University of Chicago Press, 2015

From Voice to Influence: Understanding Citizenship in a Digital Age

Jen Light & Danielle Allen

In From Voice to Influence, Danielle Allen and Jennifer Light bring together a stellar group of political and social theorists, social scientists, and media analysts to explore the transformation of political action in a digital age.
MIT Press, 2014

Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe

Chakanetsa Mavhunga

In Transient Workspaces, Clapperton Mavhunga views technology in Africa from an African perspective. Technology in his account is not something always brought in from outside, but is also something that ordinary people understand, make, and practice through their everyday innovations.
University of Chicago Press, 2013

The Triumph of Human Empire: Verne, Morris, and Stevenson at the End of the World

Rosalind Williams

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.
University of Chicago Press, 2013

Science and the American Century: Readings from "Isis"

David Kaiser

The twentieth century was one of astonishing change in science, especially as pursued in the United States. Science and the American Century offers some of the most significant contributions to the study of the history of science, technology, and medicine during the twentiety century, all drawn from the pages of the journal Isis.
W. W. Norton & Company, 2011

How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival

David Kaiser

In the 1970s, an eccentric group of physicists in Berkeley, California, banded together to explore the wilder side of science. Dubbing themselves the “Fundamental Fysiks Group,” they pursued an audacious, speculative approach to physics, studying quantum entanglement in terms of Eastern mysticism and psychic mind reading.
MIT Press, 2011

Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo

Nicholas de Monchaux

How the twenty-one-layer Apollo spacesuit, made by Playtex, was a triumph of intimacy over engineering. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface in July of 1969, they…