All over the world, salmon populations are in trouble, as overfishing and habitat loss have combined to put the once-great Atlantic and Pacific Northwest runs at serious risk. Alaska, however, stands out as a rare success story: its salmon population...

The locations of Shakespeare's plays range from Greece, Turkey and Syria to England, and they range in time from 1000 BC to the early Tudor age. He never set a play explicitly in Elizabethan London, which he and his audience inhabited, but always in...

"Making 'Nature'" is the first book to chronicle the foundation and development of Nature, one of the world's most influential scientific institutions. Now nearing its hundred and fiftieth year of publication, Nature is the international benchmark fo...

The second installment in a planned three-volume series, this book provides the first substantive review of South American rodents published in over fifty years. Increases in the reach of field research and the variety of field survey methods, the in...

In the thirteenth century, Italian merchant and explorer Marco Polo traveled from Venice to the far reaches of Asia, a journey he chronicled in a narrative titled "Il Milione", later known as "The Travels of Marco Polo". While Polo's writings would g...

For James Barilla and his family, the dream of transforming their Columbia, South Carolina backyard into a haven for wildlife evoked images of kids catching grasshoppers by day and fireflies at night, of digging up potatoes and picking strawberries....

The history of medicine is as old as the history of human civilization. In "The Medical Book", popular science writer Clifford A. Pickover explores 250 milestone discoveries in medicine that span more than 12,000 years. Whether writing on "hard scien...

In "Mastering the Niger", David Lambert recalls Scotsman James MacQueen (1778–1870) and his publication of "A New Map of Africa" in 1841 to show that Atlantic slavery – as a practice of subjugation, a source of wealth, and a focus of political strugg...

In the nineteenth century, Americans began to use maps in radically new ways. For the first time, medical men mapped diseases to understand and prevent epidemics, natural scientists mapped climate and rainfall to uncover weather patterns, educators m...

With a love for adventure as great as his lifelong fascination with butterflies, America's best-known lepidopterist set himself an irresistible challenge: how many of the 800 species of butterflies known in the U.S. could he track down in a single ye...