Maps, as we know, help us find our way around. But they're also powerful tools for someone hoping to find you. Widely available in electronic and paper formats, maps offer revealing insights into our movements and activities, even our likes and dislikes. In Spying with Maps, the maptician Mark Monmonier looks at the increased use of geographic data, satellite imagery, and location tracking across a wide range of field such as military intelligence. law enforcement, market research and traffic engineering. Could these diverse forms of geographic monitoring, he asks, lead to grave consequences...

In this innovative work, Scott L. Montgomery explores the diverse roles that translation has played in the development of science from antiquity to the present--from the Arabic translations of Greek and Latin texts whose reintroduction to Europe was crucial to the Renaissance, to the origin and evolution of modern science in Japan.
" A] book of great richness, as much for its examples as for its ideas, which keenly illustrate the development of knowledge across languages and epochs. It is a book to read and reread. Its subject is important; it is ours, it is our history." -Andre Clas,...

Breathtaking in its historical and geographical scope, this book provides a sweeping examination of the construction of male and female homosexualities, stressing both the variability of the forms same-sex desire can take and the key recurring patterns it has formed throughout history.
" An] indispensable resource on same-sex sexual relationships and their social contexts. . . . Essential reading." -Choice
" P]romises to deliver a lot, and even more extraordinarily succeeds in its lofty aims. . . . O]riginal and refreshing. . . . A] sensational book, part of what I see...

To explore evolutionary relationships among organisms, biologists construct and compare phylogenetic trees, not unlike the family trees traced for humans by genealogists. In recent years, the use of molecular data to build these trees and sophisticated computer-aided techniques to analyze them have led to a revolution in the study of cospeciation (the joint speciation of two or more lineages that are ecologically associated, such as hosts and parasites).

Food webs are diagrams depicting which species interact or in other words, who eats whom. An understanding of the structure and function of food webs is crucial for any study of how an ecosystem works, including attempts to predict which communities might be more vulnerable to disturbance and therefore in more immediate need of conservation.
Although it was first published twenty years ago, Stuart Pimm's "Food Webs" remains the clearest introduction to the study of food webs. Reviewing various hypotheses in the light of theoretical and empirical evidence, Pimm shows that even the most...

One of the most radical feminist theorists in Europe before the nineteenth century, Francois Poullain de la Barre (1647-1723) was a man way ahead of his time. Applying Cartesian principles to "the Woman Question," Poullain demonstrated by rational deduction that the supposedly "self-evident" inequality of the sexes was nothing more than unfounded prejudice.
Poullain published three books (anonymously) on this topic in the 1670s, all of which are included in English translation in this volume. In "On the Equality of the Two Sexes" he argued that the supposedly "natural" inferiority of...

In 1993, an American biotechnology company and a French genetics lab developed a collaborative research plan to search for diabetes genes. But just as the project was to begin, the French government called it to a halt, barring the laboratory from sharing something never previously thought of as a commodity unto itself: French DNA.

The attraction of a wink, a nod, a discarded snapshot--such feelings permeate our lives, yet we usually dismiss them as insubstantial or meaningless. With "The Logic of the Lure," John Paul Ricco argues that it is precisely such fleeting, erotic, and even perverse experiences that will help us create a truly queer notion of ethics and aesthetics, one that recasts sociality and sexuality, place and finitude in ways suggested by the anonymity and itinerant lures of cruising. Shifting our attention from artworks to the work that art does, from subjectivity to becoming, and from static space to...

Empiricism today implies the dispassionate scrutiny of facts. But Jessica Riskin finds that in the French Enlightenment, empiricism was intimately bound up with sensibility. In what she calls a "sentimental empiricism," natural knowledge was taken to rest on a blend of experience and emotion.

Riskin argues that sentimental empiricism brought together ideas and institutions, practices and politics. She shows, for instance, how the study of blindness, led by ideas about the mental and moral role of vision and by cataract surgeries, shaped the first school for the blind; how Benjamin...

In fin-de-siecle France, politics were in an uproar, and gender roles blurred as never before. Into this maelstrom stepped the "new women," a group of primarily urban, middle-class French women who became the objects of intense public scrutiny. Some remained single, some entered nontraditional marriages, and some took up the professions of medicine and law, journalism and teaching. All of them challenged traditional notions of womanhood by living unconventional lives and doing supposedly "masculine" work outside the home.
Mary Louise Roberts examines a constellation of famous new women...