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The spirometer is used routinely to diagnose respiratory disease in specialist and primary care settings, although most patients probably do not recognize the name of the device. An important feature of spirometry is that numerical values produced with the device are routinely “corrected” for race and sometimes ethnicity. The “correction” factors for race and/or ethnicity are embedded seamlessly in the software and hardware of the spirometer, such that operators are generally unaware of the details of the correction process activated when they use the machine. The basis of this practice dates to Civil War anthropometrists and plantation physicians who reported lower lung capacity in blacks as compared to whites. This book explores the production of scientific ideas about the “vital capacity” of the lungs and social ideas about racial and ethnic difference from the mid-nineteenth century to the present through the mediating mechanisms of the spirometer. For reasons that this book examines, a century and a half of research investigations have converged on the idea that people labeled black – and most other groups worldwide – differ in the capacity of their lungs from people historically labeled white/European/Caucasian. Explanations for difference varies but notions of innate/genetic difference continue to shape the biomedical literature on lung capacity. If anything, the advent of genomics has brought a reinvigoration of ideas of innate difference in current research. Race correction continues to the present day.

Digital State tells the long overdue history of Minnesota’s world famous computer industry. The book profiles each of the most notable Minnesota companies, beginning with the founding of the Engineering Research Associates (in St. Paul) in 1946. Univac was a local successor to ERA, while Control Data was a spinoff that became a billion dollar a year concern by the 1960s. Honeywell was the state’s largest private sector employer, and IBM Rochester was a prominent outpost of that global company. The book is based on archival records of ERA, Control Data, and Univac and draws extensively on 60-plus oral histories collected at the Charles Babbage Institute as well as interviews done by the author. The book’s two final chapters consider how Minnesota embraced the coming of the “information economy” with assessments of its changing workforce and activities of prominent institutions (such as the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, the University of Minnesota, and the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium). A unique firm-level dataset of nearly 250 Minnesota computer companies (1980-2011) anatomizes significant connections between the computing industry and today’s medical device industry. The “industrial district” concept used in the book meaningfully ties together the company case studies as well as has direct implications for the state’s economic development strategy. There is no other book that tells the history (1940s–today) of Minnesota’s computer industry and high tech economy.

This collection of essays explores the complex interplay between disease as biological phenomenon, illness as a subjective experience, race as an ideological construct, and racism as a material practice. Ranging across time and space—from the interactions between white settlers and Native Americans in mid-nineteenth-century Puget Sound to physicians’ activism around hunger in the South and the Southwest in the 1960s—the contributions here collectively tell a complicated history of the relationship between medical knowledge, ideas of racial difference, health practices and power. Rather than reducing the heterogeneous histories of people of color and Western biomedicine to standard stories of medical racism or simple binaries of power and resistance, the essays highlight the contradictions and historical contingencies that mark the ways in which medical knowledge and public health policy work to racialize certain groups, on the one hand, and the ways in which racialized groups make demands on the health care profession or claims on the state to attend to their health needs, on the other. This collection of essays brings together for the first time in a single volume studies by scholars trained in the medical humanities and in the history of race and ethnicity, both fields which have grown considerably in the last two decades. Considered together, the essays provoke new ways of thinking about health and disease, race and citizenship in America.

Opening with the emergence of Theosophy in American religious life, Radiance tells the story of a small but significant utopian moment, beginning with an interest in progressive politics based in an understanding of the Iroquois League, led to the creation of an agrarian and artistic utopia on the Central Coast of California called Halcyon. The opening of a nature-cure sanatorium and the interest in electricity and vibration there and in the teachings and music emanating from the group, provided a creative atmosphere that encouraged the youth of the community to experiment, leading to lasting discoveries and inventions in applied physics and music. Radiance is a chronologically based narrative about the rise of the independent theosophical Temple movement, now known as the Temple of the People, within the context of organizational schisms that took place in the Theosophical movement in America in the 1890s, within the even wider context of the emergence of metaphysical religion in the United States. It is a case study of a religious and scientific utopia that emerged at a period of national social and political redefinition, that created an early think tank atmosphere through its theology, gender concepts, worship protocols and emphasis on creativity and experimentation in medicine, science and the arts. Radiance considers the relationship of religion and science in turn of the twentieth century Theosophy, outlines the building of the socialist utopian community of Halcyon, explores multiple healing modalities available in the early twentieth century through the group’s sanatorium, and provides an in-depth account of theosophical architecture and art in the United States.