Bücher der Reihe New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History

Ultimately, he reveals the crucial role played by the cybernetics moment-when cybernetics and information theory were seen as universal sciences-in setting the stage for our current preoccupation with information technologies.

From the rise of ticker-tape technology to the development of conspiracy theories, Reading the Market argues that commentary on the Stock Exchange between 1870 and 1915 changed how Americans understood finance-and explains what our pervasive interest in Wall Street says about us now.

Alter examines how comparative philology provided a genealogical model of language that Darwin, as well as other scientists and language scholars, used to construct rhetorical parallels with the common-descent theory of evolution.

Entering a distinctively male space-the saloon-to rescue fathers, brothers, and sons, women at the same time began to enter another male bastion-politics-again justifying their transgression in terms of rescuing the nation's manhood.

"The Radical Enlightenments of Benjamin Franklin brings us a much fuller understanding of Franklin's intellectual and literary roots and his later influence among common readers.

Because it provided the dominant framework for the "development" of poor, postcolonial countries, modernization theory ranks among the important constructs of twentieth-century social science. This title offers the intellectual history of a movement that has had far-reaching, and often unintended, consequences.