Technology and Culture

Steven Usselman

Historians of technology are not, strictly speaking, fiction writers. Yet we are storytellers. Like novelists, historians must immerse themselves in the manners and customs of a time and place, in hopes they might glimpse something of the larger mystery of human affairs. We, too, seek to connect the local to the universal, to speak to the largest of concerns through the most accurate rendering of reality. It begs a question the great American novelist Flannery O’Connor might have asked: what is the true country of the historian of technology?

Megan Mullen

Harold Innis introduced his major contributions to communication scholarship gradually, perhaps not even realizing until near the end of his life that he even had ideas to contribute to this nascent field. Yet the conditions he identified as key to the success and longevity of empires define twenty-first-century life.

Merritt Roe Smith

Daniel Walker Howe argues that the three decades between the end of the War of 1812 and the end of the Mexican War witnessed “the transformation of America.” Of what did this transformation consist? What drove it? What were its larger implications? These questions lie at the very center of historical writing about the early and middle decades of nineteenth- century America.

Pamela O. Long

The ship on the cover is a galley of the type used by Venetians during the first half of the fifteenth century for convoys to London and Flanders. It is an image from an extraordinary book by a mariner who made more than forty voyages in Venetian convoys from 1401 until his death in 1445, rising from oarsman to the highest position that a nonnoble could attain.

Bernard S. Finn

Among the controversies surrounding Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone patent, the most intriguing has concerned his relationship with Elisha Gray. Was it simply a coincidence that both men filed applications with the United States Patent Office—Bell for a patent, Gray for a caveat—covering electrical transmission of voice sounds, on the same day?