By Anna Storm and Nina Wormbs
In 2006, Tom Tits Experiment, a science center located south of Stockholm in Södertälje, Sweden, received the European Museum Forum’s Micheletti Award, a prize established in 1996 that goes to the year’s most promising technical or industrial museum. How does a hands-on science center capture a prize intended for technology museums?
By Yakup Bektas
Arnold Reisman’s Turkey’s Modernization brings to light the little-known story of how Turkey welcomed (and thus saved) several hundred prominent, predominantly Jewish, intellectuals, scientists, doctors, legal scholars, architects, librarians, and musicians fleeing the Nazis. Absent that welcome, the knowledge and expertise of these Jewish scientists and artists might have been lost forever—and Turkey’s own modernization and educational and social reforms set back as well.
By John Cloud
It is fifty years since the publication of A. Hunter Dupree’s Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities. No one would attempt such a project today, but after half a century the book still speaks to the present.
By Jeffrey Stine
Donald Worster’s 1979 Dust Bowl was a pioneering exploration of a profound ecological and economic crisis. History, for Worster, involves place: that context in which stories unfold, whose contours are shaped both by nature and by technology.
By Steven Usselman
Alfred Chandler’s magisterial history of the rise of big business in the United States remains a vibrant force in contemporary intellectual life. In helping us identify broadly felt, less resistible tendencies inherent in certain technologies, he helps us comprehend more clearly what remains in play.
By Megan Mullen
“Although McLuhan’s name is no longer a buzzword in the popular vernacular—or even in the communication classroom—we are living in an era when [his] predictions . . . are in evidence all around us. His variety of technological determinism is instructive.”
By George O’Har
Walter Prescott Webb’s The Great Plains cuts across geology, physiography, climatology, botany, zoology, anthropology, history, and literature to venture to the very boundaries of what historians are comfortable in calling history.
