Technology and Culture

By Michael Bess
Some of the most important watersheds in human history have been associated with new applications of technology in everyday life: the shift from stone to metal tools, the transition from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture, the substitution of steam power for human and animal energy. Today we are in the early stages of a similarly epochal change. But this time around, the new techniques and technologies are transforming not our tools, our methods of food production, our means of manufacturing. We ourselves are being refashioned. We are applying our ingenuity to the challenge of redesigning our own physical and mental capabilities. And we are unprepared for the dramatic and destabilizing changes we are about to experience.

By Sharon Irish
Carl Condit’s The Chicago School of Architecture: A History of Commercial and Public Building in the Chicago Area, 1875–1925 deeply influenced the history of building technology and the history of urban form—so deeply that his midcentury interpretations have been frustratingly long-lived. Condit’s powerful prose and compelling polemics in The Chicago School have carried effectively across the decades, shaping the history of tall buildings into a myth that has its own shifting history.

By Bruce Seely
Hype pervades research into nanotechnology. In Nano-Hype, David Berube examines the various reasons that supporters of the NNI and nanotechnology have used to justify the massive commitment of funds: enormous economic payoffs in the form of new technologies; fundamental transformations in the nature of science and technology itself; the insuring of national competitiveness and national security. But he also surveys the field at this stage of its history, and the book is a comprehensive primer on the process of developing nanotechnology.

Stephen Richards
Since it returned from the Falkland Islands in 1970, the SS Great Britain has been a powerful symbol for the city of Bristol and its maritime history. The ship was designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and was launched at Bristol in 1843; she was both the world’s largest ship and the first screw-propelled ocean-going [...]

Thomas J. Misa
For many years historians of technology have been arguing that technology needs to be understood in a contextual and historical framework, situated within ongoing social and political processes; above all, that it is not to be understood as an exogenous force with outside impacts. This message is beginning to seep into mainstream historical [...]

By Bruce Epperson
Robert Moses is the most reviled man in the history of American urban planning. But recently a trio of exhibits in New York City, mounted this past spring in coordination with a symposium at Columbia University and the publication of an extensive catalog of Moses’s public works projects, summed up the extent to which historians’ perspectives on this brilliant and arrogant man have evolved.

By Bruce Seely
It is the rare scholar of American transportation history who has not used George Rogers Taylor’s The Transportation Revolution as the launchpad for his or her own research, and it remains a classic work of technological history.

By Robert C. Post
In 1892, when this photo of Frederick Wood and John Fowler of the Temple Street Cable Railway in Los Angeles demonstrating their cable-rail system was taken, electric streetcars were about to cast these two capable men into historical obscurity. One wonders whether the men at General Motors who have filled their basket with so many eggs bearing names like Suburban, Escalade, and Hummer have a similar sense of apprehension.

By Lissa Roberts
“E-books” are increasingly common, and scholars are being encouraged to publish electronically; Sarah Lowengard’s The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe is a case in point. It is worth pondering how traditional ideas of what makes a scholarly book will have to change in the face of that trend.

By Mary Henninger-Voss
Neil Kamil’s Fortress of the Soul: Violence, Metaphysics, and Material Life in the Huguenots’ New World, 1517–1751, is a monumental work, a brilliant tapestry of objects, texts, artisanal networks, apocalyptic battles, and political maneuvers. Kamil elaborates the political context and material forms of an “artisanal soulishness” that stretches over two centuries and serves as the refuge, means of mobility, and stable center of unity for Huguenot Protestant culture in its diaspora throughout the Atlantic world.