Product Description: Museums are at the heart of the nation's cultural life, bastions of Britishness in almost every major city and town. Together they detail myriad aspects of our heritage: from lawnmowers to cuckoo clocks, pencils to chairs, there seems to be no end to the subject matter deemed worthy of collection and public display...read more

Product Description: The middle years of Queen Victoria's reign saw huge changes in society: the rise of the middle classes, the introduction of compulsory education and the growth of the labor movement. The Great Exhibition brought a taste of the exotic to the masses, and the London Underground was opened...read more

Argues that contrary to popular belief, fostered in classrooms the world over, Christopher Columbus did not discover that the world was round. Based on a range of original sources, this book raises issues central to the history and philosophy of science, its relationship with religion and the making of human knowledge about the natural world.