The past two decades have seen a boom in publications claiming to offer a transnational perspective on history, and history journals now regularly feature discussions on the pros and cons of this concept. What could a “transnational history of technology” mean, and what should historians of technology know when responding to the challenges of transnational history?

With a collection dating back to the 1920s, the London Transport Museum can rightly claim to be one of the world’s finest museums of urban transport.

In The Enlightenment Cyborg, Allison Muri has set out to uncover the “prehistory” of the cyborg. She finds it in an era in which old certainties had been overthrown and the boundaries between the natural and artificial, life and the lifeless, body and mind, animals and humans, were being renegotiated.

The adoption of the internet by scholarly communities has transformed them, argues Christine Borgman in Scholarship in the Digital Age. We know the internet is a useful addition to our scholarly lives. But how, exactly? What must we learn to do, or to accept? What place should the internet hold in professional activities or scholarly endeavors?

Given the economic, environmental, and cultural challenges engendered by mass automobility in China and India, we can only speculate on its future trajectory. But so far, at least, the spirits of Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan have prevailed over those of Mao Zedong and Mahatma Gandhi.

To succumb to the spectacle of the “green” car is not so qualitatively different from succumbing to the optimism of tail fins, streamlined design, or chrome. Yet if technics is not simply an external means, and the automobile is not simply a shell that could quickly and easily be filled with a greener technics, then it is not enough to have a debate, even in a democratic context, about how best to use it.

Almost every aspect of daily life in ancient Greek and Roman culture was connected in some way to engineering and technology. The new Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World offers an authoritative survey of current thinking and research on these topics, but not for the faint of heart.

Every image from a workshop provides a different vision of what is going on there; in a collection of such images lie hints and traces of industrial activity seldom described in written documents.

Edwin Layton’s pathbreaking and still widely read Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession is a rich and insightful account of the struggles between “progressive” and “conservative” engineers to remake the profession of engineering, mostly within engineering societies.