UWSP Libraries

The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World By Edward Dolnick Call Number: Q 127 .E8 D65 2011 Publisher's Description :  The Clockwork Universe is the story of a band of men who lived in a world of dirt and disease but pictured a universe that ran like a perfect machine. A meld of history and science, this book is a group portrait of some of the greatest minds who ever lived as they wrestled with nature’s most sweeping mysteries. The answers they uncovered still hold the key to how we understand the world. At the end of the seventeenth century—an age of religious wars, plague, and the Great Fire of London— when most people saw the world as falling apart, these earliest scientists saw a world of perfect order. They declared that, chaotic as it looked, the universe was in fact as intricate and perfectly regulated as a clock. This was the tail end of Shakespeare’s century, when the natural and the supernatural still twined around each ot...

  At Home: A Short History of Private Life By Bill Bryson Call Number:  GT 165.5 B79 2010 Publisher's Description:   From one of the most beloved authors of our time—more than six million copies of his books have been sold in this country alone—a fascinating excursion into the history behind the place we call home. Review from the New York Times "Houses aren't refuges from history. They are where history ends up." Bill Bryson and his family live in a Victorian parsonage in a part of England where nothing of any great significance has happened since the Romans decamped. Yet one day, he began to consider how very little he knew about the ordinary things of life as he found it in that comfortable home. To remedy this, he formed the idea of journeying about his house from room to room to "write a history of the world without leaving home." The bathroom provides the occasion for a history of hygiene; the bedroom, sex, death, and sleep; the kitchen, nutriti...