The printing press is considered to be one of, if not the greatest invention in history. The printing press allowed for an explosion in information and it ushered in the renaissance, the enlightenment, and the scientific and industrial revolutions.
As such, Johannes Gutenberg is often considered one of the most important people in history.
But did Gutenberg actually invent the printing press? Should he be given credit for this important invention?
Learn more about Gutenberg and the invention of the printing press on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Aro Velmet's Pasteur's Empire: Bacteriology in France, Its Colonies, and the World (Oxford UP, 2020) is a complex history of the Pasteur Institutes, a network of scientific laboratories established in France and throughout the French empire, beginning in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The book examines the crucial roles Pastorians and Pasteurization played in the imperial project in and between different locations, particularly in Southeast Asia and Africa. Participating in the "civilizing mission," helping to establish and maintain industrial monopolies, and the control of colonial bodies through public health regulation and disease management, the institutes had a tremendous political impact.
Attentive to the experiences and perspectives of the Vietnamese and African peoples in the sites the book focuses on, Pasteur's Empire examines a range of scientific responses and measures, from the study and containment of infectious and epidemic disease to the microbiological aspects of industry. The book's chapters move from "Indochina" to North and West Africa, tracing the way that Pastorians and Pasteurization worked with(in) and sometimes pushed against colonial structures and assumptions. French modernity and the "civilizing mission" had profound and practical biological dimensions. A history that pursues ideas about modernity and the meanings of scientific and other forms of mobility, Pasteur's Empire moves from the local to the global while bringing together science, medicine, and politics. Enjoy the episode!
Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca).
We'll tell you about wildfires that have forced thousands of Americans to evacuate and the latest impact of Covid-19 on travelers taking planes, trains, and cruises.
Also, the American jobs market is showing some real momentum as we close out 2021.
Plus, a new warning for Tesla drivers, the big sporting events happening this weekend, and how people are planning to celebrate New Year's Eve all around the country.
Top 5 of 2021 Day 5: During this Christmas season, we're sharing some of our favorite interviews of the year to allow our team to take time off for the holidays.
Kevin Roberts is the new president of The Heritage Foundation.
Roberts says he is eager to advance the conservative movement and address some of the most pressing issues facing our nation today.
“The top three [critical issues that we are facing right now] are education, education, and education,” Roberts says, adding that conservatives will miss an “opportunity of a lifetime” if we cannot come together and address what is “broken about the education system.”
The immigration crisis at America’s southern border and the “administrative state, the power of the executive branch to do the legislating rather than the legislative branch [doing it]” are also critical issues Roberts says he looks forward to working to fix.
Roberts is coming to the Washington, D.C.-based think tank after serving as president and CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation in Austin, Texas. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
He joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss his vision for the future of The Heritage Foundation and the conservative movement.
Last week, the U.S. government released a new report that attempts to categorize 144 verified sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena, or U.A.P. They could only definitively explain one of them.
The new report signals a shift in the way we think about U.A.P. As technology has advanced and evidence of these encounters have increased, the question has become more urgent: what exactly is happening in our skies?
Guest: Shane Harris, intelligence and national security reporter for the Washington Post
Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted on 5/6 counts. Andrew takes us through it, as well as how the BBC made an absolutely colossal blunder in inviting Alan Dershowitz on to comment. Then, we go through an update on the Trump lawsuit over documents. It's headed to the Supreme Court!
Both our interviews today deal with the pressures we put on ourselves. First, Olympic runner Alexi Pappas on her memoir, Bravey. On the outside, Pappas was living what looked like a great life; she was breaking Greek Olympic records and her movie got a distribution deal. But, she told NPR's Ari Shapiro, she was still deeply sad. Next, an interview from early in the pandemic when women were disproportionately feeling the burden of our new reality. Glennon Doyle, author of Untamed, told former NPR host Lulu Garcia-Navarro that "every woman on earth needs to lower her expectations for herself."
In 2011, influential Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei was secretly detained by Chinese authorities.
While in detention, he thought often about his father – who had also been punished by the Chinese government – and how incomplete his understanding of his father was.
Ai spoke to Ailsa Chang about his new book, which explores his time in detention, his relationship with his father, and his attempt to avoid a similar disconnect with his own son.
In our first programme of the year, we gathered a group of scientific experts directly involved in analysing the structure and impact of the SARS- Cov-2 coronavirus. There were concerns over the emergence of two new variants, Alpha and Beta, especially whether these variants might spread more quickly, or outmanoeuvre the suite of new vaccines that were about to be rolled out.
Now the same questions are being asked about the Omicron variant’s ability to spread and overcome our defences.
We’ve invited the same scientists back to give us their assessment of our journey with Covid-19 over the past year, and discuss their findings on Omicron.
The programme features:
Ravi Gupta, Professor of Clinical Microbiology at the University of Cambridge
Tulio de Oliveira, Professor of Bioinformatics, Stellenbosch University, South Africa
Dr Allie Greaney from the Medical Scientist Training Program at the University of Washington School of Medicine
Professor Jeremy Luban from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Presenter: Roland Pease
Producer: Julian Siddle
Image: Local residents queue to receive a dose of the Covid-19 vaccine in Parkhurst, Johannesburg (Credit: Luca Sola/AFP via Getty Images)
