Book
In Pursuit of the Great Peace: Han Dynasty Classicism and the Making of Early Medieval Literati Culture
Through an examination of the Great Peace (taiping), one of the first utopian visions in Chinese history, Zhao Lu describes the transformation of literati culture that occurred during the Han Dynasty. Driven by anxiety over losing the mandate of Heaven, the imperial court encouraged classicism in order to establish the Great Peace and follow Heaven’s will.
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Book
Practicing the Correspondence Principle in the old Quantum Theory: a Transformation through Implementation
This book presents a history of the correspondence principle from a new perspective. The author provides a unique exploration of the relation between the practice of theory and conceptual development in physics. In the process, he argues for a new understanding of the history of the old quantum theory and the emergence of quantum mechanics.
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Book
L'eglise comme lieu de concert: pratiques musicales et usages de l'espace (Paris, 1830-1905)
Alors que de nombreux travaux ont mis en lumière le rôle central de Paris dans la vie musicale européenne du xixe siècle, l’histoire de certains de ses hauts lieux de musique est demeurée dans l’ombre. L’historiographie a eu tendance à passer systématiquement sous silence l’importance des églises dans cette activité artistique.
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Special Issue (Working Group Volume)
Listening to the Archive: Sound Data in the Humanities and Sciences
Our aim here is to take a first step in research on the epistemic challenges that sound archiving has posed within and between the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences since the late nineteenth century—and even more so since the availability of digital sound archives and tools for sound analysis.
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Working Group Volume
Surprise: 107 Variations on the Unexpected
Science depends on the unexpected. Yet surprise and its role in the process of scientific knowledge-making has hitherto received little attention, let alone systematic investigation. This collection explores surprise as a historical category, as a staged performance or as a spontaneous reaction, or as part of a personal experience during scholarly endeavors.
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Working Group Volume
Working with Paper: Gendered Practices in the History of Knowledge
Working with Paper builds on a growing interest in the materials of science by exploring the gendered uses and meanings of paper tools and technologies, considering how notions of gender impacted paper practices and in turn how paper may have structured knowledge about gender.
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Book
Heisenberg’s 1958 Weltformel and the Roots of Post-Empirical Physics
In 1958, Werner Heisenberg, in his 57th year, jumped the shark. At the Max Planck centennial in Berlin, he presented what others would label his Weltformel (World Formula), a final theory reducing all of physics, known and unknown, to the interactions of one elementary quantum field.
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Edited Book
Technosphäre
Was geschieht, wenn Technologien und Techniken zu planetarischen Akteuren werden? Im Laufe des 20. Jahrhunderts hat sich mit der Technosphäre eine neue Komponente des Erdsystems etabliert, vergleichbar in ihrer Wirkmacht und Funktion mit der Bio- oder Hydrosphäre.
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Working Group Volume
Entangled Itineraries: Materials, Practices, and Knowledges across Eurasia
Trade flowed across Eurasia, around the Indian Ocean, and over the Mediterranean for millennia, but in the early modern period, larger parts of the globe became connected through these established trade routes. Knowledge, embodied in various people, materials, texts, objects, and practices, also moved and came together along these routes in hubs of exchange where different social and cultural groups intersected and interacted.
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Book
Against Nature
Why have human beings, in many different cultures and epochs, looked to nature as a source of norms for human behavior? From ancient India and ancient Greece, medieval France and Enlightenment America, up to the latest controversies over gay marriage and cloning, natural orders have been enlisted to illustrate and buttress moral orders.
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Book
Planning Labour: Time and the Foundations of Industrial Socialism in Romania
Impoverished, indebted, and underdeveloped at the close of World War II, Romania underwent dramatic changes as part of its transition to a centrally planned economy. As with the Soviet experience, it pursued a policy of “primitive socialist accumulation” whereby the state appropriated agricultural surplus and restricted workers’ consumption in support of industrial growth.
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Book
Geschichte des mestizischen Europas: Vermischung als Leitkategorie europäischer Geschichtsschreibung
Es ist an der Zeit, die europäische Geschichte als eine Vielzahl von Vermischungsprozessen zu verstehen, die durch Europas Teile und durch die globale Eingebundenheit des Kontinents seit der Antike stattgefunden haben.
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Book
Creatures of Cain: the Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America
After World War II, the question of how to define a universal human nature took on new urgency. Creatures of Cain charts the rise and precipitous fall in Cold War America of a theory that attributed man’s evolutionary success to his unique capacity for murder.
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Edited Book
Animals through Chinese History: Earliest Times to 1911
This volume opens a door into the rich history of animals in China. As environmental historians turn their attention to expanded chronologies of natural change, something new can be said about human history through animals and about the globally diverse cultural and historical dynamics that have led to perceptions of animals as wild or cultures as civilized.
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The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries
This handbook takes on the task of examining the history of music listening over the past two hundred years. It uses the “art of listening” as a leitmotif encompassing an entanglement of interdependent practices and discourses about a learnable mode of perception.
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Book
Sonic Skills: Listening for Knowledge in Science, Medicine, and Engineering (1920s–Present)
It is common for us today to associate the practice of science primarily with the act of seeing—with staring at computer screens, analyzing graphs, and presenting images. We may notice that physicians use stethoscopes to listen for disease, that biologists tune into sound recordings to understand birds, or that engineers have created Geiger tellers warning us for radiation through sound.
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Special Issue (Working Group Volume)
The Pugwash Conferences and the Global Cold War: Scientists, Transnational Networks, and the Complexity of Nuclear Histories
This special issue uses the Pugwash Conferences for Science and World Affairs as a means to explore important themes in Cold War history.
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Edited Book
Jenseits des Vertrauten: Facetten transzendenter Erfahrungen
Bei transzendenten Erfahrungen treten Aspekte und Dimensionen der vertrauten Wirklichkeit hervor, die normalerweise verborgen sind. Gewohnte Deutungsmuster und Erklärungskategorien versagen.
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Edited Book
Engineering Asia: Technology, Colonial Development and the Cold War Order
Weaving together chapters on imperial Japan's wartime mobilization, Asia's first wave of postwar decolonization, and Cold War geopolitical conflict in the region, Engineering Asia seeks to demonstrate how Asia's present prosperity did not arise from a so-called 'economic miracle' but from the violent and dynamic events of the 20th century.
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Special Issue (Working Group Volume)
Technology and the sublime = Tecnologia e sublime
The "sublime" evokes beauty, excellence, grandiosity, and at the same time fear, awe and danger. It triggers emotions that transcend the ordinary, confronting us with events, phenomena and objects that uncannily exceed our understanding.
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