Introduction -- The quest for scientific history -- Scientific history and the Russian locale -- Nikolai Vavilov, genogeography, and history's past future -- Julian Huxley's cold wars -- The UNESCO "History of Mankind: Cultural and Scientific Development" Project -- Information socialism, historical informatics, and the markets -- Epilogue.

For almost two centuries, the category of 'applied science' was widely taken to be both real and important. Then, its use faded. How could an entire category of science appear and disappear? By taking a longue durée approach to British attitudes across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Robert Bud explores the scientific and cultural trends that led to such a dramatic rise and fall. He traces the prospects and consequences that gave the term meaning, from its origins to its heyday as an elixir to cure many of the economic, cultural, and political ills of the UK, eventually overtaken by its competitor, 'technology'. Bud examines how 'applied science' was shaped by educational and research institutions, sociotechnical imaginaries, and political ideologies and explores the extent to which non-scientific lay opinion, mediated by politicians and newspapers, could become a driver in the classification of science.

The temptations of a new genetically informed eugenics and of a revived faith-based, world-wide political stance, this study of the interaction of science, religion, politics and the culture of celebrity in twentieth-century Europe and America offers a fascinating and important contribution to the history of this movement. The author looks at the career of French-born physician and Nobel Prize winner, Alexis Carrel (1873-1944), as a way of understanding the popularization of eugenics through religious faith, scientific expertise, cultural despair and right-wing politics in the 1930s and 1940s. Carrel was among the most prestigious experimental surgeons of his time who also held deeply illiberal views. In Man, the Unknown (1935), he endorsed fascism and called for the elimination of the "unfit." The book became a huge international success, largely thanks to its promotion by Readers' Digest as well as by the author's friendship with Charles Lindbergh. In 1941, he went into the service of the French pro-German regime of Vichy, which appointed him to head an institution of eugenics research. His influence was remarkable, affecting radical Islamic groups as well Le Pen’s Front National that celebrated him as the "founder of ecology."

Aldous Huxley described Gerald Heard as “that rare being—a learned man who [made] his mental home on the vacant spaces between the pigeonholes.” Heard’s off-beat interests made him a cultural and intellectual pioneer on both sides of the Atlantic in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Despite accolades from such figures as E.M. Forster, who characterized him as “one of the most penetrating minds in England,” and Christopher Isherwood, who described him upon his death as one of the “few great magic mythmakers and revealers of life’s wonder,” Heard is largely unknown today. Between the Pigeonholes is the first published full-length study of Gerald Heard. Alison Falby examines Heard’s ideas and contexts in interwar Britain and postwar America, demonstrating his significance in several important twentieth-century movements. These movements include popular science and psychology, psychical research, Eastern spirituality, pacifism, cooperativism, and Californian counter-culture. All of Heard’s involvements expressed his desire to convey religious ideas in the modern languages of biological, social, and physical science. Falby also traces Heard’s shifting political leanings from left-liberal in the early-1930s to libertarian in the early-1960s. She finds that his modernist theological approach, conventionally associated with liberal religion and politics, provided spiritual fodder for those on both the Left and the Right: Isherwood and W.H. Auden on the one hand, and Clare Boothe Luce and Spiritual Mobilization on the other. Using Heard as a prism through which to examine popular ideas, Falby shows that the twentieth century contained much political and religious heterogeneity. This heterogeneity illustrates the diverse and overlapping roots of both liberal religion and conservative politics in the twenty-first century.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, engagement with science was commonly used as an emblem of modernity. This phenomenon is now attracting increasing attention in different historical specialties. Being Modern builds on this recent scholarly interest to explore engagement with science across culture from the end of the nineteenth century to approximately 1940. Addressing the breadth of cultural forms in Britain and the western world from the architecture of Le Corbusier to working class British science fiction, Being Modern paints a rich picture. Seventeen distinguished contributors from a range of fields including the cultural study of science and technology, art and architecture, English culture and literature examine the issues involved. The book will be a valuable resource for students, and a spur to scholars to further examination of culture as an interconnected web of which science is a critical part, and to supersede such tired formulations as 'Science and culture'.

What is a humanist? After an introduction to the earliest ideas of, and terms for, humanism in the ancient world, noted humanist Nicolas Walter explores the history of humanism and its evolving definitions from the time of the original appearance and first meanings of "humanist" in the Italian Renaissance, concluding with a manifesto of modern humanism. Drawing on personal experience and information from more than 400 sources, this is the first full-length treatment of the subject.

A star debater at school, Norman Haire had always wanted to be an actor. Forced to study medicine, he followed his other passion: saving the world from sexual misery. When he arrived in London in 1919 he was a poor Jewish outsider from Australia. By 1930 he had a flourishing gynaecology practice in Harley Street, a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce and a country house. His parties were attended by the medical, intellectual and cultural elite. As a prominent sexologist and a campaigner for birth control, Haire took a leading role in the world's first international conference on birth control in 1922 and organised, with Dora Russell, the World League for Sexual Reform's highly successful 1929 Congress in London. He lectured in America, Germany, France and Spain, and wrote and edited many accessible books on sex education. In 1940 Haire returned to Australia where he attracted a loyal following, but was also hounded by the security service. The ABC Board was censured in parliament for choosing him as the key speaker in a population debate, and his weekly advice column in the magazine Woman was strongly opposed by the Catholic Church. Peter Coleman called Haire 'one of Australia's most famous freethinkers and sex reformers'. This biography pays a tribute to this tenacious, humane, witty, innovative and brave man's contribution to birth control, sexology and human rights history.

Ideology studies have undergone significant growth over the past couple of decades. The scope of the discipline has been extensively broadened to include not only text and discourse but emotions, imagination, fantasy, rhetoric and visual forms. Its attention to detail and to the micro-manifestations of ideology in the everyday have borne considerable fruit, particularly at a time of ideological fragmentation and reassembly. Its research methods have been refined, embracing both conceptual innovation and empirical evidence drawn from many fields of social creativity. During that period, the Journal of Political Ideologies has been a major vehicle of the discipline’s advance and coming of age. The chapters in this book originally published as two special issues in the Journal. The book assembles and investigates some of the latest approaches and domains in which cutting-edge ideology-research is now under way. The multiple topics, sources and interdisciplinary perspectives it contains illustrate the variety and depth that ideology studies have attained. Its subjects range from historical and literary analyses, through feminist studies, and psycho-social interpretations. It takes in the new means of dissemination that the digital age has introduced, and offers fresh assessments of the many cross-fertilizations possible between ideology research, political theory, and international studies, as traditional ideologies vie with new ideological articulations and forms.