Category: Books that Rock
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On Hacking’s Emergence of Probability
Ian Hacking’s The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge University Press, 1975), was in many ways the launching pad for history of statistics as a scholarly topic in (but not limited to) history of science. Like its author, the book resists classification. Ian took his graduate training in philosophy at Cambridge, and he preferred simply “philosophy” to…
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Looking Over The Historian’s Shoulder
I first encountered A Midwife’s Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich twenty years ago when I was a teaching assistant for a course called Medicine and Society in America.[1] For Professor Allan Brandt, the book was of interest mainly for its content. Based on the diary of an eighteenth century midwife in rural Hallowell, Maine, Ulrich’s…
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On Rereading Arthur Koestler’s Sleepwalkers
Johannes Kepler, Keppler, Khepler, Kheppler, or Keplerus was conceived on 16 May A.D. 1571, at 4.37 a.m., and was born on 27 December at 2.30 p.m., after a pregnancy lasting 224 days, 9 hours and 53 minutes. The five different ways of spelling his name are all his own, and so are the figures relating…
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Revisiting Risk Society
In this new series, historians of the sciences will share one book that made a lasting impact on them, with the goal to inspire others to pick up those books as well. These ‘rocks’ may have been written in the Middle Ages or in 2015, and our authors may abhor or admire its content– our question is simply this: why did it make such a…