Bøger i PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THE HISTOR serien

Militarizing Outer Space explores the dystopian and destructive dimensions of the Space Age and challenges conventional narratives of a bipolar Cold War rivalry. Concentrating on weapons, warfare and viölence, this provocative volume examines real and imagined endeavors of arming the skies and conquering the heavens. The third and final volume in the groundbreaking ¿European Astroculture trilogy, ¿Militarizing Outer Space zooms in on the interplay between security, technopolitics and knowledge from the 1920s through the 1980s. Often hailed as the site of heavenly utopias and otherworldly salvation, outer space transformed from a promised sanctuary to a present threat, where the battles of the future were to be waged. Astroculture proved instrumental in fathoming forms and functions of warfare¿s futures past, both on earth and in space. The allure of dominating outer space, the book shows, was neither limited to the early twenty-first century nor to current American space force rhetorics.

This book explores the social origins of the Western preoccupation with health and environmental hazards. It looks at the rise of the dichotomy between the vulnerable 'in' and the threatening 'out' by examining the pathologies associated with weather, domestic space, ventilation, clothing, and travel in Britain at the turn of the 19th century.

Gillette shows that the sciences of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology were undergoing rapid development in the early Twentieth century. However, many of the early researchers in these sciences were also eugenicists. With the rise of behaviourism and the reaction against eugenics in the 1930s, any scientific claims that behaviour might be influenced by heredity were suppressed for ideological reasons.