Implementing and sustaining a new approach to transportation in the United States requires much more than shifting appropriations and priorities—it requires the reconstruction of fundamental institutions. If mass transit continues to be financed and managed in competition with infrastructure for motor vehicles, there is little chance of achieving a more sane and stable balance. However, as an integral function of new institutions designed to support mobility and accessibility with the most appropriate technologies, mass transit could become a significant component of more efficient and equitable local and regional transportation systems than the ones we have today.

In 1991, at sixty-five, Art Arfons made the last attempt by anyone to set a land speed record at the Bonneville Salt Flats. It was a culmination, of sorts, to a remarkable career and a lifelong love affair with speed and power. Arfons’ machines were triumphs of mechanical engineering, and from 1963 to 1966 he dueled Craig Breedlove over the land speed record in a contest that has been dubbed the “Bonneville jet wars.”

In the mid-nineteenth century, Kavala developed into one of the most important tobacco-processing centers in the Balkans, attracting the commercial interest of the Habsburg Empire, England, France, Egypt, and even the United States.

Appearing almost a decade after the founding of SHOT, these two volumes, edited by the founder of the society and his colleague Carroll Pursell, deeply influenced the character of the history of technology as an academic field of study.

There are two schools of thought on the decline of mass transit and the rise of mass motorization in the United States. In this sweeping history, David Jones debunks popular conspiracy theory—the Who Framed Roger Rabbit? story—and revives an earlier explanation based on rising income and personal choice.

Concerns over increasing corporate domination of the organic sector and the industrial food system’s contribution to climate change, fossil-fuel consumption, and food-borne illness have moved the issue of local food into the national spotlight. Yet just as local food has begun to receive unprecedented public attention, it has come under attack from a number of supporters of sustainable agriculture. The question is, why? The answer, it turns out, has a good deal to do with Michael Pollan.

Roger Burlingame’s optimism may seem somewhat naive and romantic today, but he made pioneering contributions to both this journal and the history of technology—or, in his apt words, “the Hardware of Culture.”

Art in the Age of Steam, at the Walker Gallery in Liverpool, brought together artworks on steam rail travel from a chronology of historical movements. The results were of interest to historians of technology and art historians alike.

Lehigh University’s Fritz Engineering Laboratory marks its centennial in 2010. For slightly more than half of its hundred-year history, Fritz Lab has been the home of what at the time of its dedication in 1955 was the world’s largest universal testing machine.

At some point in the 1970s or early 1980s, the capitalist system changed dramatically. Whether that change made the current crisis inevitable remains to be seen, but it did make it more likely.