The 2025 Hughes Prize for an accessible book in the history of science is awarded to Renée Bergland for the book Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science..

The Jury of the BSHS Hughes Prize said: “It’s a tough time to be writing about the history of science, and science more broadly, so we were very encouraged to see so many submissions across such a wide and varied range of subjects to this year’s Hughes Prize. It goes to show the discipline is very much alive and kicking, and the more we know about where our ideas come from, the better equipped we are to deal with them and their legacies. Renée Bergland’s book Natural History is a brilliant, engaging and accessible consideration of two significant historical characters and their overlapping contexts in the history of science”.

The 2023 Hughes Prize for an accessible book in the history of science is awarded to Keith Wailoo for the book Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette.

The Jury of the BSHS Hughes Prize said: “Among an extraordinarily strong field of shortlisted books, Keith Wailoo’s revelatory Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette stood out for its originality and timeliness. In telling the story of menthol cigarettes’ targeted marketing in African American communities, Wailoo draws on meticulous research to uncover the enmeshment of social sciences, racial exploitation, and corporate interests, with catastrophic consequences for public health in the United States. Lucidly written, with incisive commentary on present-day issues of racism, commerce, and public policy, the book speaks powerfully to experiences and audiences beyond the academic.”

The 2021 Hughes Prize for an accessible book in the history of science is awarded to Jaipreet Virdi for the book Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History.

The Jury of the BSHS Hughes Prize said: “Jaipreet Virdi’s marvellous book Hearing Happiness won over the judges by its unique mixture of personal insight and perceptive historical analysis of a fascinating and understudied topic – the development of technology to cure deafness in the USA and the UK. Virdi – a deaf person, in the words of her book jacket – writes powerfully and clearly for the general public about the complex issues around deafness and the technologies that have been developed in response to it. This book can be an inspiration to young historians, who may realise that they, too, have a unique insight into a particular aspect of science or medicine.”

Professor Charlotte Sleigh, President of the BSHS added “Jaipreet Virdi humanises science by blending memoir and history in her hugely readable account of deafness. In describing the many curious and strange attempts to ‘cure’ deafness, she calls us to question the role of science in policing what is ‘normal’ about our bodies, identities and society.”

The 2019 Hughes Prize was awarded to James Delbourgo for his book Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum.

In the intensively researched and elegantly written book, Delbourgo explores the way modern science and collecting are intertwined with empire and slavery. Delbourgo uses these connections to paint a rich, complex and fascinating picture of the era. ‘Collecting the world’ is not an exaggeration, as Delbourgo shows how the British Empire absorbed and redefined, through its collections, the natural and cultural life of the world, and presented it in London for all to see.

Tim Boon, BSHS President and Head of Research at the Science Museum Group, said: “I am delighted that James Delbourgo’s ‘Collecting the World’ has been selected by our jury as the winner of the Hughes Prize. This book exemplifies the relevance of the historiographical approach of our discipline, history of science, to understanding the world, including its science and its museums, as we experience them today.

“The Jury for the BSHS Hughes Prize 2019 award this prize in recognition of James Delbourgo’s achievement in historical scholarship and its potential to contribute to important debates of today. The Jury also enthusiastically recommend this book to readers with interest in global history, museums and collecting, Restoration England, the history of the medical profession or the history of international trade.”

The BSHS awarded the 2017 Dingle Prize for the best popular book in history of science, technology and medicine to Andrea Wulf for her remarkable book The Invention of Nature: the Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science (London: John Murray, 2015). The judging was chaired by Jim Secord and the four other members of the panel were Matthew Eddy, Anne Hanley, Martin Rudwick and Sophie Waring.

“The award of the Dingle Prize particularly recognizes Andrea Wulf’s mastery of the vast range of history of science scholarship on Humboldt and her command of original sources in multiple languages. Timely and significant—particularly given current attacks on climate change science – this is scientific biography at its best. The judging committee appreciated the range and quality of this year’s submissions, and made its final selection from a diverse shortlist of seven books representing the requisite qualities of accessibility and scholarship.”

The other shortlisted titles were:

Fay Bound Alberti, This Mortal Coil: the Human Body in History and Culture, Oxford University Press

1. Bucciantini, Michelle Camerota and Franco Giudice, Galileo’s Telescope: A European Story, Harvard University Press

Gordon Corera, Intercept: The Secret History of Computers and Spies, Weidenfeld and Nicholson

Michael D. Gordin, Scientific Babel: How Science was Done Before and After Global English, University of Chicago Press

Tania Munz, The Dancing Bees: Karl von Frisch and the Discovery of Honeybee Language, University of Chicago Press

Ulinka Rublack, The Astronomer and the Witch: Johannes Kepler’s Fight for his Mother, Oxford University Press

The BSHS awarded the 2015 Dingle Prize for the best book in history of science, technology and medicine accessible to a popular audience is awarded to Martin Rudwick for his book Earth’s Deep History: how it was discovered and why it matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). The judging was chaired by Gowan Dawson and three other members of the jury – Helen Bynum, Patricia Fara and Vanessa Heggie.

From the young Earth theories of the seventeenth century to the startling discoveries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, inquisitive individuals have questioned the story of our planet’s development. Martin’s book captures vividly the significance and dynamism of these discoveries, providing an engaging yet rigorous account of how these ideas were debated and discussed. Martin gave the 2015 Dingle Prize Lecture on the subject of his winning entry at the BSHS Annual Meeting in Swansea on Friday 3 July 2015.

The other shortlisted books were:

Mark Jackson, The History of Medicine: A Beginner’s Guide

James A. Secord, Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age

David Knight, Voyaging in Strange Seas: The Great Revolution in Science

Kersten T. Hall, The Man in the Monkeynut Coat: William Astbury and the Forgotten Road to the Double-Helix

Richard Dunn and Rebekah Higgitt, Finding Longitude: How Ships, Clocks and Stars helped solve the Longitude Problem

The BSHS awarded the 2013 Dingle Prize to David Wright for Downs: The History of a Disability. Published by Oxford University Press this excellent book is a genuine attempt to engage a wide audience of non-specialists in a way that reflects some of the major virtues of current historiography of medicine and science. The judges commented that Wright has produced “a terrific book” and “a little gem”, which “has valuable contributions to make to current debates” in the history of science and medicine. In dealing with the history of Down’s syndrome – a subject for which very few other wide-ranging historical studies exist, but for which there is a substantial secondary literature from other perspectives – Wright has also achieved the Prize’s requirement to “re-examine a well-known historical incident or achievement, or bring new perspective to previously neglected figures or fields in the past.” Wright’s book faced stiff competition from over sixty other nominations, and this represented the largest field of entries ever for this competition.

The judges also strongly commend both D. Graham Burnett’s The Sounding of the Whale (University of Chicago Press) and Jon Agar’s Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (Polity). Both books are truly extraordinary in their depth (Burnett) and breadth (Agar), and make significant contributions to the history of science and more broadly to our understanding of twentieth-century history. They are also remarkable in being books that, while written primarily with a scholarly audience in mind, are nevertheless accessible and of interest to a wider audience, and an excellent advertisement for the discipline.

Judging Panel: Dr Simon Chaplin (Chair), Dr Tim Boon, Dr Sabine Clarke, Dr Sophie Forgan, Dr Melanie Keene, Dr James Stark (BSHS Outreach and Education Committee Chair).

In their timescales, styles and physical formats, the 40 books nominated for the 2011 Dingle Prize represented well the diversity of popular history of science writing published in 2009 and 2010.

The longlist of 16 books ranged from introductory surveys to biographies of people and objects, local history and media tie-ins. They introduced famous and unsung heroes, and disciplines from mathematics to genetics. They travelled from the ancient middle-east to contemporary Silicon Valley; and they were authored by historians of science, journalists and science writers. This diversity was an encouraging sign of publishers’ appetite for the field, particularly for twentieth century topics — yet it also made it difficult to compare some very different texts (e.g. a synoptic 400-year history versus one detailed case-study versus an introductory think-piece for mathematicians). Nevertheless the judges unanimously agreed on a shortlist of 4 books:

• Richard Dunn: The Telescope. A Short History (National Maritime Museum, 2009).
• Patricia Fara: Science. A Four Thousand Year History (OUP, 2009).
• James Hannam: God’s Philosophers. How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science (Icon, 2009).
• Sean Johnston: History of Science. A Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld, 2009).

All 4 books impressed the judges as being engagingly written, appealingly presented and historically insightful. Any would have been a worthy winner. But the judges agreed that in its admirably broad scope, its historical and historiographical depth and its engaging re-presentation of the best of recent scholarship, the 2011 Dingle Prize should be awarded to Patricia Fara for “Science: A Four Thousand Year History.”

In her acceptance speech, given in absentia at the 2011 annual BSHS conference held in Exeter, Patricia said:

I feel so overwhelmed by this honour that I hardly know how to begin expressing my appreciation. I should start by apologizing for not being at Exeter: I had no idea until Tuesday that I would win this prize and by then, it was too late to alter my existing commitments. More importantly, I’d like to extend my deepest gratitude to everybody who was involved in this decision. I am particularly proud to receive this accolade from a Society of scholars who, above all others, are so well-placed to appreciate my book’s shortcomings. This award means far far more to me than the pleasure I’ve gained by seeing my book reviewed in a newspaper, sitting on the shelves of a shop or translated into a foreign language.

As an eighteenth-century historian, I realise that for 3900 years-worth of knowledge, I relied heavily on the expertise of other people. As well as turning to books and papers, I also asked for help from friends and colleagues, who were extraordinarily generous in reading drafts and offering me advice. So although it was me who wrote the words and made the mistakes, I do see this book as a collective enterprise.

Herbert Dingle left school when he was only 14, but eleven years later, won a scholarship to Imperial College. I’ve partially followed in his footsteps by going to Imperial College as an MSc student 18 years after graduating. More significantly, Dingle’s subsequent career as an astronomer is a tribute to the benefits of government investment in widening participation. Since this book was published, I have spent much of my time promoting access to higher education and trying to ensure that this country does not regress to a system based on privilege rather than ability. Like Dingle, I’ve been lucky enough to benefit from a late start in academia, and I hope that this book will fulfil Dingle’s expectation of making other people as enthusiastic about the history of science as I am.

Patricia Fara
14 July 2011

• 2009: Thomas Dixon for Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. In commending Dixon’s book the judges wrote: “Using a wide-range of examples Dixon beautifully demonstrates how the history of science can illuminate a complex issue of contemporary importance – the relationship between science and religion. The book is historically sophisticated, intellectually engaging, and thought provoking. It is clearly and concisely written, well argued, and accessible to the non-expert; it should appeal to a wide readership not only beyond the history of science community but also outside academia.”
• 2007: Philip Ball for Elegant Solutions: Ten Beautiful Experiments in Chemistry. London: Royal Society of Chemistry, 2005
• 2005: Stephen Pumfrey for Latitude and the Magnetic Earth: the True Story of Queen Elizabeth’s Most Distinguished Man of Science. Icon Books, 2003
• 2003: Ken Alder for The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error that Transformed the World. London: Little, Brown, 2002
• 2001: Deborah Cadbury for The Dinosaur Hunters. London: Fourth Estate, 2000
• 1999: Steven Shapin for The Scientific Revolution. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996
• 1997: Adrian Desmond and James Moore for Darwin. London: Penguin, 1992