In Immeasurable Weather Sara J. Grossman explores how environmental data collection has been central to the larger project of settler colonialism in the United States. She draws on an extensive archive of historical and meteorological data spanning two centuries to show how American scientific institutions used information about the weather to establish and reinforce the foundations of a white patriarchal settler society. Grossman outlines the relationship between climate data and state power in key moments in the history of American weather science, from the nineteenth-century public data-gathering practices of settler farmers and teachers and the automation of weather data during the Dust Bowl to the role of meteorological satellites in data science’s integration into the militarized state. Throughout, Grossman shows that weather science reproduced the natural world as something to be measured, owned, and exploited. This data gathering, she contends, gave coherence to a national weather project and to a notion of the nation itself, demonstrating that weather science’s impact cannot be reduced to a set of quantifiable phenomena.

The third issue of the yearbook History of Intellectual Culture (HIC) devotes a thematic section to experimental spaces for knowledge production. The articles in this section investigate the role of experimental environments as sites for knowledge production during the long nineteenth century, thereby extending the scope beyond the confines of traditional academic institutions such as academies, laboratories, and universities. By focusing on intentional communities, colonial gardens, agricultural colonies, and artistic colonies as experimental spaces, the authors investigate the intertwined social, natural, and aesthetic aspects of environments. An overarching aim is to develop a distinct perspective rooted in the history of knowledge, wherein experiments are conceptualized both as a category employed by the historical actors and as a methodological concept. In addition, the third issue comprises several individual papers covering a wide range of topics, stretching from the U.S. patent system in the 1930s and anti-intellectualism in interwar Britain to the cultural translation of knowledge in the wake of the Holocaust and the circulation of economic knowledge in postwar Sweden. The issue also contains several theoretical, historiographical, and methodological interventions and reflections, including a conversation on decolonizing knowledge in academia and beyond.

Uncertainties are everywhere. Whether it’s climate change, financial volatility, pandemic outbreaks or new technologies, we don’t know what the future will hold. For many contemporary challenges, navigating uncertainty – where we cannot predict what may happen – is essential and, as the book explores, this is much more than just managing risk. But how is this done, and what can we learn from different contexts about responding to and living with uncertainty? Indeed, what might it mean to live from uncertainty? Drawing on experiences from across the world, the chapters in this book explore finance and banking, technology regulation, critical infrastructures, pandemics, natural disasters and climate change. Each chapter contrasts an approach centred on risk and control, where we assume we know about and can manage the future, with one that is more flexible, responding to uncertainty. The book argues that we need to adjust our modernist, controlling view and to develop new approaches, including some reclaimed and adapted from previous times or different cultures. This requires a radical rethinking of policies, institutions and practices for successfully navigating uncertainties in an increasingly turbulent world.

Michel Danton, the brilliant investigator-hero of To Die in Provence, is back with a vengeance. Badly wounded the summer before, he is getting ready to marry Jennifer Bowen, the beautiful American art professor who saved his life. But then a girl's disfigured body washes ashore on the beach of a resort near Aix-en-Provence, and Danton finds himself forced to take charge of a harrowing investigation. From the medieval city of Bruges in Belgium through the glorious sun-dappled towns of Provence, Danton chases a depraved madman, desperate to catch him before he strikes again. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

"Literature and Weather. Shakespeare – Goethe – Zola" is dedicated to the relation between literature and weather, i.e. a cultural practice and an everyday phenomenon that has played very different epistemic roles in the history of the world. The study undertakes an archaeology of literature’s affinity to the weather which tells the story of literature’s weathery self-reflection and its creative reinventions as a medium in different epistemic and social circumstances. The book undertakes extensive close readings of three exemplary literary texts: Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther and Zola’s The Rougon-Macquarts. These readings provide the basis for reconstructing three distinct formations, negotiating the relationship between literature and weather in the 17th, the 18th and the 19th centuries. The study is a pioneering contribution to the recent debates of literature’s indebtedness to the environment. It initiates a rewriting of literary history that is weather-sensitive; the question of literature’s agency, its power to affect, cannot be raised without understanding the way the weather works in a certain cultural formation.

Sara J. Grossman explores how weather data collection has been central to the larger project of settler colonialism in the United States between 1820 and the present.