Marcia Bartusiak, Archives of the Universe: A Treasury of Astronomy's Historic Works of Discovery, Pantheon Books, New York, 2004. The history and development of astronomy is traced through its key discovery papers over the centuries. Included are some 100 excerpts, from Aristotle's proof that the Earth is round to the 1998 papers that posited an accelerating universe. Marcia Bartusiak is a Visiting Professor in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies.

Elizabeth Garrels, co-translator and editor of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Recollections of a Provincial Past, Oxford University Press, Library of Latin America Series, 2005. Garrels also provides an introductory essay to the first complete English translation of Sarmiento's autobiography. Elizabeth Garrels is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies and Head of Foreign Languages and Literatures.

Jonathan Gruber, Public Finance and Public Policy, Worth Publishers, 2005. This new textbook for undergraduate public finance courses focuses on the exciting developments in the field of public finance over the past two decades, with extensive use of applications and empirical evidence. Jonathan Gruber is Professor of Economics.

Sally Haslanger and Charlotte Witt, eds., Adoption Matters, Philosophical and Feminist Essays, Cornell University Press, 2004. The contributors to Adoption Matters explore a range of related topics, such as the manner in which interracial or international adoption affects the way we perceive the relationships among race, ethnicity, and culture. Sally Haslanger is Professor of Philosophy.

Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America, Princeton University Press, 2005. Jacobs demonstrates how pocketbook politics provided the engine for American political conflict throughout the twentieth century. From Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon, national politics turned on public anger over the high cost of living. Pocketbook Politics offers a new interpretation of state power by integrating popular politics and elite policymaking. Meg Jacobs is the Class of 1947 Career Development Associate Professor of History.

David S. Jones, Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality Since 1600. Harvard University Press, 2004. Jones examines Puritan responses to Indian depopulation in the 17th century; attempts to spread or prevent smallpox on the Western frontier in the 18th and 19th centuries; tuberculosis campaigns on the Sioux reservations from 1870 until 1910; and programs to test new antibiotics and implement modern medicine on the Navajo reservation in the 1950s. Revealing the economic and political patterns that link these cases, Jones provides insight into the dilemmas of modern health policy in which desire and action stand alongside indifference and inaction. David S. Jones will become Assistant Professor of History of Science in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society on July 1, 2005.

Alan Lightman, A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit, Pantheon, 2005. In A Sense of the Mysterious, Lightman records his personal struggles to reconcile certainty with uncertainty, logic with intuition, questions with answers and questions without. He explores the emotional life of science, the power of metaphor and imagination in science, the creative moment, the different uses of language in science and literature, and the alternate ways in which scientists and humanists think about the world. Alan Lightman is Adjunct Professor of Writing.

Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia, Harvard University Press, 2005. Why did the Manchu Rulers of Qing China succeed where their predecessors failed? Although vigorous emperors played their part, the full answer involves much more than imperial virtue or brilliant generalship. The book focuses on four themes: central military institutions, the primacy of Central Eurasia for the Manchu ruling elite, the agrarian economy, and the cultural legacy left by the Qing for the Chinese nation in the twentieth century. Peter C. Perdue is the T.T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian Civilizations and Professor of History.

Ruth Perry, Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture 1748-1818, Cambridge University Press, 2004. Perry describes the transformation of the English family as a function of several major social changes taking place in the eighteenth century, including the development of a market economy and waged labor, enclosure and the redistribution of land, urbanization, the "rise" of the middle class, and the development of print culture. Perry focuses particularly on the effect these changes had on women's position in families. Ruth Perry is Professor of Literature and Women's Studies.

Christine J. Walley, Rough Waters: Nature and Development in an East African Marine Park, Princeton University Press, 2004. Rough Waters offers an anthropological account of the conflict at the heart of an internationally-sponsored conservation and development project in Tanzania. Based on nearly two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this analysis considers the very different meanings that international organizations, national government officials, and local residents attribute to nature and development, as well as what the growing centrality of international organizations suggests for contemporary accounts of globalization. Christine Walley is Associate Professor of Anthropology.

top

back