New Books in the History of Science

Erin Maglaque's new book Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body (Astra House, 2026), is a work of early modern history and an account of what it is like to study the past as an embodied person. Having been trained as to disregard the physical self when writing history, Maglaque's worldview completely shifted following the birth of her child. What might it mean to instead, "find a way to write that flowed from the body?" Presence is her answer. The book draws from a vast array of archival and printed sources to illustrate the realities of women's physical experiences in early modern Europe, from eating, pregnancy, abortion, birth, nursing, sleeping, working, and dying. Maglaque intersperses her historical narrative with personal accounts, demonstrating the ways in which studying the past can impact our lives today. For anyone interested in women's history, the history of labor, early modern health and medicine, or simply the purpose and potential of historical study, Presence is the book to read.

Erin Maglaque is a historian of early modern Europe and gender. She teaches at Durham University and writes for publications including the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Book Review.

Elspeth Currie is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe. Learn more here

In Nary a Horse Left Standing: How a Nineteenth-Century Epidemic Transformed Medicine, Animal Welfare, and the Modern City (MIT Press, 2026), Dr. Lee Dugatkin chronicles this little-known crisis, revealing how the epidemic disrupted nearly every aspect of urban life. From coast to coast, livelihoods collapsed as horses lay sick, or worse dying, on stable floors, fires raged unchecked without horse-drawn wagons, and city development stalled for lack of horsepower. Just as the Gilded Age was dawning and industrialists were poised to amass fortunes, the flu slowed progress to a crawl.

Yet the tragedy also catalyzed revolutions in medicine, animal rights, and transportation. Veterinary science in the U.S. was still emerging, but detailed medical reports from the epidemic helped validate germ theory and discredit outdated beliefs. The crisis also spotlighted early animal welfare efforts, with fledgling groups like the ASPCA advocating for sick horses forced to work. Finally, the sheer vulnerability of relying on animals for transport spurred a shift toward mechanized systems.

As illuminating as it is humbling, the book brings to life a critical account of a crisis that still speaks to the complex public health and transportation challenges we face today.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Standardizing Sex: A History of Trans Medicine (U Chicago Press, 2025) traces the emergence of trans medicine in Scandinavia in the twentieth century, exploring the construction and negotiation of medical expertise among medical professionals, patients, and activists in the media and government bureaucracy. The book combines the author’s analysis of medical records and other archival sources with oral history interviews with former patients, activists, doctors, psychologists, and civil servants. Physician-historian Ketil Slagstad uses the Scandinavian story of sex reassignment to anchor not only the role of the state but also bureaucracy and social rights. Scandinavian countries, he shows, played a foundational role in the emergence of trans medicine internationally. As a result, Standardizing Sex tells a transnational history of medicine that sheds light on a set of relations and problems that continue to impact discussions of trans medicine and trans rights around the world.Slagstad’s sources offer a rare opportunity to explore the emergence of trans medicine in action in the clinic, laboratory, waiting room, and operating room, as well as in the bureaucrat’s office, on the psychologist’s couch, and in the publications and meetings of activist groups. Together, these sources allow for the analysis of the increasingly complex negotiations of nosological criteria, medical knowledge, and medical practices in a formative period for transgender medicine. More generally, the book offers a story about the reshaping of the normal and the pathological in modern societies.

Ketil Slagstad is a research fellow at the Institute for the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine at Charité: Universitätsmedizin Berlin.

Since the advent of computers, society has fantasized about conversing with machines. In Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture
(University of Chicago Press, 2026), Dr. Xiaochang Li shows readers how
that dream both fueled the demand for data and set the stage for
today’s generative AI. 

With original research and clear
explanations, Dr. Li elucidates the origins of what’s
known as natural language processing (NLP) and the heated
twentieth-century debates between computer scientists, linguists, and
communication engineers that shaped today’s technology. Starting with
early devices that recorded, analyzed, and attempted to interpret human
speech, she demonstrates
how computer speech recognition, particularly efforts led by Bell Labs
and IBM, advanced technology by deemphasizing linguistic meaning in
favor of statistical prediction. In other words, researchers gradually
abandoned systems that sought to understand human language, opting
instead for work-arounds
that simply predicted patterns in speech and text data. That solution
became incredibly and surprisingly adaptable. As Dr. Li reveals,
transforming linguistic questions into engineering ones ushered in the
routine operation of search engines, spam filters, and the varied
content sorting and recommendation mechanisms that regulate the access,
circulation, and legitimacy of information across every platform. But
this has all come at the cost of forever requiring copious and
ever-growing amounts of new data.

At its core, Divination Engines
illuminates how the artifacts of human communication—speech, text, and
images—have become both the fodder for and products of computers. This
connection between communication and computation, Li shows, has given
rise to data-driven analytics, machine learning, and today’s algorithmic
culture.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book
focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty
negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative
analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

This special episode features a short talk Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, gave at the Jefferson Scholars Foundation in Charlottesville, Virginia. The event featured a great mix of historians and Science and Technology Studies scholars and was organized by Jacob Bruggeman, who recently finished his dissertation on the politics of computer hackers at Johns Hopkins University and is now headed to a job at Ohio State University. Thanks to Jacob for putting the event together and hearty congratulations on his accomplishments. In the talk, Vinsel argues that we are missing a synthetic social and economic history of how our adoption and use of digital technologies over the past fifty years has affected everyday life in many social spheres, including work, religion, politics, schools, and family life. He also points to some exemplary scholars who have laid some initial groundwork on these topics and gives some suggestions for primary and secondary sources we can use to do this work. Most of all, the talk is an open invitation to collective work - because doing this project well goes far beyond what any individual can do alone.