University Of Pittsburgh Press imprint: 402 books
Engineering the Environment
Phytotrons and the Quest for Climate Control in the Cold War
Language: English
Release Date: May 30, 2017
This is the first history of phytotrons, huge climate-controlled laboratories that enabled plant scientists to experiment on the environmental causes of growth and development of living organisms. Made possible by computers and other modern technologies of the early Cold War, such as air conditioning...
by Roger Smith
Language: English
Release Date: February 15, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: February 15, 2013
From the late nineteenth century onwards religion gave way to science as the dominant force in society. This led to a questioning of the principle of free will—if the workings of the human mind could be reduced to purely physiological explanations, then what place was there for human agency and...
New Natures
Joining Environmental History with Science and Technology Studies
Language: English
Release Date: July 8, 2013
New Natures broadens the dialogue between the disciplines of science and technology studies (STS) and environmental history in hopes of deepening and even transforming understandings of human-nature interactions. The volume presents richly developed historical studies that explicitly engage with...
Old Age, New Science
Gerontologists and Their Biosocial Visions, 1900-1960
Language: English
Release Date: May 13, 2016
Between 1870 and 1940, life expectancy in the United States skyrocketed while the percentage of senior citizens age sixty-five and older more than doubled—a phenomenon owed largely to innovations in medicine and public health. At the same time, the Great Depression was a major tipping point for...
by
Language: English
Release Date: September 29, 2017
Language: English
Release Date: September 29, 2017
March 2015 should have been a time of celebration for Brazil, as it marked thirty years of democracy, a newfound global prominence, over a decade of rising economic prosperity, and stable party politics under the rule of the widely admired PT (Workers’ Party). Instead, the country descended into...
Regionalizing Science
Placing Knowledges in Victorian England
Language: English
Release Date: February 15, 2010
Victorian England, as is well known, produced an enormous amount of scientific endeavour, but what has previously been overlooked is the important role of geography on these developments.
Naylor seeks to rectify this imbalance by presenting a historical geography of regional science. Taking...
The British Arboretum
Trees, Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century
Language: English
Release Date: March 15, 2011
This study explores the science and culture of nineteenth-century British arboretums, or tree collections. The development of arboretums was fostered by a variety of factors, each of which is explored in detail: global trade and exploration, the popularity of collecting, the significance to the British...
The Islands
Six Fictions
Language: English
Release Date: December 4, 2017
WINNER OF THE 2017 DRUE HEINZ LITERATURE PRIZE
Selected by David Gates
William Wall is the first international winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize.
“Suddenly I see weeks that are like years stretch out before me. Islands are, more than anything else, places of deprivation.”
Jeannie,...
by Daniel Grandbois
Language: English
Release Date: November 18, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: November 18, 2016
Bertrand Russell finds himself in purgatory, tumbling through literal representations of the worlds of ideas he examined in his classic text, A History of Western Philosophy, gulping much-needed air, for example, from Empedocles’ bucket. Mistaking his erection for a planted flag, he declares the...
Distant Publics
Development Rhetoric and the Subject of Crisis
Language: English
Release Date: August 19, 2012
Urban sprawl is omnipresent in America and has left many citizens questioning their ability to stop it. In Distant Publics, Jenny Rice examines patterns of public discourse that have evolved in response to development in urban and suburban environments. Centering her study on Austin, Texas, Rice finds...
Bound Lives
Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru
Language: English
Release Date: April 15, 2012
Bound Lives chronicles the lived experience of race relations in northern coastal Peru during the colonial era. Rachel Sarah O’Toole examines the construction of a casta (caste) system under the Spanish government, and how this system was negotiated and employed by Andeans and Africans.
Royal...
Eurasian Environments
Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russian and Soviet History
Language: English
Release Date: November 6, 2018
Through a series of essays, Eurasian Environments prompts us to rethink our understanding of tsarist and Soviet history by placing the human experience within the larger environmental context of flora, fauna, geology, and climate. This book is a broad look at the environmental history of Eurasia,...
Azan on the Moon
Entangling Modernity along Tajikistan's Pamir Highway
Language: English
Release Date: June 30, 2017
Azan on the Moon is an in-depth anthropological study of people’s lives along the Pamir Highway in eastern Tajikistan. Constructed in the 1930s in rugged high-altitude terrain, the road fundamentally altered the material and social fabric of this former Soviet outpost on the border with Afghanistan...
The Force of Custom
Law and the Ordering of Everyday Life in Kyrgyzstan
Language: English
Release Date: December 16, 2016
The Force of Custom presents a finely textured ethnographic study that sheds new light on the legal and moral ordering of everyday life in northwestern Kyrgyzstan. Through her extensive fieldwork and firsthand experience, Judith Beyer reveals how Kyrgyz in Talas province negotiate proper behavior...