Nearly thirty years after the end of the Cold War, its legacy and the accompanying Russian-American tension continues to loom large. Russia's access to detailed information on the United States and its allies may not seem so shocking in this day of d...

Archives bring to mind rooms filled with old papers and dusty artifacts. But for scientists, the detritus of the past can be a treasure trove of material vital to present and future research: fossils collected by geologists; data banks assembled by g...

What new insights become available for historians when emotions are included as an analytical category? This volume of "Osiris" explores the historical interrelationships between science and its cultures and cultures of emotions. It argues that a dia...

Duhem's 1908 essay questions the relation between physical theory and metaphysics and, more specifically, between astronomy and physics-an issue still of importance today. He critiques the answers given by Greek thought, Arabic science, medieval Chri...

How did flying birds evolve from running dinosaurs, terrestrial trotting tetrapods evolve from swimming fish, and whales return to swim in the sea? These are some of the great transformations in the 500-million-year history of vertebrate life. And wi...

The period between the French Revolution and World War II was a time of tremendous growth in both mapmaking and map reading throughout Europe. There is no better place to witness this rise of popular cartography than in Alsace-Lorraine, a disputed bo...

When we think of sites of animal research that symbolize modernity, the first places that come to mind are grand research institutes in cities and near universities that house the latest in equipment and technologies, not the surroundings of the bird...

Being human while trying to scientifically study human nature confronts us with our most vexing problem. Efforts to explicate the human mind are thwarted by our cultural biases and entrenched infirmities; our first-person experiences as practical age...

"What is a weed", opined Emerson, "but a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered?" While that may be a worthy notion in theory, these plants of undiscovered virtue cause endless hours of toil for backyard gardeners. Wherever they take root,...

Since the establishment of Yellowstone National Park in 1872, the national park movement has spread quickly and internationally. There are now over seven thousand national parks in 140 countries, and these numbers continue to grow. But national parks...