What are stars? Why do those tiny points of light sparkle with different colors? How far away are they?
Astronomers use physics and mathematics to create new images
of stars. For them, the delight of seeing stars on a clear, dark night is
enhanced by searching for a unified understanding of the universe.
Key discoveries opened the study of the universe as a whole. At the beginning of this century, astronomers had a limited sense of the size of the universe. Then, in 1924, Edwin Hubble (1889-1953)...

You see then, studious reader, how the subtle mind of Galileo, in my opinion the first philosopher of the day, uses this telescope of ours like a sort of ladder, scales the furthest and loftiest walls of the visible world, surveys all things with his own eyes, and, from the position he has gained, darts the glances of his most acute intellect upon these petty abodes of ours-the planetary spheres I mean,-and compares with keenest reason- ing the distant with the near, the lofty with the deep.
From D...

Kenneth Brecher and Michael Feirtag, expand on astronomy's archaeological aspects. In addition to describing ancient Egyptian and Babylonian astronomy, Comell ex- plains the relevance of specific ancient observatories in the Far East and Africa; Brecher's and Feirtag's collection of eight essays leading archaeoastrono- mers focuses on such matters as the first scientific instruments and the medicine wheels of the Plains Indians. Providing a close look at particular cultures, Native American Astronomy...

When, early in his first term, President Reagan called the Soviet Union "the evil empire," right-thinking persons joined in an angry chorus of protest against such provocative rhetoric. At other times, Mr. Reagan has said that the United States and the Soviet Union "have different values" (italics added), an assertion that the same people greet at worst with silence and frequently with approval.
I believe Mr. Reagan thought he was saying the same thing in both instances. The...

They were "the most beautiful creations of man in America. With no extraneous ornament except a figurehead, a bit of carving and a few lines of gold leaf, their one purpose of speed over the great ocean routes was achieved by perfect balance of spars and sails to the curving lines of the smooth black hull. ...These were our Gothic cathedrals, our Parthenon."
So wrote historian Samuel Eliot Morison, recalling one of the early achievements of American technology: the clipper ship.
During...

pipeline, has won much of the heating-fuel market, but oil tanker traffic is still heavy, although gasoline was the dominant cargo on this day.
The port remains the nation's biggest in terms of cargo value ($49.9 billion in 1986); it also claims to lead in cargo weight (close to 55 million tons), although Los Angeles-Long Beach and Houston are close. But 40 years ago, half the nation's foreign trade passed through New York; now 10 percent does. During 1947, 10,806 ships called; this year, 6,000...

Men first went down to the sea not in ships, or even boats. They used what- ever expedients they could find to get themselves across deep water.
Some of these expedients are still in use, historian Lionel Casson notes in Ships and Seamanship in the An-cient World (Princeton, 1986). "A New Zealand aborigine today paddles over lakes astride a bundle of reeds, an Iraqi herdsman crosses streams on an in- flated goatskin, a Tamil native does his fishing drifting with a log under his arms while...

Since the "normalization" of Sino-American relations in 1979, most U.S. scholarship on China has focused on politics and economics. But historians have also learned much about how ordinary Chinese variously have coped with the rigors of everyday life. Here, journalist Alice Greenway describes the plight of rural women in Canton before World War II, and how one woman, Ah Bing, joined others, through a network of "sisterhoods," in vows of spinsterhood to escape forced marriage and poverty.