| Description |
xxii, 396 pages : illustrations (some color), maps (some color) ; 23 cm |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 343-384) and index. |
| Contents |
The literary-industrial complex -- Anne Bradstreet : colonial poet -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's American mythology -- John Bartlett's quotations -- Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins and The Colored American Magazine -- Robert Lowell and modern American poetry -- Social reform in the people's republic -- Margaret Fuller : early feminist and journalist -- Mount Auburn cemetery -- Melusina Fay Peirce and cooperative housekeeping -- Maria Baldwin : educator and reformer -- W.E.B. Du Bois : pure American genius -- Marriage equality -- Industrial Cambridge -- Slippery speculation : the international ice trade -- Elias Howe's sewing machine -- The Bell Telephone Company and Gardiner Greene Hubbard -- The sweet life in Cambridge : candy manufacturing -- Polaroid and the origins of instant photography -- The hi-liter marker -- Origins of a research enterprise -- Benjamin Waterhouse : vaccine pioneer -- Mapping the heavens : astronomy in Cambridge -- Asa Gray : botany and natural selection -- Eben Horsford and baking powder -- Louis Agassiz : public scientist -- Wallace Sabine and architectural acoustics -- Cambridge goes to war -- Vannevar Bush : science in the national interest -- The MIT radiation laboratory and microwave radar -- Harold "Doc" Edgerton and flash photography -- Louis Fieser and napalm -- Charles Stark Draper : innovator in aeronautical navigation -- Noam Chomsky and the responsibility of intellectuals -- Digital Cambridge -- Claude Shannon and information theory -- Internet email -- Public key cryptography -- The electronic spreadsheet -- Zipcar -- Harnessing biology -- Matthew Meselson : making the world a safer place -- Recombinant DNA and the biosafety debate -- Unraveling the human genome -- Robert Langer : biomedical engineering pioneer -- Gene-editing tools -- Our fair city in popular culture -- The origins of modern football -- Julia Child : the French chef -- Ben Thompson and the festival marketplace -- Love story -- T. Berry Brazelton and behavioral pediatrics -- Car talk -- Yo-yo Ma : connecting centers and edges -- Re : invention. |
| Summary |
"Born in Cambridge is both a history book and a story of contemporary events. It provides several dozen vignettes of innovative people who did formative work in Cambridge, such as African American social critic and early Civil Rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois and television chef Julia Child. It also describes inventions made here, such as the sewing machine, the instant camera and modern radar. The stories are broken down into eight chapters, focused on: literature, social reform, 19th century science, industrial development, war-time innovations, digital advances, pop culture and 21st century biology. A final chapter sums up the lessons of four centuries of innovation and reinvention, explaining why Cambridge has managed to thrive, despite deindustrialization and other challenges."-- Provided by publisher. |
| Subject |
Cambridge (Mass.) -- Biography.
|
|
Cambridge (Mass.) -- History.
|
|
Massachusetts -- Cambridge.
(OCoLC)fst01205363
|
| Genre/Form |
Biographies. (OCoLC)fst01919896
|
|
History. (OCoLC)fst01411628
|
| Added Author |
Kuchta, Michael, author.
|
| Added Title |
400 years of ideas and innovators |
| ISBN |
9780262046800 (hardcover) |
|
0262046806 (hardcover) |
|
