
Discussing Chemistry and Steam
This book contains an edition of the Minutes of the Coffee House Philosophical Society 1780-1787, as transcribed by William Nicholson, the secretary to the society. The 1780s were exciting years for science and for its applications, and experimental philosophy and industrial development were closely interwoven. This coffee house society provided a …

Perfect Heresy
A shattering chronicle of the life and death of the Cathar movement -- one of Western civilization's great tragedies.
At the beginning of the 13th century, the Cathars, a group of heretical Christians, thrived across what is now southern France, but was then a patchwork of city states and principalities beholden to neither king nor bishop. The Cath …

In the Arms of Morpheus
In the Arms of Morpheus is the shocking story of how a simple but bewitching substance touted as a miracle drug enslaved unwitting generations of nineteenth-century writers, artists and ordinary citizens.
Extracted from opium, the sap of the poppy, Opium was welcomed into the homes of rich and poor alike under the guise of medical use in the form of …

Lost Warships
Millennia of conflict have made famous the names of great naval battles -- Salamis, Actium, Lepanro, the Spanish Armada, Trafalgar, Tsushima, Jutland, Pearl Harbor Midway, the Battle of the Atlantic. In lively text and with more than eighty full-colour images and one hundred black-and-white photographs, Lost Warships traces the history of war at se …

Sea of Faith
The long, shared history of Christianity and Islam began in the early seventh century AD with a question: Who would inherit the Greco-Roman world of Mediterranean? Sprung from the same source, the two faiths played out over the millennium what historian Stephen O'Shea calls "a sibling rivalry writ very large." Their cataclysmic clashes on the battl …

Race for Real Sailors, A
On October 22, 1921, the American fishing schooner Elsie, just arrived from Gloucester, Massachusetts, lined up in Halifax Harbour beside a new, untested schooner from Lunenburg, ready to race over a 40-mile ocean course. The Elsie's skipper had beaten a Canadian boat decisively the previous year to win the first International Fishermen's Cup race. …

To Cast Out Disease
Though one of the most important public health agencies of the 20th century and the most powerful and richest branch of the Rockefeller Foundation, the International Health Division's history (1913-1951) has never been told before. This original work is based on a vast multitude of letters, reports and photographs the author uncovered in the Rockef …

A Merciful End
Ian R. Dowbiggin is a 2011 Fellow of The Royal Society of Canada.
While it may seem that debates over euthanasia began with Jack Kervorkian, the practice of mercy killing extends back to Ancient Greece and beyond. In America, the debate has raged for well over a century. Now, in A Merciful End, Ian Dowbiggin offers the first full-scale historical ac …