We are pleased to announce our new History of Science & History of Knowledge catalog for 2018! Among the exciting new titles are an annotated edition of Albert Einstein’s travel diaries, a new look at the history of heredity, eugenics, and the asylum, and the latest volume of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein.
The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein makes available the complete journal that Einstein kept on his momentous 1922 journey to the Far East and Middle East.
The telegraphic-style diary entries—quirky, succinct, and at times irreverent—record Einstein’s musings on science, philosophy, art, and politics, as well as his immediate impressions and broader thoughts on particular events and encounters. Entries also contain passages that reveal Einstein’s stereotyping of members of various nations and raise questions about his attitudes on race. This beautiful edition features stunning facsimiles of the diary’s pages, accompanied by an English translation, an extensive historical introduction, numerous illustrations, and annotations.
This volume offers an initial, intimate glimpse into a brilliant mind encountering the great, wide world.
In the early 1800s, a century before there was any concept of the gene, physicians in insane asylums began to record causes of madness in their admission books. Almost from the beginning, they pointed to heredity as the most important of these causes. Genetics in the Madhouse is the untold story of how the collection and sorting of hereditary data in mental hospitals, schools for “feebleminded” children, and prisons gave rise to a new science of human heredity.
In this compelling book, Theodore Porter draws on untapped archival evidence from across Europe and North America to bring to light the hidden history behind modern genetics. Porter argues that asylum doctors developed many of the ideologies and methods of what would come to be known as eugenics, and deepens our appreciation of the moral issues at stake in data work conducted on the border of subjectivity and science.
A bold rethinking of the asylum, Genetics in the Madhouse shows how heredity was a human science as well as a medical and biological one.
Volume 15 of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein covers one of the most thrilling two-year periods in twentieth-century physics. The almost one hundred writings by Einstein, of which a third have never been published, and the more than thirteen hundred letters show Einstein’s immense productivity and hectic pace of life.
Between June 1925 and May 1927, Einstein quickly grasps the conceptual peculiarities involved in the new quantum mechanics and investigates the problem of motion in general relativity, hoping for a hint at a new avenue to unified field theory. He also falls victim to scientific fraud and experiences rekindled love for an old sweetheart. He participates in the League of Nations’ International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation and remains intensely committed to the shaping of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, although his enthusiasm for this cause is sorely tested.
THE COLLECTED PAPERS OF ALBERT EINSTEIN is one of the most ambitious publishing ventures ever undertaken in the documentation of the history of science. Selected from among more than 40,000 documents contained in the personal collection of Albert Einstein (1879-1955), and 20,000 Einstein and Einstein-related documents discovered by the editors since the beginning of the Einstein Papers Project, The Collected Papers provides the first complete picture of a massive written legacy that ranges from Einstein’s first work on the special and general theories of relativity and the origins of quantum theory, to expressions of his profound concern with international cooperation and reconciliation, civil liberties, education, Zionism, pacifism, and disarmament. The open access digital edition of the first 14 volumes of the Collected Papers is available online at einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu.