Essays by international bestselling author Edward Tenner that explore both the negative and positive surprises of human ingenuity

How did the addition of lifeboats after the Titanic shipwreck contribute to another tragedy in Chicago harbor three years later? How efficient are wild animals as investors, and how do dog breeds become national symbols? Why have scientific breakthroughs so often originated in the study of shadows? How did the file card prepare scholarship and commerce for the rise of electronic data processing, and why did the visual metaphor of the tab survive into today's graphic interfaces? Why have Amish artisans played an important role in manufacturing advanced technology? Why was United Shoe Machinery the Microsoft of the 1890s? Surprises like these, Edward Tenner believes, can help us deal with the technological issues that confront us now.

Since the 1980s, Edward Tenner has contributed essays on technology, design, and culture to leading magazines, newspapers, and professional journals, and has been interviewed on subjects ranging from medical ethics to typography. Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge--named for one of the paradoxes that can result from the inherent contradictions between consumer safety and product marketing--brings many of Tenner's essays together into one volume for the first time, accompanied by new introductions by the author on the theme of each work. As an independent historian and public speaker, Tenner has spent his career deploying concepts from economics, engineering, psychology, science, and sociology, to explore both the negative and positive surprises of human ingenuity.

Philadelphia's early national history represented in Thomas Sully's portraits

Thomas Sully is widely regarded as perhaps the most important portrait painter of the antebellum years. Using those portraits, Thomas Sully's Philadelphians: Painting the Athens of America reconstructs many of the people, institutions, and events that combined to make Philadelphia, from the Revolution until the 1840s, at once the most cosmopolitan and most racially embattled city in America. The book approaches Sully's portraits as visual documents in the history of Philadelphia in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The faces of the men and women who appear in his portraits are alive with intelligence and personality. His best work has been summed up by Carol Soltis, of the Philadelphia Museum of Art: luminous color, a dramatic or nuanced quality of light, a rich but refined handling of paint and description of form, tightly integrated compositions that underline a narrative or dramatic moment.

Gathered under headings that include individuals, institutions, professions, and contemporary events, Sully's portraits offer points of entry into much that was going on in early nineteenth-century Philadelphia. Conn explores education, politics, theater, medicine, journalism, commerce, philanthropy, religion, and the fierce debate over slavery. In each case, Sully's portraits bring to vivid life the men and women who were making the city's antebellum history.

Drawing upon wide research, including previously unpublished archival material, Thomas Sully's Philadelphians brings to life the men and women who were making the history of early national Philadelphia.

Presenting more than seventy documents from Spanish archives that provide a rare glimpse into Benjamin Franklin's connection to Spain.

Although Benjamin Franklin never set foot in Spain, from 1774 until his death in 1790 he maintained contact and correspondence with a wide range of Spanish officials and intellectuals. As a diplomat, Franklin carried papers to Paris naming him minister to Spain, yet he remained in the French capital where he dealt with Spain's ambassador to France, the formidable Count of Aranda. Beginning with Franklin's exchange of gifts with the Don Felipe Bourbon, the King of Spain's third son, and ending with his induction into Spain's Royal Academy of History, The Diplomacy of Independence explores a facet of Franklin's life previously overlooked yet documented in the archives of Spain.

This book makes available more than seventy Franklin-related documents housed in various Spanish archives. The majority of documents are in Spanish or French, while a few are in original English. Some are in Franklin's hand, while others relate meetings in which Franklin participated, or as in one case, the actual minutes in which Franklin was inducted into the Royal Academy. All documents are presented in their original language, as well as in an English translation. Annotations provide contextual information, each document has an introduction that relays pertinent information relative to their archival locale, so that historians and the curious will be able to locate the original with little effort.

The Diplomacy of Independence not only contributes to the already extensive knowledge of Benjamin Franklin but also highlights Franklin's and his colleagues' efforts in assuring Spain's key aid and involvement in the American Revolutionary war.

Contributors: Russ Davidson, Genoveva Enríquez, Patricia Kurz, and Celia López-Chávez.

How universities have become increasingly contentious since the Sixties, from the viewpoint of a former Princeton provost and Harvard president

From his days at Princeton University as a member of the faculty, dean, and provost, and his time as a faculty member and president at Harvard University, Neil L. Rudenstine has been uniquely positioned to observe the changes that have occurred in higher education over the past few decades. In this book, he draws on his various roles to present an educator's inside account of the modern university. More than that, Our Contentious Universities is a personal history of how our current campus climate of antagonism evolved, beginning with the late 1960s and up to our contemporary moment.

Starting with his perceptions of the anti-Vietnam War events at Columbia, Princeton, and Berkeley, as well as descriptions of what occurred at Harvard, Michigan, and other institutions, Rudenstine identifies a pattern that was characterized by students protesting against institutions because of purported university support for the Vietnam War. Not surprisingly, once the Vietnam War ended, the protests ceased. In contrast, Rudenstine reveals how contemporary campus conflicts essentially differ in nature from the Sixties protests. Since the issues that spark these present protests--such as climate change, conservative judicial opinions, lack of gun control legislation, the Hamas-Israeli war--are clearly not readily soluble problems, there can be no easily defined end to the action. Rudenstine also depicts how universities themselves have changed substantially over the past few decades. The institutions have not only evolved into a collection of decentralized quasi-autonomous departments in competition with other centers and initiatives for resources but also nurtured a highly diverse population of faculty and students with a variety of backgrounds and perspectives already at odds before they even encounter each other on campus.

Combining an analysis of how universities transformed with an examination of how protests changed, the book argues that, opposed to the external causes of student protest in the Sixties, it is actually the internal sources of division and conflict that now characterize our universities that are at the root of their contentious campus environments.

The life and times of extraordinary Philadelphia art collector Albert C. Barnes

Philadelphia art collector Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951) is renowned today for collecting many of the world's most important impressionist, post-impressionist, and modern paintings, and displaying them alongside African masks, Native American jewelry, Greek antiquities, and decorative metalwork. The museum that bears his name holds more than eight hundred paintings, with a strong focus on Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso, as well as other European and American masters.

In The House of Barnes, Neil L. Rudenstine provides the first scholarly study on the historical, art historical, and political context during which Barnes purchased his masterpieces and attempted to redefine aesthetic education. Inspired by his good friend John Dewey's educational philosophy, Barnes held art-appreciation classes for the workers in his factory. His successes there led him to establish the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania--more as an educational experiment than a typical museum.

In 2012, the Barnes Foundation moved to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia. Rudenstine presents the controversial events surrounding the Barnes Foundation's move to Philadelphia, including an analysis of the Foundation's financial plight, a review of the major court cases over the decades, and a characterization of the fervent reactions following the court's decision to allow the move to take place.

The House of Barnes chronicles the life and times of an extraordinary collector and the continued endurance of the Barnes Foundation long after the death of its founder. Originally published in 2012, this new edition contains sixteen pages of full-color reproductions of masterpieces from the collection, a new preface from the author, and a foreword from the prominent art historian Yve-Alain Bois.

Sketching Splendor examines the work of three American naturalists, William Bartram, Titian Ramsay Peale, and John James Audubon whose work exemplifies innovation and injustice in equal measure. The exhibition draws on the American Philosophical Society's rich holdings as well as select loans, with many objects exhibited together for the first time.

The careers of Bartram, Peale, and Audubon spanned the exciting period from 1750 to 1850, helping to shape the nation's emerging intellectual identity, cataloging species unknown to Euro-Americans, engaging with the nascent concepts of ecology and evolution, as well as developing new techniques to visually and verbally represent the complexity of the natural world. Yet natural history was not an innocent intellectual pursuit, and these three naturalists also supported expansionist agendas dispossessing Native Nations and relied on enslaved labor. Moreover, while the names of Bartram, Peale, and Audubon are commemorated in the historical record, there were many unacknowledged or underacknowledged Native Americans, people of African descent, and women, whose knowledge, labor, and skills made their work possible. These are the two realities that this exhibition engages, teasing out the many ways in which Bartram, Peale, and Audubon relied on and promoted the forces of colonization and plantation slavery, even as it acknowledges points of ambivalence. Their work speaks to the conflicted nature of our nation's early history and the place of natural historians in that complex landscape.

Biographical sketches of the nineteen chairmen who have guided the evolution of the University of Pennsylvania's medical school and surgery department, America's first, from 1765 to the present day

In Surgeons and Something More, Clyde F. and Elizabeth D. Barker chronicle the evolution of the University of Pennsylvania's medical school and surgery department, America's first, begun in 1765. In the turbulent times before and after the Revolution, with medicine and surgery then in a primitive state, the new school's leaders included some of America's most conspicuous political and military figures.Over the next 250 years, the new nation experienced a dozen wars, four presidential assassinations, several devastating epidemics, and the expansion of US territory nine times over. This book reveals how Penn surgeons played prominent roles in these events as well as in the concomitant medical advances, such as anesthesia, antisepsis, heart surgery, x-rays, transplantation, cancer chemotherapy, intravenous nutrition, and gene therapy.

Biographical sketches of the nineteen chairmen who have guided Penn Surgery over its development detail the department's progress and depict some of its setbacks. These trailblazers wrote the first text- books, taught the first classes, started the field's journals, and led its academic organizations. By inventing new procedures, they saved countless lives. But by ignoring antisepsis, they lost many others. They operated on paupers, prisoners, Supreme Court justices, and gravely wounded presidents. Three of them became US Surgeon Generals. Others fought duels, explored the frozen Arctic seas, and conducted clandestine love affairs. In war, they parachuted behind enemy lines and invented SCUBA to disrupt enemy shipping. They built World War II's largest hospital in the Burmese jungle to care for wounded commandos, and in Korea's MASH tents they were the real-life Hawkeyes struggling to save the lives of stricken GIs. This is the story of how surgery evolved to its present, still imperfect, form, and of the role played by the doctors of the University of Pennsylvania in advancing the surgeon's science and art.

The first comprehensive study of the life and times of colonial Philadelphia clockmaker Edward Duffield

Edward Duffield (1730-1803) was a colonial Philadelphia clockmaker, whose elegant brass, mahogany, and walnut timekeepers stand proudly in major American museums and collections. Duffield, unlike other leather-apron 'mechanics, ' was born rich and owned a country estate, Benfield, and many more properties. He was deeply involved in civic and church affairs during crucial years in American history--his lifelong close friend, Benjamin Franklin, was staying at Duffield's Benfield estate when Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams first discussed the Declaration of Independence. Sally, Franklin's daughter, brought her family there for extended periods during the Revolution and Franklin's wife, Deborah, was best friends for fifty years with Duffield's mother-in-law. Duffield was even one of three executors of Franklin's will.

In this lavishly illustrated book, Bob Frishman catalogs and describes seventy-one known Duffield clocks and instruments and reveals how, during the mid-eighteenth century, they largely were not fabricated from scratch by isolated individuals. He contends that Duffield and his fellow clockmakers were not furniture-makers; they were mechanical artisans whose complex metal machines rang the hours and steadily ticked inside wooden cases made by others. Existing books on Philadelphia clocks have focused on these artifacts as furniture, including their woodwork, cabinetmakers, and decorative aspects. However, Frishman, a professional horologist for nearly four decades, brings his vast expertise to bear on this first comprehensive study of Duffield's life and work.

Far more than a treatise on pre-industrial horological timekeeping, this book tells the compelling stories of a man, a city, and an era, while deepening our appreciation for Duffield's stately sentinels--often a colonial American family's most valuable possession--and the times and places in which their makers lived.

In The Other Presidency, Patrick Spero resurrects an overlooked but essential part of Thomas Jefferson's life. For nearly seventeen years, Jefferson served as President of the American Philosophical Society (APS), the nation's first learned society and one dedicated to promoting new research in the young republic, especially in the sciences. He did so while also serving as Vice President and President of the United States. As Spero shows in this short but important work, Jefferson used his various positions to solidify the Society's foundation and, in turn, shape the course of American science.

Through a deep dive into APS Archives and Jefferson's papers, Spero demonstrates how the Society became a thoroughly Jeffersonian institution--that is, the APS, the largest and most powerful scientific body in the nation, advanced an agenda that comported with Jefferson's own priorities. While Jefferson juggled affairs of state, he also remained deeply involved in the Society. In fact, the two complemented each other. He helped draft the institution's first collection development policy, making clear the items and material he thought most important for the nation's posterity. He also used his international network to introduce European intellectuals to the Society, and he called on these same networks to help build the Society's collection. Jefferson himself received direct support from the Society to conduct his own research, including funding for an expedition with James Madison, and as President of the United States, he would often call on the APS and its members for advice. In short, Spero shows that Jefferson was integral to the development of the APS--and, perhaps more unexpectedly, the APS and the scientific community it fostered were integral to Jefferson and his vision for the young United States.

A resource for students, history buffs, and Jefferson aficionados, the book includes a chronology of Thomas Jefferson's contributions to the APS, with references to major events in Jefferson's life.

A history of diabetes science and the experience of diabetics in the nineteenth-century England

A Male Hysteria examines both the science of diabetes in nineteenth-century England and the testimony of Victorian diabetics. What could be known about diabetes given the science of the day? And what did new models of diabetes mean for the treatment and self-image of diabetics?

Ideas about diabetes were revolutionized in 1849 by the great French physiologist Claude Bernard. After he made rabbits diabetic by pricking their brains, diabetes in England came to be thought of as neurological, even psychological in origin. British diabetics (often men) were prevented from working or becoming excited, treated in the same manner as women who were diagnosed with hysteria. Meanwhile, discoveries in thermodynamics were applied to diabetics and menstruating women. People were assumed to be closed systems, wasting energy that couldn't be replenished. Thus, diabetics had to stay still if they wanted to live and women had to stay away from education to have the energy to produce children.

Some people resisted these hysterical views. As no brain lesion was ever found in deceased diabetics, even after decades of searching, the animal model of the disease no longer seemed to apply to humans. Some diabetic patients also resisted the hysterical picture, including medical professionals--both men and women--who refused to slow down as the new treatment regimen was mandated. Likewise, physicians at spas noted that walking long distances seemed to help diabetics.

A Male Hysteria journeys through nineteenth-century diabetes science and the lives of diabetics. It examines how science can go wrong when models from one area of inquiry are too excitedly applied to another. It also demonstrates the persistence of the psychological stereotype of diabetics as nervous and overworked in the United Kingdom--long after medical attention turned to the pancreas and the role of insulin.

Based on a symposium hosted by the American Philosophical Society, Evidence: The Use and Misuse of Data brings together essays from scholars representing a host of disciplines from statistics through psychology and anthropology to examine the question of evidence and what it means.

Contributors examine the place of evidence across a host of research areas, including early psychiatric methods, ethnographic fieldwork, antebellum African American historical debates, and the historicization of artificial intelligence. While the essays delve into issues surrounding specific cases, an overarching theme emerges: that human judgment is essential in interpreting and evaluating evidence and that assessing evidence is a process.

Featuring an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Linda Greenhouse, the collection is a valuable resource for scholars and students in any field that relies on empirical observation and its interpretation.

Contributors: Nicholas Barron, Gordon Fraser, Linda Greenhouse, Lindsey Grubbs, Robert M. Hauser, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Jennifer Burek Pierce, Angela G. Ray, Jutta Schickore, Andrew M. Schocket, Richard Shiffrin, Joshua Sternfeld, Stephen M. Stigler, Mark Turin.

The life and times of extraordinary Philadelphia art collector Albert C. Barnes

Philadelphia art collector Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951) is renowned today for collecting many of the world's most important impressionist, post-impressionist, and modern paintings, and displaying them alongside African masks, Native American jewelry, Greek antiquities, and decorative metalwork. The museum that bears his name holds more than eight hundred paintings, with a strong focus on Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso, as well as other European and American masters.

In The House of Barnes, Neil L. Rudenstine provides the first scholarly study on the historical, art historical, and political context during which Barnes purchased his masterpieces and attempted to redefine aesthetic education. Inspired by his good friend John Dewey's educational philosophy, Barnes held art-appreciation classes for the workers in his factory. His successes there led him to establish the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania--more as an educational experiment than a typical museum.

In 2012, the Barnes Foundation moved to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia. Rudenstine presents the controversial events surrounding the Barnes Foundation's move to Philadelphia, including an analysis of the Foundation's financial plight, a review of the major court cases over the decades, and a characterization of the fervent reactions following the court's decision to allow the move to take place.

The House of Barnes chronicles the life and times of an extraordinary collector and the continued endurance of the Barnes Foundation long after the death of its founder. Originally published in 2012, this new edition contains sixteen pages of full-color reproductions of masterpieces from the collection, a new preface from the author, and a foreword from the prominent art historian Yve-Alain Bois.

John Milton's 100-line hexameter poem Mansus is, on first impression, merely a poem of praise for Giovanni Battista Manso, the old Neapolitan nobleman and patron of poets whom Milton met on his Italian journey in 1638-1639. But in the first book devoted solely to Mansus, arguably the most accomplished of Milton's neo-Latin writings pertaining to his Italian period, Estelle Haan offers a series of fresh interpretations of the poem.

Situating Mansus alongside Milton's seemingly voracious reading of contemporary Italian literature while abroad, Haan assesses the poem's academic, religious, topographical, and linguistic contexts and analyzes its classical, neo-Latin, Italian, and English intertexts. Read in these wider contexts, Mansus emerges as a polyvocal poem, a text about other texts--it embraces not only its addressee's Latin encomium composed in Milton's honor, but also, and essentially, Manso's published (and, possibly, unpublished) works. Haan demonstrates how Milton's poem draws upon the writings of two Italian poets who also benefitted from Manso's care and patronage, namely, Torquato Tasso and Giambattista Marino. Like them, Milton is the recipient of Manso's hospitality and courtesy and he unabashedly aligns his Neapolitan experience with theirs.

Milton, paying homage to Manso's hospitality and literary work in Mansus, cleverly experiments with genre and language and simultaneously showcases his vast and intimate knowledge of Italian literature, gained while on Neapolitan soil. In her insightful study of Mansus, Haan not only shows how Milton assumes a place of his own in a Neapolitan world but also maps the literary import of Naples onto Milton during the time of his sojourn and beyond.