The Triumph of Human Empire explores the overarching historical event of our time: the rise and triumph of human empire, the apotheosis of the modern ambition to increase knowledge and power in order to achieve world domination, which Williams explores through the lives and works of three writers: Jules Verne, William Morris, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

The underground has always played a prominent role in human imaginings, both as a place of refuge and as a source of fear. The late nineteenth century saw a new fascination with the underground as Western societies tried to cope with the pervasive changes of a new social and technological order.

When Warren Kendall Lewis left Spring Garden Farm in Delaware in 1901 to enter MIT, he had no idea that he was becoming part of a profession that would bring untold good to his country but would also contribute to the death of his family’s farm. In this book written a century later, Professor Lewis’s granddaughter, a cultural historian who has served in the administration of MIT, uses her grandfather’s and her own experience to make sense of the rapidly changing role of technology in contemporary life.

In Dream Worlds, Rosalind Williams examines the origins and moral implications of consumer society, providing a cultural history of its emergence in late nineteenth-century France.