Joyce E. Chaplin – författare

A Washington Post Noteworthy BookOne of The New Yorker's Best Books of the Year So Far"[A] richly textured history . . . This story holds numerous lessons for our era." -The New Yorker"From Joyce Chaplin's engaging, wide-ranging pages a fresh Franklin emerges." -Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Revolutionary"A fascinating, innovative, inventive look at a fascinating, innovative man and his inventions." -Charles C. Mann, bestselling author of The Wizard and the Prophet and 1491The surprising story of Benjamin Franklin's most famous invention-and a new take on the Founding Father we thought we knew. The biggest revolution in Benjamin Franklin's lifetime was made to fit in a fireplace. Assembled from iron plates like a piece of flatpack furniture, the Franklin stove became one of the era's most iconic consumer products, spreading from Pennsylvania to England, Italy, and beyond. It was more than just a material object, however-it was also a hypothesis. Franklin was proposing that, armed with science, he could invent his way out of a climate crisis: a period of global cooling known as the Little Ice Age, when unusually bitter winters sometimes brought life to a standstill. He believed that his stove could provide snug indoor comfort despite another, related crisis: a shortage of wood caused by widespread deforestation. And he conceived of his invention as equal parts appliance and scientific instrument-a device that, by modifying how heat and air moved through indoor spaces, might reveal the workings of the atmosphere outside and explain why it seemed to be changing. With his stove, Franklin became America's first climate scientist.Joyce E. Chaplin's The Franklin Stove is the story of this singular invention, and a revelatory new look at the Founding Father we thought we knew. We follow Franklin as he promotes his stove in Britain and France, while corresponding with the various experimenters who discovered the key gases in Earth's atmosphere, invented steam engines, and tried to clean up sooty urban air. During his travels back and forth across the Atlantic, we witness him taking measurements of the gulf stream and observing the cooling effect of volcanic ash from Iceland. And back in Philadelphia, we watch him hawk his invention while sparring with proponents of the popular theory that clearcutting forests would lead to warmer winters by reducing the amount of shade cover on the surface of the Earth. As the story of the Franklin stove shows, it's not so easy to engineer our way out of a climate crisis; with this book, Chaplin reveals how that challenge is as old as the United States itself.

An ambitious global history that fundamentally alters our understanding of MalthusThe New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus is a sweeping global and intellectual history that radically recasts our understanding of Malthus''s Essay on the Principle of Population, the most famous book on population ever written or ever likely to be. Malthus''s Essay is also persistently misunderstood. First published anonymously in 1798, the Essay systematically argues that population growth tends to outpace its means of subsistence unless kept in check by factors such as disease, famine, or war, or else by lowering the birth rate through such means as sexual abstinence.Challenging the widely held notion that Malthus''s Essay was a product of the British and European context in which it was written, Alison Bashford and Joyce Chaplin demonstrate that it was the new world, as well as the old, that fundamentally shaped Malthus''s ideas. They explore what the Atlantic and Pacific new worlds—from the Americas and the Caribbean to New Zealand and Tahiti—meant to Malthus, and how he treated them in his Essay. Bashford and Chaplin reveal how Malthus, long vilified as the scourge of the English poor, drew from his principle of population to conclude that the extermination of native populations by European settlers was unjust.Elegantly written and forcefully argued, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus relocates Malthus''s Essay from the British economic and social context that has dominated its reputation to the colonial and global history that inspired its genesis.