Science, Technology and Culture, 1700–1945
180.jpg "Ashgate Book Series Listings")
Series Editor: David M. Knight, University of Durham, UK and
Trevor Levere, University of Toronto, Canada
 |
Selected titles from
this
series |
Science, Technology and Culture, 1700–1945 focuses on
the social, cultural, industrial and economic contexts of science
and technology from the ‘scientific revolution’ up to the Second
world War. It explores the agricultural and industrial
revolutions of the eighteenth century, the coffee-house culture of
the Enlightenment, the spread of museums, botanic gardens and
expositions in the nineteenth century, to the Franco-Prussian war
of 1870, seen as a victory for German science. It also addresses
the dependence of society on science and technology in the
twentieth century.
Science, Technology and Culture, 1700–1945 addresses
issues of the interaction of science, technology and culture in the
period from 1700 to 1945, at the same time as including new
research within the field of the history of science.
Series editor, David M. Knight, explains the background to
the series:
"As editor of the British Journal for the History of
Science in the 1980s, and then President of the British Society
for the History of Science in 1994-6, I became aware how much good
work was being done, how many people in different institutions
around the world were teaching and researching in the field, and
what wide interest there was. Some university presses published
series, but it was not always easy to get monographs, biographies,
or institutional histories published, and they were scattered
through publishers’ lists. When, after inviting me to publish a
Variorum reprint of papers, Ashgate suggested that a series might
be a good idea, I jumped at it; and we brought in Trevor Levere
from Toronto (editor of Annals of Science and the Variorum
collection Chemists and Chemistry in Nature and Society,
1770–1878) as my co-editor. We have found Ashgate good to work
with, efficient in coming to decisions, and expeditious in
production: authors from many countries have been keen to publish
with us, the books are handsome and have attracted
appropriately-respectful reviews, and the series has come to
include a wide range of subjects and genres. There are some volumes
of essays (where we insist on a strong editorial hand to pull them
together and make the book more than the sum of its parts);
biographies of scientists, popularisers and technologists who were
eminent in their time but needed to be resurrected for us to
understand their period; close studies of developments in
particular sciences; monographs on instrument makers; and
interdisciplinary studies bringing out the importance of science in
understanding past culture, and the cultural influences upon the
development of science. I have had a lot of pleasure from this
intellectual midwifery, and I am proud to be associated with the
series: we hope to further promote the contextual history of
science and technology, and we welcome authors with proposals for
further volumes."