Resultados para "América" en Historia y filosofía

El filósofo Pedro Insua explora con ideas y datos la desconocida línea salmantina que va desde los descubrimientos náuticos de Colón a los debates morales de Francisco de Vitoria sobre la licitud de la conquista de América. La ciudad castellana se elevó como el faro moral e ideológico para un imperio que domesticó océanos e hizo suyo todo un continente. Los sabios congregados en torno a Salamanca sentaron las bases de la astronomía moderna, la física, el derecho internacional y hasta la economía.

Throughout the seventeenth century, medical lecturers demonstrated human anatomy by dissecting a cadaver while surrounded by students. After the Revolutionary War, though, instructors realized that they needed many more cadavers to serve a growing number of medical students. Enter the “resurrectionists”–body snatchers. Resurrectionists were a cruel lot; men (almost always men and often medical students themselves) who would sneak into a cemetery under the cover of darkness, remove a body, and then sell it to a physician or anatomist–usually for around $100.

John Roebling was one of the 19th century's most brilliant engineers, ingenious inventors, successful manufacturers, and fascinating personalities. Raised in a German backwater amid the war-torn chaos of the Napoleonic Wars, he immigrated to the US in 1831, where he became wealthy and acclaimed, eventually receiving a carte-blanche contract to build one of the 19th century's most stupendous and daring works of engineering: a gigantic suspension bridge to span the East River between New York and Brooklyn. 

North America was not empty nor were its inhabitants savages when Europeans arrived in 1492. Quite the opposite, North America was thickly populated by indigenous people who lived in clean cities, had a thriving economy, and transformed the landscape into bountiful productivity. Forgotten Landscapes reveals the incredible extent to which Native Americans manipulated and shaped their surrounding environs through agricultural practices and urban engineering, resulting in one of the most prosperous civilizations of their time.

Humankind has always wrestled with the existence of suffering. For two centuries, many American ministers, physicians, and scientists believed that an omnipotent and omniscient God created the world such that people might relieve suffering through ingenuity and learning. Others responded to the new worldview introduced by the scientific revolution as a threat to the divine order. In Imagining Progress, Kristin Johnson traces the history of Americans' evolving relationship with science and religion at "one of its most dramatic places"—the bedsides of dying children.

In 1995, a scandal erupted when the New York Times revealed that the Smithsonian possessed a century’s worth of nude “posture” photos of college students. In this riveting history, Beth Linker tells why these photos were only a small part of the incredible story of twentieth-century America’s largely forgotten posture panic—a decades-long episode in which it was widely accepted as scientific fact that Americans were suffering from an epidemic of bad posture, with potentially catastrophic health consequences.

Why did the US intelligence services fail so spectacularly to know about the Soviet Union's nuclear capabilities following World War II? As Vince Houghton, historian and curator of the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, shows us, that disastrous failure came just a few years after the Manhattan Project's intelligence team had penetrated the Third Reich and knew every detail of the Nazi's plan for an atomic bomb. What changed and what went wrong?

Long before the U.S. government began conducting secret radiation and germ-warfare experiments, and long before the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, medical professionals had introduced—and hotly debated the ethics of—the use of human subjects in medical experiments. In Subjected to Science, Susan Lederer provides the first full-length history of biomedical research with human subjects in the earlier period, from 1890 to 1940.

More than 10,000 years ago spectacularly large mammals roamed the pampas and jungles of South America. This book tells the story of these great beasts during and just after the Pleistocene, the geological epoch marked by the great ice ages. Megafauna describes the history and way of life of these animals, their comings and goings, and what befell them at the beginning of the modern era and the arrival of humans.

In 1938, a young German rocket enthusiast named Wernher von Braun had dreams of building a rocket that could fly him to the moon. In Ray, North Dakota, a young farm girl named Mary Sherman was attending high school. In an age when girls rarely dreamed of a career in science, Mary wanted to be a chemist. A decade later, the dreams of these two disparate individuals would coalesce in ways neither could have imagined.

Today, the Space Race is widely viewed poignantly and fondly as a race to the Moon that culminated with Apollo 11 "winning" the race for the United States. In fact, it encompassed a much broader range of competition between the Soviet Union and the United States that affected everything from military technology to successfully launching satellites that could land on Mars or orbit other planets in the solar system. Moreover, the notion that America "won" the Space Race at the end of the 1960s overlooks just how competitive the Space Race actually was in launching people into orbit.

The American standard system of measurement is a unique and odd thing to behold with its esoteric, inconsistent standards: 12 inches in a foot, three feet in a yard, 16 ounces in a pound, 100 pennies to the dollar. For something as elemental as counting and estimating the world around us, it seems like a confusing tool to use. So how did we end up with it? Most of the rest of the world is on the metric system, and for a time in the 1970s America appeared ready to make the switch.

En 1776, les 13 colonies anglaises qui deviendront les 13 premiers États des États-Unis d'Amérique déclaraient leur indépendance, mais l'Angleterre, pour des raisons politiques et économiques, ne leur a octroyé cette indépendance qu'en 1783 après une guerre qui aura duré sept ans.

The Los Angeles Times headline screamed: Rocket Scientist Killed in Pasadena Explosion. The man known as Jack Parsons, a maverick rocketeer who helped transform a derided sci-fi plotline into actuality, was at first mourned as a scientific prodigy. But reporters soon uncovered a more shocking story: Parsons had been a devotee of the city’s occult scene.

After the Soviet Union proved to the United States that it possessed an operational intercontinental ballistic missile with the launch of Sputnik in October 1957, the world watched anxiously as the two superpowers engaged in a game of nuclear one-upmanship. Amid this rising tension, eccentric physicist Nicholas Christofilos brought forth an outlandish, albeit ingenious, idea to defend the US from a Soviet attack: detonating nuclear warheads in space to create an artificial radiation belt that would fry incoming ICBMs. Known as Operation Argus, this plan is the most secret and riskiest experiment in history, and classified details of these nuclear tests have been long obscured.

An illustrated history of American innovators—some well known, some unknown, and all fascinating—by the author of the bestselling The American Century. The real inventor of the steam engine. The creator of the bra. The man who invented modern banking. The creator of the computer operating...

In How the Left Swiftboated America, FOX commentator and bestselling author John Gibson offers the first comprehensive defense of the Bush presidency against its numerous detractors. In this provocative political work, Gibson explores who was right and who was wrong in taking us into the Iraq...

On December 23, 1919, Alice H. Parker received Patent No. 1,325,905 for a revolutionary gas-powered heating system that would transform American homes forever. Yet today, almost no one knows her name. HEAT OF GENIUS chronicles the remarkable life and groundbreaking innovation of Alice Parker, the Black woman inventor whose vision of centralized heating became the blueprint for every modern HVAC system.

"A treasure of a book."—David McCullough The harrowing story of a pathbreaking naval expedition that set out to map the entire Pacific Ocean, dwarfing Lewis and Clark with its discoveries, from the New York Times bestselling author of Valiant Ambition and In the Hurricane's Eye. A New York...

In 1869, the Atlantic Monthly magazine published a new novella in serial form. This bizarre tale, The Brick Moon, was written by a historian (and Unitarian minister) named Edward Everett Hale, who had already written several well-received novels and articles. However, this was something completely different today, as it was in the genre of what is today considered science fiction. Many people compared the new work to the previous novels of French writer Jules Verne, including From the Earth to the Moon, but Hale’s work was presented as a genuine account of a previous experiment.