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Motorized Obsessions: Life, Liberty, And The Small-Bore Engine, Paul R. Josephson

Faculty Books

From dirt bikes and jet skis to weed wackers and snowblowers, machines powered by small gas engines have become a permanent—and loud—fixture in American culture. But fifty years of high-speed fun and pristine lawns have not come without cost.

In the first comprehensive history of the small-bore engine and the technology it powers, Paul R. Josephson explores the political, environmental, and public health issues surrounding one of America's most dangerous pastimes. Each chapter tells the story of an ecosystem within the United States and the devices that wreak havoc on it—personal watercraft (PWCs) on inland lakes and rivers; all-terrain vehicles …

Mayflower Hill: A History Of Colby College, Earl H. Smith

Colby Books

A lively history of Colby College from its founding in 1813 to the present day.

Founded by Baptists in Waterville, Maine (and originally named The Maine Literary and Theological Institution), Colby College began as a tiny place- half college, half seminary. It faced doom at the end of the Civil War but was rescued by Gardner Colby, a wealthy manufacturer whose $50,000 donation saved the college. Three years later, it changed its name to honor its benefactor. Sixty years after that, the tiny college had become choked by the city's success. Squeezed between the Kennebec River and the railroad tracks, …

Totalitarian Science And Technology, Paul R. Josephson

Faculty Books

In Totalitarian Science and Technology Paul Josephson considers how physicists, biologists, and engineers have fared in totalitarian regimes. Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin relied on scientists and engineers to build the infrastructure of their states. The military power of their regimes was largely based on the discovery of physicists and biologists. They sought to use biology to transform nature, including their citizens, with murderous effect in Nazi Germany. They expected scientists to devote themselves entirely to the goals of the state, and were intolerant of deviation from state-sponsored programs and ideology. As a result, physicists, biologists, and engineers suffered from …

New Atlantis Revisited: Akademgorodok, The Siberian City Of Science, Paul R. Josephson

Faculty Books

In 1958 construction began on Akademgorodok, a scientific utopian community modeled after Francis Bacon's vision of a "New Atlantis." The city, carved out of a Siberian forest 2,500 miles east of Moscow, was formed by Soviet scientists with Khrushchev's full support. They believed that their rational science, liberated from ideological and economic constraints, would help their country surpass the West in all fields. In a lively history of this city, a symbol of de-Stalinization, Paul Josephson offers the most complete analysis available of the reasons behind the successes and failures of Soviet science--from advances in nuclear physics to politically induced …

Remembered Maine, Ernest Cummings Marriner

Colby Books

No abstract provided.

Kennebec Yesterdays, Ernest Cummings Marriner

Colby Books

A “social history of the Pine Tree State…especially…the Kennebec Valley” inspired by Marriner’s long-running Sunday evening radio program “Little Talks on Common Things,” broadcast by Waterville’s WTVL beginning in 1948.

From the foreword:

To my amazement I found hundreds of people interested in the social history of the Pine Tree State. Material has always poured in faster than I could use it. Out of trunks and boxes stored away in attics, came letters and diaries, account books and legal documents. Scrap books prepared by patient hands many decades ago were opened for my inspection. Yellowed newspapers, tied in neat bundles …