Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2025 -

Bannor (Atlanta History Center) reminds a modern world of the vital role sheep have played in the history of the United States. Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton all had great interest in decreasing wool imports and improving the quality, yield, and population of American sheep by importing Spanish Merino sheep, but disagreed on how this should be accomplished. Sheep's wool provided basic clothing and blankets for the military as well as the general population, and was seen as a matter of national security for all conflicts from the Revolutionary War through the Korean Conflict. After the Civil War, proposals and laws regarding sheep and the dogs that could either assist in herding them, or prey upon them, were used by both those trying to build up the resources of the freedmen, and those who would keep them impoverished. The author reveals how sheep were written out of the history of the Western frontier in favor of the cattle they actually outnumbered. Technological advances in sheep shearing lead to advances in other industries, and wool itself was necessary in the manufacturing of early automobiles. The increase in dairy cattle farms to support urban growth and the invention of polyester contributed to the decline in sheep from 56 million at the close of WWII to fewer than seven million at the beginning of the 21st century, but the role of sheep up until that time cannot be overestimated. Includes illustrations and statistical tables highly relevant to the text.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

Stuart Anderson's Pharmacopoeias is a sweeping study of both the development of pharmacopoeias and the use of the term in official, unofficial, and scholarly writing. Anderson explains that the word pharmacopeia is so widely used, especially in academic writing, that it has lost much meaning, and its ambiguous use is problematic and makes discussions surrounding pharmacology and empire difficult. Anderson sets out to correct this issue by asking scholars to employ a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary approach to set reasonable limits on the use of the term. The book is largely focused on the British colonial world, but Anderson does employ a cross-imperial analysis as a way of tracing how Britain's approach to pharmacology differed from other European powers. Although such an approach is useful, Anderson does not use pharmacology as a lens to tell us more about imperialism, nor to expand on previous scholarship that is concerned with the ways in which power and knowledge flowed through the empire. Anderson's narrow approach does allow for a detailed study of pharmacopoeias, making it an essential read for those working in various fields related to the academic study of pharmacology.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers.

This edited volume provides an authoritative series of contributions that explore the historical and contemporary role that non-human primates, our closest living relatives, have played in global culture and art. The chapters are written by internationally renowned experts in the humanities and life sciences. The opening section focuses on art, folklore, and indigenous knowledge from the regions of the world where humans live alongside primates in the wild, including Asia, Africa, Madagascar, and the Americas. The last two chapters in this section are devoted to primates in antiquity. The following section discusses the expansion of knowledge and perception about primates in Europe and the Arab World during the "Age of Exploration" from Medieval times to the 16th Century. The final two sections review how the study of primates by early natural historians, in association with the rise of evolutionary thinking, transformed the view of our place in nature. This excellent volume is an essential resource for students and professionals in the fields of art history, anthropology, primatology, and the history of science, but it will also appeal to general readers with an interest in the natural world.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

Artificial intelligence (AI)--the buzzword of the current historical moment and the epitome of cutting-edge technology--is, in fact, just the latest expression of very old ways of thinking about intelligence, technology, and science. So argues Donnelly (history, Alvernia Univ.) in this timely and readable book. He makes an invaluable contribution by placing current AI hype within a deep historical context, showing how it results from a chain of thinking dating back to the Enlightenment. Moreover, he argues provocatively that much of that thinking was, in fact, bad. Donnelly suggests that AI contains all the vices of previous attempts to simplify complex human thought and behavior to levels that can be studied with rigid methods borrowed from the natural sciences. This argument is sharply critical of both AI and the social sciences but is based on deep, careful, and stylishly reported research. The book is a valuable intervention in the rapidly expanding historical literature on the history of AI and also a useful and readable resource for students and scholars at all levels who want to know more about the historical roots of fraught contemporary discourses around intelligence, artificial or otherwise.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Undergraduates through faculty; professionals.