The Life And Times Of Sir Goldsworthy Gurney

Dale H. Porter has combined recent research by local Cornish historians with his own investigations of nineteenth-century London politics and society to reconstruct Goldsworthy Gurney's remarkable life.

Edward J. Gillin explores the extraordinary role of scientific knowledge in the building of the Houses of Parliament in Victorian Britain.

Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize | A New York Times Editor's Choice “[A] grounded, bracingly intelligent study” —Nature Prizewinning science journalist Sonia Shah presents a startling examination of the pandemics that have ravaged humanity—and shows us how history can prepare us to confront the most serious acute global health emergency of our time. Over the past fifty years, more than three hundred infectious diseases have either emerged or reemerged, appearing in places where they’ve never before been seen. Years before the sudden arrival of COVID-19, ninety percent of epidemiologists predicted that one of them would cause a deadly pandemic sometime in the next two generations. It might be Ebola, avian flu, a drug-resistant superbug, or something completely new, like the novel virus the world is confronting today. While it was impossible to predict the emergence of SARS-CoV-2—and it remains impossible to predict which pathogen will cause the next global outbreak—by unraveling the stories of pandemics past we can begin to better understand our own future, and to prepare for what it holds in store. In Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, Sonia Shah interweaves history, original reportage, and personal narrative to explore the origins of epidemics, drawing parallels between cholera—one of history’s most deadly and disruptive pandemic-causing pathogens—and the new diseases that stalk humankind today. She tracks each stage of cholera’s dramatic journey, from its emergence in the South Asian hinterlands as a harmless microbe to its rapid dispersal across the nineteenth-century world, all the way to its latest beachhead in Haiti. Along the way she reports on the pathogens now following in cholera’s footsteps, from the MRSA bacterium that besieges her own family to the never-before-seen killers coming out of China’s wet markets, the surgical wards of New Delhi, and the suburban backyards of the East Coast. Delving into the convoluted science, strange politics, and checkered history of one of the world’s deadliest diseases, Pandemic is a work of epidemiological history like no other, with urgent lessons for our own time. “Shah proves a disquieting Virgil, guiding us through the hells ruled by [infectious diseases] . . . the power of Shah's account lies in her ability to track simultaneously the multiple dimensions of the public-health crises we are facing.” —The Chicago Tribune

This book traces the diffusion trajectory of the second and third generation of British steam engines, the Watt and high-pressure models, covering the period 1774 to 1870. It begins by subjecting to econometric analysis the latest version of Dr. Kanefsky's database on 18th century steam engines coming up with an upward revision of the total amount of horsepower installed by 1800. Subsequent chapters delve into the determinants of the diffusion process through the third quarter of the 19th century relating to engines used both in mining and industry as well as transportation (railways, steam cars). The book's main contribution to the literature lies in drawing material from a very large volume of 18th- and 19th-century sources found in the Dibner Library of Rare Books, Smithsonian, and by utilizing a fair amount of technical literature pertaining to the economic factors driving the diffusion process. This great expansion of the empirical material has led to bringing multiple revisions to the work of other authors on the key aspects and determinants of the diffusion process. In conjunction with the publication by the author of an earlier monograph on the first generation of steam engines, the Newcomen model, the present study completes the task of offering the most comprehensive account of the preeminent and most strategic technology of the British Industrial Revolution. This book will appeal to students, scholars, and researchers of economic history and history of technology, interested in a better understanding of the industrial revolution in general and the role of British steam engines in particular.

John Macrone, who wrote this life of Scott in 1832-3, was admirably suited to the task; for, while he had never met Scott, his friends and associates included Cunningham, Galt, and Hogg, who wrote his Anecdotes of Scott for publication in Macrone's book. A quarrel with Lockhart, however, put a stop to the project, and nothing more was heard of it until the recent discovery of an autograph manuscript, here edited and published for the first time. A well-written and carefully-researched narrative, it increases our knowledge of Scott's life and work as perceived by his contemporaries, as well as enabling us to read Hogg's Anecdotes in their original context. The editor's introduction draws extensively on uncollected and unpublished material to illuminate Macrone's career, in the course of which he became the friend and publisher of Dickens, Thackeray, and Moore.

This book offers an in-depth, global history of the British Magnetic Survey - the nineteenth-century, British-government-funded efforts to measure and understand the earth's magnetic field. These scientific efforts are situated within the context of the development of 'global science' and the ways they intersected with empire and colonialism.