidate power. Through four case studies spanning nearly 300 years of Spanish rule in colonial Mexico, Nemser illustrates how different modes of concentration -- centralized towns, disciplinary institutions, segregated neighborhoods, and general collections – reflected the prerogatives and imperatives of domination and expropriation. Compellingly, Infrastructures of Race argues that these spatial infrastructures and strategies were central and instrumental in the creation of racial identities and their inscription upon colonial subjects. Through designed and engineered spaces, racial identities were lived, sensed, and experienced, and as the built environment faded into barely noticeable infrastructure, race as well became naturalized. Infrastructures of Race provides essential historical background for present-day interrogations of how infrastructures – from aged water pipes to search engine algorithms – reinforce persistent racial inequalities. The challenges of de-racializing these often unnoticed foundations require a deep understanding of how race became so imbricated with technological environments. Through Nemser’s case studies, we can better apprehend the hundreds of years of oppression that have been built into our material lives. Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Over the past four decades, the volumes published in the landmark History of Cartography series have both chronicled and encouraged scholarship about maps and mapping practices across time and space. As the current director of the project that has produced these volumes, Matthew H. Edney has a unique vantage point for understanding what “cartography” has come to mean and include. In this book Edney disavows the term cartography, rejecting the notion that maps represent an undifferentiated category of objects for study. Rather than treating maps as a single, unified group, he argues, scholars need to take a processual approach that examines specific types of maps—sea charts versus thematic maps, for example—in the context of the unique circumstances of their production, circulation, and consumption. To illuminate this bold argument, Edney chronicles precisely how the ideal of cartography that has developed in the West since 1800 has gone astray. By exposing the flaws in this ideal, his book challenges everyone who studies maps and mapping practices to reexamine their approach to the topic. The study of cartography will never be the same. Matthew Edney is the Osher Professor in the History of Cartography at the University of Southern Maine. In addition to Cartography: The Ideal and Its History (University of Chicago Press, 2019) he is the author of Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (University of Chicago Press, 1997). Since 2005, Matthew has directed the History of Cartography Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the co-editor with Mary S. Pedley of Cartography in the European Enlightenment, a massive compilation (at 1,920 pages!) now in press as Volume Four of Chicago’s The History of Cartography series. (Volumes 1, 2, 3, and 6 are already available on open access. Matthew also run a personal blog, Mapping as Process, which features his commentary on the study of map production, circulation, and consumption. Steven Seegel is a Professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Along with the rapid expansion of the market economy and industrial production methods, such innovations as photography, lithography, and steam printing created a pictorial revolution in nineteenth-century society. The proliferation of visual prints, ephemera, spectacles, and technologies transformed public values and perceptions, and its legacy was as significant as the print revolution that preceded it. Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Oxford University Press, 2018) explores the significance of the pictorial revolution in one of its vanguard cities: San Francisco, the revolving door of the gold rush. In their correspondence, diaries, portraits, and reminiscences, thousands of migrants to the city by the Bay demonstrated that visual media constituted a central means by which people navigated the bewildering host of changes taking hold around them in the second half of the nineteenth century, from the spread of capitalism and class formation to immigration and urbanization. Amy K. Defalco Lippert, Assistant Professor of American History and the College at the University of Chicago, argues that images themselves were inextricably associated with these world-changing forces; they were commodities, but as representations of people, they also possessed special cultural qualities that gave them new meaning and significance. Visual media transcended traditional boundaries of language and culture that divided diverse groups within the same urban space. From the 1848 conquest of California and the gold discovery to the disastrous earthquake and fire of 1906, San Francisco anticipated broader cultural transformations in the commodification, implementation, and popularity of images. For the city's inhabitants and sojourners, an array of imagery came to mediate, intersect with, and even constitute social interaction in a world where virtual reality was becoming normative. ____________________________________________________________________________ Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

“Phytotron” is such a great name for something that is, when you look at it, a high-tech greenhouse. But don’t sell it short! The phytotron was not only at the center of post-war plant science, but also connected to the Cold War, commercial agriculture, and long-duration space flight. Today I speak with David Munns, professor of history at John Jay College, about his new book, Engineering the Environment: Phytotrons and the Quest for Climate Control in the Cold War (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), but we also talk about Matt Damon, shitting in space, and growing pot in your dorm room. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Paul Ramírez’s first book explores how laypeople impacted the new medical techniques and technologies implemented by the imperial state in the final decades of Spanish rule in colonial Mexico. More than a scholarly intervention, Ramírez seeks to answer a very pragmatic and timely question: how and why do successful public health measures succeed? Through his surprising, nuanced, and complicated answer, Ramírez broadens our understanding of who counts as a vital actor in public health programs. Whereas historians have long thought of enlightened reform in the terms of absolutist monarchical power, Enlightened Immunity: Mexico’s Experiments with Disease Prevention in the Age of Reason (Stanford University Press, 2018)cracks the nut to find within a effervescent world of competitive and cooperative medical cultures. Through careful analyses of the Royal Vaccination Campaign of the early 19th century as well as prior public methods of responding to epidemic disease, Ramírez demonstrates a consistent pattern of mutual exchange and influence between professional communities and lay populations, both indigenous and not. Refreshingly, he also reassesses the role of the Catholic Church: despite common assumptions of an inherent antipathy between science and religion (especially Catholicism), we see here the integral role of religious ideas, practices, rituals, personnel, and political power in the implementation of modern public health initiatives. The resulting picture of negotiation, conciliation, and experimentation is essential reading for both historians of public health, science, and Latin America, as well as readers in the medical humanities generally. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Too often keeping patients alive gets in the way of helping them as they approach death. Dr. Pauline Chen shares her experiences as a medical student and transplant surgeon and how they’ve shaped the way she practices medicine. Chen is the author of Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality (Vintage, 2008) and the New York Times column “Doctor and Patient.” Her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times Magazine, and The New York Times Book Review. Her work has been nominated for a National Magazine Award. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) such as in vitro fertilization and surrogacy have been critically examined within philosophy, particularly by feminists and bioethicists, but the role of race—both in how the technologies are used and in the effects that they are having—has received less attention. In The Assisted Reproduction of Race (Indiana University Press, 2018), Camisha Russell undertakes this critical analysis. While there is a robust scientific consensus that there is no meaningful genetic basis for race, Russell’s analysis of the role of race in ARTs reveals that when it comes to producing kinship, race is still doing a great deal of work. Further, by arguing that race itself is a technology, Russell shows how race is both produced and productive, historically, as well as in everyday practices, techniques, and choices. While this analysis focuses on what race does in the contemporary realm of ARTS, it illuminates the role of race, in the past and now, in constructing social reality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

We often think of scientific racism as a pseudo-science of a bygone age, yet in both academic population genetics and popular ancestry testing, the specter of race continues to inflect our senses of biology and being. In Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science (Stanford University Press, 2018), Professor Terence Keel explains this persistence with a new account of the origins of race science, one that illustrates the continuities through four centuries of research into human variation. With trenchant analyses of Christian intellectual history and the founding figures of ethnology, Keel documents an infrastructure of thought – about universalism, the supercession of knowledge, creation, and human dispersion – that shaped and still shapes the science of race. And through case studies of 20th century public health and genomics, Divine Variations shows how these intellectual patterns reemerge time and again. Rather than exclusive spheres, Keel’s book illuminates modern science’s intellectual debts to theology and in doing so presents new ways understand science as historically and socially situated. Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In our current moment marred by media monopolies and disinformation campaigns, it is easy to get caught up in the dizzying temporality of the news cycle and think these are new phenomena. Heidi Tworek’s impressive new book, News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900-1945 (Harvard University Press, 2019), is a necessary reminder that they have a longer history. News from Germany explores how elites in academia, business, and government fought over the regulation of news at home and sought to use communications to extend German power abroad. Readers learn that “false news” was a political strategy used by far-right media moguls in the 1920s and 1930s. Readers also learn that people have long debated the fraught relationship between communications and democracy. Based on a gob-smacking amount of archival research, News from Germany helps explain everything from the Nazis’ adept use of media to German domination of communications scholarship at mid-century. Readers from across specializations and disciplines need to read this remarkable book. Dexter Fergie is a PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @DexterFergie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

When President Trump talked of Africa as a continent of “shithole countries” where people lived in huts, he was drawing on a set of ideas made popular in the 19th century. “Darkest Africa” became a favorite trope of explorers like Henry Morton Stanley who promoted his books and lectures by pushing the idea of Africa as a dark place – a phrase that had all kinds of meanings – racial, intellectual, geographical. Today I speak with Jeannette Eileen Jones, author of In Search of Brightest Africa, Reimagining the Dark Continent in American Culture, 1884-1936 (University of Georgia Press, 2011). Jones talks about the many different groups, from naturalists and conservationists to African American artists and intellectuals, who begin to recast Africa in the America imagination in the early 20th century. Jones is associate professor of history and ethnic studies at University of Nebraska Lincoln. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Feelings have a history and nostalgia has its own. In What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion(University of Chicago Press, 2018) Thomas Dodman explores the history of nostalgia from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. Beginning with the coining of the term by a young Swiss medical student in 1688, the book tracks the development of nostalgia as a diagnosis with a specific military medical history. Never exclusive to the French context, the disease garnered more attention there than elsewhere in Europe for various reasons, including the existence of a powerful military force through the period of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, and the specificities of French political, cultural, and medical fields during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rooted at first in the experiences, displacements, and alienation of soldiers far from home, the diagnosis morphed eventually from an illness to a broader set of cultural phenomena and “feels,” acquiring the character of the temporal, memorial sentimentality we think of today. Bringing together intellectual, military, and medical history with the history of emotions, What Nostalgia Was stays close throughout to the lived experience of those whose pained and/or pleasurable longings for spaces/times distant or lost preoccupied the expert observers and practitioners who sought to help and understand them. Dodman’s examination of historical shifts in understandings of nostalgia is compelling as it builds on both the author’s commitment to archival evidence and sources, and his openness to the insights and approaches of political and cultural theory, philosophy and literary studies. His carefully researched analysis of what nostalgia was and became between Algeria and France is particularly fascinating. The book will give readers (and listeners!) much to think on in terms of why and how nostalgia has moved and affected individuals and cultures for centuries up to and including the present. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: [email protected]. *The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written and performed by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (“hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Nara Milanich’s Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father (Harvard University Press, 2019) explains how fatherhood, long believed to be impossible to know with certainty, became a biological “fact” that could be ascertained with scientific testing. Though the advent of DNA testing might seem to make paternity less elusive, Milanich’s book invites readers to think about paternity not as a biological fact but as a socially-constructed role that has evolved over time. Historically, given assumed paternal uncertainty, fathers were defined in terms of their behavior (acting like a father) or their relationship to a child’s mother (being married to a woman made a man the father of her offspring). In the twentieth century, paternity testing developed as a way to scientifically determine male progenitors, although these new methods never replaced older ways of reckoning paternity. Milanich describes blood tests and other early techniques proffered by doctors and scrutinized by courts as a way to know the “true” father. Paternity testing, she points out, has been used to different ends in different societies: it could identify an errant progenitor or reveal a mother’s liaison. A certain paternity test result could mean economic security for a child or put a person’s life in jeopardy. Moreover, Milanich reveals the uneven application of paternity testing that has tended to protect the most privileged groups in different societies. Paternity is a transatlantic study that moves from South America to Europe and the United States, and its chapters touch upon the histories of science and medicine, gender and the family, and immigration. The podcast features fascinating case studies set in Brazil and Argentina. This book’s reflections on the making of modern paternity speak to our own time, when, for example, the U.S. government is using DNA testing at the border to separate “real” kin from “fictitious” families, as Milanich explains to podcast listeners. The stakes of knowing the father go far beyond determining biological progenitors, and this book vividly reconstructs the political uses and cultural implications of the paternity test. Rachel Grace Newman is joining Smith College in July 2019 as Lecturer in the History of the Global South. She has a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and her dissertation was titled “Transnational Ambitions: Student Migrants and the Making of a National Future in Twentieth-Century Mexico.” She is also the author of a book on a binational program for migrant children whose families divided their time between Michoacán, Mexico and Watsonville, California. She is on Twitter (@rachelgnew). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In the new book #Identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation (University of Michigan Press, 2019), Abigail De Kosnik and Keith Feldman bring together a broad array of chapters that dive into multiple perspectives on social media engagement, especially around hashtag activism and the ways that individuals think about and interact with others via Twitter in regard to social movements and political involvement. As the authors note, “#identity is among the first scholarly books to address the positive and negative effects of Twitter on our contemporary world.” This text came out of The Color of New Media working group at the University of California at Berkeley and the contributors come from a variety of academic backgrounds and disciplines, making this a particularly interdisciplinary approach to considering and understanding a wide variety of social movements, social engagement, political discourse, and active use of hashtagging and Twitter. The chapters include examinations of the global use of Twitter in India and Africa; the rise of and then subsequent response/backlash to black Twitter; and the way that Twitter has been used to target minoritarian groups who have established connections and communities via Twitter and social media. This is a fascinating and diverse book, bringing together different voices, studies, and analysis, all examining how Twitter and #hashtagging has grown up, evolved, and essentially provided a platform for political rhetoric, engagement, and also silencing. #identity will appeal to scholars in many different disciplines including sociology, political science, media studies, gender and women’s studies, Queer studies, postcolonial studies, African-American Studies, American Studies, global studies, and more. This book is available open access here. Lilly J. Goren is Professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Journalist Scott Wallace talks about a 2002 FUNAI expedition to find the Arrow People, one of the last uncontacted tribes in the world. Wallace is a writer and photojournalist who covered the wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s for CBS and The Guardian. Since then he has written extensively for National Geographic. His book, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes (Broadway Books, 2012), tells the story of this expedition. Wallace’s work about the Amazon has also recently appeared in The New York Times. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society