{"title":"Scienceculture","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"shoddy-book-hanna-rose-shell-9780226377759","title":"Shoddy","description":"You know shoddy: an adjective meaning cheap and likely poorly made. But did you know that before it became a popular descriptor, shoddy was first coined as a noun? In the early nineteenth century, shoddy was the name given to a new textile material made from reclaimed wool. Shoddy was, in fact, one of the earliest forms of industrial recycling as old rags and fabric clippings were ground into \"devil's dust\" and respun to be used in the making of suits, army uniforms, carpet lining, mattress stuffing, and more.   In Shoddy, Hanna Rose Shell takes readers on a vivid ride beginning in West Yorkshire's Heavy Woollen District and its \"shoddy towns,\" and traveling to the United States, the third world, and waste dumps, textile labs, and rag shredding factories, in order to unravel the threads of this story and its long history. Since the time of its first appearance, shoddy had become both pervasive and politically and culturally controversial on multiple levels. The use of the term \"virgin\" wool--still noticeable today in the labels on our sweaters--thus emerged as an effort by the wool industry to counter shoddy's appeal: to make shoddy seem shoddy. Public health experts, with encouragement from the wool industry, worried about sanitation and disease--how could old clothes be disinfected? As well, the idea of wearing someone else's old clothes so close to your own skin was discomforting in and of itself. Could you sleep peacefully knowing that your mattress was stuffed with dead soldiers' overcoats? Over time, shoddy the noun was increasingly used as an adjective that, according to Shell, captured a host of personal, ethical, commercial, and societal failings.    Introducing us to many richly drawn characters along the way, Shell reveals an interwoven tale of industrial espionage, political infighting, scientific inquiry, ethnic prejudices, and war profiteering. By exploring a variety of sources from political and literary texts to fabric samples and old military uniforms, antique and art photographs and political cartoons, medical textbooks, and legal cases, Shell unspools the history of shoddy to uncover the surprising journey that individual strands of recycled wool - and more recently a whole range of synthetic fibers from nylon to Kevlar - may take over the course of several lifetimes. Not only in your garments and blankets, but under your rug, in your mattress pads, the peculiar confetti-like stuffing in your mailing envelopes, even the insulation in your walls. The resulting fabric is at once rich and sumptuous, and cheap and tawdry--and likely connected to something you are wearing right now. After reading, you will never use the word shoddy or think about your clothes, or even the world around you, the same way again.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49537211891985,"sku":"GOR013247394","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49570667757841,"sku":"GOR010850403","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49737300672785,"sku":"NGR9780226377759","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51890463703313,"sku":"GOR014448415","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52491479056657,"sku":"CIN022637775XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022637775X.jpg?v=1751389623"},{"product_id":"intelligibility-of-nature-book-peter-dear-9780226139494","title":"The Intelligibility of Nature","description":"Considers how science as such has evolved and positioned itself. This book reveals how the two principles of craft and understanding became formalized into a single enterprise, science, that would be carried out by a new kind of person, the scientist. It is useful for aficionados and historians of science.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49540152459537,"sku":"GOR007270260","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50346818306321,"sku":"CIN0226139492G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000196333841,"sku":"NIN9780226139494","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51333613158673,"sku":"CIN0226139492VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226139492.jpg?v=1751259360"},{"product_id":"putting-science-in-its-place-geographies-of-scientific-knowledge-book-david-n-livingstone-9780226487229","title":"Putting Science in Its Place  Geographies of Scientific Knowledge","description":"Establishing the fundamental importance of geography in both the generation and the consumption of scientific knowledge, this work does so with historical examples of the many places where science has been practised.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49585618682129,"sku":"GOR012229249","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50031480996113,"sku":"GOR013002329","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53369609781521,"sku":"CIN0226487229G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226487229.jpg?v=1750843631"},{"product_id":"scientific-revolution-book-steven-shapin-9780226398341","title":"The Scientific Revolution","description":"In this classic of science history, Shapin takes into account the culture  the variety of beliefs, practices, and influences  that in the 1600s shaped the origins of the modern scientific worldview.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49709336920337,"sku":"CIN022639834XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49726657921297,"sku":"NGR9780226398341","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":49948941418769,"sku":"CIN022639834XA","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50260924629265,"sku":"GOR011418461","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51502655209745,"sku":"NIN9780226398341","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53509909545233,"sku":"CIN022639834XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022639834X.jpg?v=1751290754"},{"product_id":"human-built-world-book-thomas-p-hughes-9780226359342","title":"Human-Built World","description":"In Human-Built World, Thomas P. Hughes restores to technology the richness and depth it deserves by writing its intellectual history. Chronicling the ideas about technology expressed by influential Western thinkers who not only understood its multifaceted character but who also explored its creative potential, Hughes draws on an enormous range of literature, art, and architecture to explore what technology has brought to society and culture. From the \"Creator\" model of development of the sixteenth century to the \"big science\" of the 1940s and 1950s to the architecture of Frank Gehry and Hughes's concept of \"ecotechnology,\" Human-Built World nimbly charts the myriad ways that technology has been woven into the social and cultural fabric of different eras and the promises and problems it has offered.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50345903784209,"sku":"CIN0226359344G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51782517293329,"sku":"GOR009059126","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51825755586833,"sku":"CIN0226359344VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226359344.jpg?v=1750940775"},{"product_id":"putting-science-in-its-place-book-david-n-livingstone-9780226102849","title":"Putting Science in Its Place","description":"We are accustomed to thinking of science and its findings as universal. After all, one atom of carbon plus two of oxygen yields carbon dioxide in Amazonia as well as in Alaska; a scientist in Bombay can use the same materials and techniques to challenge the work of a scientist in New York; and of course the laws of gravity apply worldwide. Why, then, should the locations where science is done matter at all? David N. Livingstone here puts that question to the test with his fascinating study of how science bears the marks of its place of production. Putting Science in Its Place establishes the fundamental importance of geography in both the generation and the consumption of scientific knowledge, using historical examples of the many places where science has been practiced. Livingstone first turns his attention to some of the specific sites where science has been made - the laboratory, museum, and botanical garden, to name some of the more conventional locales, but also places like the coffeehouse and cathedral, ship's deck and asylum, even the human body itself. In each case, he reveals just how the space of inquiry has conditioned the investigations carried out there. Putting Science in Its Place powerfully concludes by examining the remarkable mobility of science and the seemingly effortless way it moves around the globe.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50345981542673,"sku":"CIN022610284XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000237097233,"sku":"NIN9780226102849","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022610284X.jpg?v=1750812554"},{"product_id":"everyday-technology-book-david-arnold-9780226922027","title":"Everyday Technology","description":"In 1909 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, on his way back to South Africa from London, wrote his now celebrated tract Hind Swaraj, laying out his vision for the future of India and famously rejecting the technological innovations of Western civilization. Despite his protestations, Western technology endured and helped to make India one of the leading economies in our globalized world. Few would question the dominant role that technology plays in modern life, but to fully understand how India first advanced into technological modernity, argues David Arnold, we must consider the technology of the everyday. \"Everyday Technology\" is a pioneering account of how small machines and consumer goods that originated in Europe and North America became objects of everyday use in India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rather than investigate \"big\" technologies such as railways and irrigation projects, Arnold examines the assimilation and appropriation of bicycles, rice mills, sewing machines, and typewriters in India, and follows their impact on the ways in which people worked and traveled, the clothes they wore, and the kinds of food they ate. But the effects of these machines were not limited to the daily rituals of Indian society, and Arnold demonstrates how such small-scale technologies became integral to new ways of thinking about class, race, and gender, as well as about the politics of colonial rule and Indian nationhood. Arnold's fascinating book offers new perspectives on the globalization of modern technologies and shows us that to truly understand what modernity became, we need to look at the everyday experiences of people in all walks of life, taking stock of how they repurposed small technologies to reinvent their world and themselves.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50346916938001,"sku":"CIN0226922022G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226922022.jpg?v=1751164365"},{"product_id":"green-lands-for-white-men-book-meredith-mckittrick-9780226834696","title":"Green Lands for White Men","description":"How an audacious environmental engineering plan fanned white settlers’ visions for South Africa, stoked mistrust in scientific experts, and gave rise to the Apartheid state.     In 1918, South Africa’s climate seemed to be drying up. White farmers claimed that rainfall was dwindling, while nineteenth-century missionaries and explorers had found riverbeds, seashells, and other evidence of a verdant past deep in the Kalahari Desert. Government experts insisted, however, that the rains weren’t disappearing; the land, long susceptible to periodic drought, had been further degraded by settler farmers’ agricultural practices—an explanation that white South Africans rejected. So when the geologist Ernest Schwarz blamed the land itself, the farmers listened. Schwarz held that erosion and topography had created arid conditions, that rainfall was declining, and that agriculture was not to blame. As a solution, he proposed diverting two rivers to the Kalahari’s basins, creating a lush country where white South Africans could thrive. This plan, which became known as the Kalahari Thirstland Redemption Scheme, was rejected by most scientists. But it found support among white South Africans who worried that struggling farmers undermined an image of racial superiority.    Green Lands for White Men explores how white agriculturalists in southern Africa grappled with a parched and changing terrain as they sought to consolidate control over a Black population. Meredith McKittrick’s timely history of the Redemption Scheme reveals the environment to have been central to South African understandings of race. While Schwarz’s plan was never implemented, it enjoyed sufficient support to prompt government research into its feasibility, and years of debate. McKittrick shows how white farmers rallied around a plan that represented their interests over those of the South African state and delves into the reasons behind this schism between expert opinion and public perception. This backlash against the predominant scientific view, McKittrick argues, displayed the depth of popular mistrust in an expanding scientific elite.     A detailed look at the intersection of a settler society, climate change, white nationalism, and expert credibility, Green Lands for White Men examines the reverberations of a scheme that ultimately failed but influenced ideas about race and the environment in South Africa for decades to come.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50406892962065,"sku":"NGR9780226834696","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000326881553,"sku":"NIN9780226834696","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226834697.jpg?v=1751101893"},{"product_id":"everyday-technology-book-david-arnold-9780226269375","title":"Everyday Technology","description":"Everyday Technology is a pioneering account of how small machines and consumer goods that originated in Europe and North America became objects of everyday use in India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 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But the effects of these machines were not limited to the daily rituals of Indian society, and Arnold demonstrates how such small-scale technologies became integral to new ways of thinking about class, race, and gender, as well as about the politics of colonial rule and Indian nationhood.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50529668366609,"sku":"CIN022626937XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51422685200657,"sku":"CIN022626937XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022626937X_cd63e99d-d2ae-49af-a145-d8154abc675f.jpg?v=1751164177"},{"product_id":"gaia-hypothesis-book-michael-ruse-9780226731704","title":"The Gaia Hypothesis","description":"In 1965 English scientist James Lovelock had a flash of insight: the Earth is not just teeming with life; the Earth, in some sense, is life. He mulled this revolutionary idea over for several years, first with his close friend the novelist William Golding, and then in an extensive collaboration with the American scientist Lynn Margulis. In the early 1970s, he finally went public with the Gaia hypothesis, the idea that everything happens for an end: the good of planet Earth. Lovelock and Margulis were scorned by professional scientists, but the general public enthusiastically embraced Lovelock and his hypothesis. People joined Gaia groups; churches had Gaia services, sometimes with new music written especially for the occasion. There was a Gaia atlas, Gaia gardening, Gaia herbs, Gaia retreats, Gaia networking, and much more. And the range of enthusiasts was-and still is-broad. In The Gaia Hypothesis, philosopher Michael Ruse, with his characteristic clarity and wit, uses Gaia and its history, its supporters and detractors, to illuminate the nature of science itself. Gaia emerged in the 1960s, a decade when authority was questioned and status and dignity stood for nothing, but its story is much older. Ruse traces Gaia's connection to Plato and a long history of goal-directed and holistic-or organicist-thinking and explains why Lovelock and Margulis' peers rejected it as pseudoscience. But Ruse also shows why the project was a success. He argues that Lovelock and Margulis should be commended for giving philosophy firm scientific basis and for provoking important scientific discussion about the world as a whole, its homeostasis or - in this age of global environmental uncertainty - its lack thereof. Melding the world of science and technology with the world of feeling, mysticism, and religion, The Gaia Hypothesis will appeal to a broad range of readers, from students and scholars of the history and philosophy of science to anyone interested in New Age culture.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51253980692753,"sku":"GOR009909748","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51356507439377,"sku":"GOR014236444","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51731965968657,"sku":"NGR9780226731704","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226731707.jpg?v=1750738165"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/scienceculture-book-series.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}