An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815 Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. ISBN9780807846131, OCLC916396138
Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2001. ISBN9780674004535, OCLC924957626[5]
The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius New York : Basic Books, 2006. ISBN9780465009558, OCLC62897551[6]
Round About the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012. ISBN9781416596196, OCLC779266177[7]
with Alison Bashford, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Re-reading the Principle of Population, Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2016. ISBN9780691164199, OCLC995299915