“A Large Canvas”: Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll W. Pursell Jr., eds., Technology in Western Civilization
Scholars have studied and written about the history of technology for many decades, indeed centuries. But the emergence of the history of technology as an academic discipline can be attributed to the vision of a young professor at Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, Melvin Kranzberg. In the late 1940s, Case’s president, T. Keith Glennan, recognized the need for a better-designed liberal-arts component to the curriculum of its engineering students. Mel Kranzberg was only one of several historians and social scientists hired by Glennan in 1952 to implement this new curriculum, but Kranzberg’s presence on the Case faculty would have much wider repercussions.1 In 1958 and 1959, in the aftermath of Sputnik, he became the principal founder of the Society for the History of Technology as well as the first editor of its quarterly journal Technology and Culture.2
Actually, the stool has three legs: First Kranzberg hired at Case, then his founding of SHOT and T&C, and third the publication in 1967 of a two-volume text, Technology in Western Civilization, volume 1 titled The Emergence of Modern Industrial Society, Earliest Times to 1900, and volume 2 titled Technology in the Twentieth Century.3 Even though these volumes appeared almost a decade after the founding of SHOT and the publication of the first issue of T&C, their organization, the range and background of the authors, their contributions, and, above all, the editorial direction provided by Kranzberg and his colleague Carroll Pursell—who joined the Case faculty in 1963—set the character of a society and journal that are now entering their second half-century. For me, returning to those volumes, after years during which they sat, unread and unopened, on my bookshelf, has been a revelation—a revelation of how much Kranzberg and Pursell laid a foundation upon which historians of technology have subsequently built.
Members of SHOT are blessed many times over. Mel Kranzberg was a prolific correspondent and saved copies of nearly all his letters throughout his long career. The result is a detailed picture of the emergence and evolution of our discipline, seen through the eyes of its principal founder. Kranzberg’s papers have been preserved and catalogued by the Archives Center of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, which made them available to me in the course of writing this essay. From these records we can trace the genesis of the two-volume Kranzberg and Pursell text. The initiative came from the United States Armed Forces Institute (USAFI), a branch of the Defense Department charged with furthering the education of uniformed personnel, many of whom had only a limited college or secondary school education. The USAFI had been founded during World War II for the benefit of Army enlisted men [sic], primarily by means of correspondence courses, no matter where in the world they might be stationed.4
By the 1960s the USAFI’s students included officers as well as enlisted personnel, and, for those stationed in the United States, its correspondence courses were being supplemented by classes offered at local universities. Its charter had also been extended to the other armed services (but did not include the service academies or the National War College, which were administered separately). During World War II the instruction had primarily been at the high school or junior college level, but now college-level courses dominated the curriculum. The headquarters of the USAFI was in Madison, Wisconsin, and it was headed by Edward L. Katzenbach, a former Marine officer.5 The origin of the book project is not completely clear, but obviously there was a growing perception at Defense that the thousands of uniformed personnel needed grounding in the technological basis of the civilization they were being asked to defend.6 At an address to a conference 6 of armed forces educators in Baltimore on 11 December 1962, Norman S. Paul, assistant secretary of defense, asked: “Could we not devote a greater portion of our time and effort to courses devoted to the history of technology so that our young men and women in the Services will at least appreciate science’s impact on the changes wrought in our times? Would it not be possible to develop courses on the impact of technology on politics and on international relations?”7 The contemporary reader will immediately note the term “impact” and its implication of technological determinism, but we shall see that Kranzberg and Pursell, while not avoiding terms such as “impact,” managed to shape a work that was anything but a paean to determinism.
In January 1963 a colleague sent Katzenbach copies of programs from recent annual meetings of SHOT and also a program for the American Association for the Advancement of Science that had included a session on the history of atomic energy. At about the same time, Ripley Sims, the head of the USAFI’s Instruction Division, asked Kranzberg, as secretary of SHOT, for a list of colleges and universities that offered courses in the history of technology. Kranzberg responded in his usual enthusiastic fashion with a detailed letter, and out of this exchange of correspondence there grew an agreement that historians and social scientists would develop a two-semester, freshman-level course.8 With Katzenbach’s support, the project ultimately transformed itself from a freshman syllabus into the two large volumes published in 1967. In a little more than four years, Kranzberg and Pursell solicited contributions from seventy authors, discussed with them the overall approach to their topics, cajoled and pleaded with laggards, and edited the submissions (sometimes drastically). A number of chapters were written by the two editors themselves. They also found a new publisher, rejecting the University of Wisconsin Press in favor of Oxford University Press, which they knew could provide a much wider market. Kranzberg and Pursell had secretarial help, although many of their letters were obviously written on manual typewriters in hunt-and-peck fashion. All this was taking place while both of them held full-time teaching positions, with Pursell moving from Case to the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the middle of the project.
Not long after the initial exchange of letters, in the spring of 1963, a group of historians gathered for a workshop at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where the USAFI was located and where, coincidentally, Thomas Parke Hughes was in residence as a visiting professor.9 The catalyst for this meeting was Paul J. Grogan, chair of the department of engineering at the University of Wisconsin Extension Division, and Grogan would be listed, along with Donald F. Kaiser—who was the publications specialist at Wisconsin’s University Extension—as executive editors for the completed volumes. Led by Hughes, the group surveyed the state of the field and noted that the few texts then in print, particularly the five-volume A History of Technology, edited by Charles Singer and three colleagues, and its abridgement, A Short History of Technology, were ill-suited for the course they were proposing.10 Although based on sound scholarship, neither those works nor any others dealt to any extent with technology developed in the twentieth century. Nor did they look at technology in its cultural context, as Kranzberg, Hughes, and their colleagues emphasized. Although this approach is familiar to today’s practitioners, in the early 1960s the history of technology was either about the invention and design of specific machines, or about the biographies of engineers and inventors. Economists and economic historians had also been writing about the history of technology, but for them it was typically a one-way street, the story of the machine’s impact on society, never the other way around. And whereas the engineers writing history focused on the internal workings of the machines, economists and economic historians often treated technology as a black box, not caring how or why it worked. The participants in the Madison workshop were eager to change that situation, and they found a willing ally at the Armed Forces Institute.11
Thus from the beginning of this project we can see what later would be called Kranzberg’s Laws put into play: whether technology was inherently good or bad, the central place for the history of technology in a liberal education, the complex interplay between invention and the social milieu in which it takes place.12 Also evident at this workshop, and reflected in the two-volume history that resulted, was a tension one still finds among SHOT members who judge submissions to Technology and Culture or papers proposed for SHOT annual meetings. This was an assumption that while technology is synonymous with the emergence of human civilization, the recent history of technology is the most important of all, with everything that happened before 1900 as “prologue” to the advances of the twentieth century (the current version of this notion moves the date forward from 1900 to 1945). The Armed Forces Institute certainly held to this view; after all, its students were being trained to operate and maintain nuclear reactors, radar equipment, jet aircraft, and guided missiles: twentieth-century inventions with little connection to military technology from an earlier age. Partly at Katzenbach’s urging, 1900 was chosen as the date separating the two volumes. Some historians who participated in the workshop resisted, Eugene Ferguson especially, but Kranzberg was not opposed to this divide, and that was how the two volumes ultimately were set apart from one another.
Kranzberg and Pursell recognized that the second volume would have to be framed differently, more as a series of case studies than as surveys of individual topics. As a result, the two volumes are quite different, and yet each one still retains much of value for a present-day reader. The first volume, based on solid scholarship, can be profitably and enjoyably read today as an introduction to the history of technology. While of course dated, its chapters hold up well. I would not hesitate to recommend it to newcomers to the field of the history of technology, or to newly-hired professors looking for an overall framework for a freshman-level course. Even though it is no longer suitable as an assigned text, subsequent attempts to replicate its sweep and level of detail—its “large canvas”—have come up short, in my view, an indication of how difficult such an overview really is. (The original Oxford publication is long out of print. Used copies are available from several on-line book dealers, and the volumes may be accessed electronically from the American Council of Learned Societies.)13
When reading this volume today, and the second volume as well, one has to be mindful of the times in which it was written. Both volumes make exclusive and frequent use of the pronoun “man” when referring to human beings. That may be excused, although it is annoying. The chapters themselves, all written by men, make no acknowledgment of the contributions of women to the history of technology. There is a bias toward Western Europe, with little treatment of technology from Asia or the Middle East. In an otherwise-masterful essay on “Technology in the Middle Ages,” Lynn White jr. writes that “. . . the Muslims, while they borrowed useful skills from other cultures . . . did not make notable contributions, so far as we now know, to mankind’s technical repertory” (p. 67). Neither White nor any other contributor discusses the Islamic world’s role in the transmission of mathematical, medical, and astronomical knowledge to the West. Geographic and gender biases, and the way the volume moves too quickly through antiquity until it arrives at medieval Europe—these are the first volume’s principal weaknesses. Nevertheless, I stand by my recommendation. The reason is the caliber of the contributors, and here again we see a manifestation of Kranzberg’s vision and energy, along with a touch of good luck.
At the start of the project a series of letters were sent to authors and scholars at the very top: to Lewis Mumford, C. P. Snow, Alfred Chandler, Robert Merton, and Jacob Bronowski, among others. Although these letters went out under Paul Grogan’s signature, there could have been no realistic expectation of response without the personal efforts of Mel Kranzberg, almost always a phone call. As has been recounted elsewhere, while at Case Kranzberg did more than build up a program in the history of technology; he cultivated relationships with leading figures in a variety of fields that intersected with his vision.14 When the time came to solicit authors, these contacts proved of immense value. Pursell writes that “no one else could have picked up the phone and recruited most of the leading experts in the field to contribute to a textbook.”15 Even though many of those whom he called and who received letters declined to contribute, nearly everyone responded with a gracious note and only a few never answered at all. Most cited overburdened workloads and other writing commitments they all seemed to be late in fulfilling.16 Among those who turned down a request to contribute was Mumford, who replied in a handwritten note that while he could have written an essay “in 1934,” he could not do so in 1964 because “many tendencies that seemed hopeful to me then have turned out otherwise.”17 But Mumford’s refusal, and that of other senior figures, often turned out to be a blessing in disguise, for Kranzberg was able to solicit a new generation of writers whose views on the contextual analysis of the history of technology meshed with his own, and whose careers were either just beginning or at midpoint, not near an end.18 Had Mumford agreed to contribute and then submitted a pessimistic essay similar to his other writings from the 1960s, Kranzberg might have been forced to reject it. It also seems likely that other eminent writers would have submitted little more than a reworking of ideas that had already appeared in print in many other venues by the mid-1960s.19
Those who did accept, with rare exceptions, pursued new approaches that have well served SHOT to the present day. And the $400 fee they received—equivalent to about $2,500 in today’s dollars—was more welcome to this cohort of scholars than it would have been to the most senior people. Many of them—Lynn White jr., Cyril Stanley Smith, Eugene Ferguson, Carl Condit, Robert Multhauf, Bernard Finn, John Rae, Bern Dibner, and of course Carroll Pursell—were already or soon would be major contributors to Technology and Culture, would serve as officers of SHOT, or would play critical roles in shaping the discipline. (Perhaps most notably missing from the list of authors was Thomas Hughes, who, after helping initiate the project, turned down a request to contribute.)20
The biases of the first volume, mentioned above, were offset by the breadth of the topics covered. Thus there is not just a chapter or two on the Industrial Revolution, but a whole section on “The Background of the Industrial Revolution, 1600–1750,” which keeps the term while setting the “revolution” in economic, political, and social contexts. Other chapters deal with the Industrial Revolution’s social impact (chapter 18 by Eric Lampard), its spread (chapter 30 by Herbert Heaton), and its economic consequences (chapter 31 by Nathan Rosenberg). Chapter 19, “The Invention of Invention,” by John Rae, covers ground that is familiar to historians today, but at the time it was a definite break from typical writings about the role of the inventor that could be found at mid-century. Rae’s chapter further hints at the “systems approach” to the history of technology, an approach that shows the influence of Thomas Hughes even if he was not present in the pages of the book. The systems approach is developed further and indeed becomes a central theme of the second volume.
That volume, Technology in the Twentieth Century, is a different matter altogether from the first. Obviously it is dated. At the time of publication one-third of the twentieth century still lay ahead. There is nothing about the Space Shuttle, the Asian challenge to American manufacturing, or Microsoft, to name a few twentieth-century topics we currently study intensively. Yet precisely for that reason, the second volume is still of interest. Today when one thinks of the mid-1960s one thinks of the cold war and the threat of a devastating exchange of nuclear weapons with the Soviet Union. The authors are all aware of that threat, but what comes across most strongly is a belief that technology, properly managed, can be a source of good. They were writing a short two decades after the cities of Germany and Japan had been reduced to rubble by Allied bombs. By the mid-1960s those countries had not only recovered and rebuilt their cities, but they were also establishing a prosperous economy based on advanced technology. That rapid reconstruction was due to the hard work and sacrifice of their citizens; it was also due to assistance from the United States through entities like the Marshal l Plan and the International Monetary Fund, through which a group of mainly American experts directed the recovery.
The first volume ended with accounts by those who believed that the rapid advances of nineteenth-century technology would usher in an era of world peace and prosperity. Yet everyone knew that such optimism faded quickly after August 1914. The contributors to the second volume could not see into the future, but they shared in a renewed sense of optimism, and in doing so they had no sense of being naive. Furthermore, they saw themselves as agents of change, who would help bring about such a world through the application of their expertise. Although much has been written about the Technocracy movement that flourished in the 1930s, the tone of the second volume reveals a more recent version of a technocratic vision from the 1960s, one that deserves more study.21 This time, economies would be directed not by a “Soviet of Technicians,” as Thorsten Veblen called them, but by an elite (if not a “soviet”) of social scientists and historians of technology. In this context, the alliance between Kranzberg and the U.S. military establishment, which might have caused concern among a later generation of historians of technology, seems natural and appropriate.22
Thus the second volume begins with an optimistic essay by Kranzberg and Pursell on “The Promise of Technology in the Twentieth Century,” followed by an address to mass production and its twin, mass consumption. In chapter 9, Robert Theobald writes of “The Crisis of Abundance,” in which he discusses with some prescience the beneficial effects of automation and the computer—this at a time when computers were programmed with punched cards. Theobald’s argument for a guaranteed income for ever y American, which he calls “Basic Economic Security” (p. 113), is somewhat similar to Great Society welfare plans developed in the 1960s and to income credits now embedded in our tax code and embraced by liberals and conservatives alike. What is interesting is not so much the details of his plan; rather, it is that Theobald is but one of many contributors to the second volume who was not a historian or engineer (his biography on page 745 lists him as a “British socioeconomist who is now an economic consultant in New York City”). Whereas most of the contributors to the first volume were professors of history or engineering, many of those contributing to the second were sociologists, professors at schools of business administration, government economists, and political scientists. This is a cohort that SHOT has unfortunately lost over the past fifty years.23
Volume II of Technology in Western Civilization suggests that the decade in which it was written and published represented a high-water mark for a particular kind of social science, one with which the history of technology was aligned. It was a time when political scientists such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, and sociologists such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, were moving into high levels of political power in both parties.24 One of the volume’s final essays is on “The ‘ Two Cultures,’” by Kenneth E. Boulding, professor of economics at the University of Michigan. C. P. Snow turned down an offer to write something on this subject, but here again fortune smiled on Kranzberg and Pursell, as Boulding’s star was ascending and would even eclipse Snow’s in my view. The essay that Boulding contributed is one of the finest in the book, even if it does not directly address the history of technology in a narrow sense. After summarizing the Two Cultures debate, he moves quickly into the meat of his essay, a section entitled “The Role of the Social Sciences.” He wastes no time in stating that the “. . . increase and spread of knowledge in the social sciences, of a testable and cumulative kind, can meaningfully affect the decision-making processes of governments, businesses and large organizations, and of individuals and households” (p. 692). For Boulding, and by implication for Mel Kranzberg too, here is the way to harness technology without the horrors of the two technology-intensive world wars that characterized the first half of the twentieth century. Boulding brings up the threat of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union, but he does not despair of a way out.
Boulding’s view has fallen from favor, as has the place for social scientists in positions of influence. But that does not diminish the appeal and interest of his and similar essays in the second volume of Kranzberg and Pursell. This volume reveals something about the history of SHOT that to date has been little discussed: the society’s founders hoped that the history of technology would not just be the most “relevant” history of all, as Kranzberg’s Fifth Law states, but that it would also provide an entrée for historians of technology into policy and decision making at high levels of government. Pertinent to this belief, although not mentioned in these volumes, was Kranzberg’s central role in establishing another organization, ICOHTEC, which he hoped would be as influential in diplomatic circles as SHOT would be in economic and regulatory circles.25
Correspondence in the Kranzberg Papers thins out once the volumes appear in print, but already we can see why that vision was not fulfilled. The reviews were good, and sales were decent although not what Oxford had hoped for.26 The Armed Forces Institute did not follow through on an implied commitment to purchase copies for its coursework, a reversal attributed to the growing unrest over the war in Vietnam.27 When Kranzberg was initially lining up contributors, one or two turned him down because of its military sponsorship, but, had he contacted potential authors in 1967, not 1963, there would have been a lot more refusals.28 By 1967 technology’s dark side was more evident, in spite of efforts to control its effects by those, including Kranzberg, who had seen its horrors first-hand during World War II. In the two decades that followed publication of Kranzberg and Pursell, anti-technology sentiment would grow more intense As it did, SHOT managed to adapt, but rarely again did members of the society set forth the sort of views seen in this 1967 volume.
One final note. In the initial stages of the project, Kranzberg and Pursell had offices adjacent to each other at Case, so there is little in the way of a written record between them; they must have spoken to one another all the time. After Pursell moved to Santa Barbara in the summer of 1965, that changed. Kranzberg was not happy about his coeditor being so far away, but one positive result was that we now have a written record of the details of the book’s editing process. The project was in its final stages by then, but the work of editing the submissions was still substantial. Some of the manuscripts came in clean and needed only minimal attention. Others were less suitable and required a lot of rewriting, work that fell mostly on the shoulders of the junior editor. In correspondence with the contributors, Kranzberg was always gracious, even charming. In correspondence with Pursell he was often candid about work that did not measure up to his expectations.
Some of that correspondence deals with what was to have been the final chapter of the first volume, an overview of technology and culture at the end of the nineteenth century written by Charles L. Sanford, professor of language and literature at Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute. Sanford began by describing the marvels of engineering that were transforming the western world at that time, but he quickly moved to a discussion of those who saw the dark side of this transformation, including Henry Adams, William Morris, and above all Friedrich Nietzsche. Kranzberg was not pleased with what Sanford had written, even if he agreed with his analysis of Nietzsche, and he told Donald Kaiser that he could not possibly allow the first volume to end on such a negative assessment of technology. In early 1966, Kranzberg asked Pursell to write an extra chapter. Pursell agreed, and this was published as an epilogue under their coauthorship. The epilogue summarized the first volume briefly, mentioning technology’s critics but ending on a much more positive, though less dramatic, note.29
That correspondence, along with the note from Mumford and other letters exchanged between the editors, reveals something that many members of SHOT assume but seldom question. SHOT members revere Kranzberg’s First Law: “Technology is neither good, nor bad; nor is it neutral”— it has even been printed on a t-shirt and on a poster (a poster that is still available, by the way). It is a serious and profound statement. But Melvin Kranzberg himself, along with most of those involved in a society that is his “lengthening shadow,” believed that technology has done more good than harm. That is the essence of these two volumes, and it is a core belief of SHOT, however much current members are aware of the less beneficial effects of technology. Perhaps the next time the t-shirt or poster are printed, there can be an asterisk, as Major League Baseball did to Roger Maris’s home run record. Better to leave the First Law as it was written, but we should remember the context in which Melvin Kranzberg formulated it. For those wishing to find a clear and comprehensive statement of this belief, there is no better place to look than these two volumes.
1. Bruce E. Seely, “SHOT, the History of Technology, and Engineering Education,” Technology and Culture 36 (October 1995): 739–72.
2. Melvin Kranzberg, “At the Start,” Technology and Culture 1 (Winter 1959): 1–10; Melvin Kranzberg, “The Newest History: Science and Technology,” Science 136 (11 May 1962): 463–68.
3. Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll W. Pursell Jr., eds., Technology in Western Civilization, 2 vols. (The Emergence of Modern Industrial Society, Earliest Times to 1900 and Technology in the Twentieth Century) (New York, 1967).
4. Col. Miles R. Palmer, “The United States Armed Forces Institute,” Public Administration Review 15 (Autumn 1955): 272–74. In this reference, as throughout the Kranzberg and Pursell volumes, the male pronouns are used almost exclusively, although there is no evidence that women in the uniformed services were excluded.
5. Katzenbach was the brother of Nicholas Katzenbach, deputy attorney general from 1962 to 1965 and later President Lyndon Johnson’s attorney general and then undersecretary of state.
6. “You’re In the Classroom Now,” Time, 17 January 1964, 72, copy in the Kranzberg Papers, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Collection 266, Box 301, folder 1.
7. “A Resume of Background Information Concerning Development of a Course on the History of Technology,” 28 January 1964, unsigned, but probably written by Kranzberg, Kranzberg Papers, Box 301, folder 2.
8. Ripley S. Sims, USAFI, to Melvin Kranzberg, Society for the History of Technology, 25 January 1963, Kranzberg Papers, Box 301, folder 2.
9. Besides Hughes, other participants in the workshop included Cyril S. Smith, Carl W. Condit, Eugene S. Ferguson, Thomas J. Higgins, and John B. Rae.
10. Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, A. R. Hall, and Trevor Williams, eds., A History of Technology, 5 vols. (New York, 1954–1958); T. K. Derry and Trevor Williams, A Short History of Technology from the Earliest Times to 1900 (New York, 1961).
11. “Report on the History of Technology Workshop,” May 24–25, by Thomas P. Hughes, University of Wisconsin-Madison, typescript, Kranzberg Papers, Box 301, folder 2.
12. Melvin Kranzberg, “Technology and History: ‘Kranzberg’s Laws,’” Technology and Culture 27 ( July 1986): 544–60.
13. See http://www.humanitiesebook.org/titlelist.online.date.26.html (accessed 17 April 2009).
14. Bob Post, “Chance and Contingency: Mel Kranzberg Before SHOT and ICOHTEC,” keynote address, International Committee for the History of Technology, University of Victoria, British Columbia, 5 August 2008.
15. Carroll Pursell, “In Memoriam, Melvin Kranzberg (1917–1995): Case Years,” Technology and Culture 37 ( July 1996): 407–12, quote at 410.
16. Kranzberg Papers, Box 301, folders 4 and 5.
17. Mumford to Kranzberg, undated, ca. summer 1964, Kranzberg Papers, Box 301, folder 4.
18. Not all senior scholars turned down an opportunity to contribute; Abbott Payson Usher was the author of chapter 14, “The Textile Industry, 1750–1830.” Usher passed away as the volumes were in press.
19. Besides Kranzberg and Pursell, the authors of volume 1 were Silvio A. Bedini, Georg Borgstrom, Lynwood Bryant, Roger Burlingame, Rondo Cameron, Shepard B. Clough, Carl W. Condit, Bern Dibner, Aage Gerhardt Drachmann, Eugene S. Ferguson, James Kip Finch, Robert James Forbes, G. E. Fussell, Anthony N. B. Gar van, Alfred Rupert Hall, Herbert Heaton, Arthur M. Johnson, Eric E. Lampard, Robert Multhauf, Thomas A. Palmer, Derek J. De Solla Price, John B. Rae, Nathan Rosenberg, Charles L. Sanford, Harold I. Sharlin, Cyril Stanley Smith, Thomas M. Smith, Abbott Payson Usher, Sam Bass Warner, Lynn White jr., Harold F. Williamson, and Robert S. Woodbury. Authors of volume 2 were Jack Baranson, Jack Barbash, Georg Borgstrom, Kenneth E. Boulding, James R. Bright, Robert C. Davis, Peter F. Drucker, John A. Duffie, Eugene M. Emme, Eduard Farber, Bernard S. Finn, Leslie H. Fishel Jr., Robert H. Guest, Richard G. Hewlett, Forest G. Hill, Irving Brinton Holley Jr., Aaron J. Ihde, Edward L. Katzenback Jr., W. David Lewis, Roy Lubove, Theodore F. Marburg, Donald N. Michael, Bruce Carlton Netschert, James L. Penick Jr., John B. Rae, Wayne D. Rasmussen, Theodore Ropp, Richard Rosenbloom, Melvin M. Rotsch, Ralph Sanders, Morgan Sherwood, Thomas Malcolm Smith, Donald C. Swain, Robert Theobald, Charles R. Walker, Reynold M. Wik, and Earnest W. Williams Jr.
20. Melvin Kranzberg to Thomas Hughes, 29 July 1964, Kranzberg Papers, Box 301, folder 4.
21. On the Technocracy movement of the 1930s, see Howard P. Segal, Technological Utopianism in American Culture (Chicago, 1985), especially chap. 6.
22. One could cite many examples of the changing attitudes toward the U.S. military among younger historians, e.g. Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997). Carroll Pursell notes how protests against the war in Vietnam began at Case as he and Kranzberg were working on the project (Pursell, private communication to the author, 22 March 2009). Whatever his personal views were, Kranzberg was always supportive of young scholars, whose work took them in directions not foreseen at the time of SHOT’s founding.
23. The founding of Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) in 1975 has in part compensated for this loss to SHOT, but 4S has evolved in a direction quite different from that implied by the contributors to this book.
24. Among Brzezinski’s writings from that era was Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (New York, 1970), in which he coined a term that suggests the merger of classical mechanical and electrical technology with the new technologies of electronics and digital computers.
25. ICOHTEC’s website is http://www.icohtec.org (accessed 16 May 2009).
26. Reviews appeared, among other places, in Science 157 (15 September 1967): 1295–96; Isis 59 (Summer 1968): 207–10; Journal of Economic History 29 ( June 1969): 366–68; and Agricultural History 43 ( January 1969): 208–9. The title of this essay is borrowed from R. A. Buchanan’s extended review in Technology and Culture 9 (July 1968): 468–76. Although reviews were favorable, many of them criticized the American-centric bias of the second volume. That is a valid criticism, but it must be understood in the context of the theme of the volume and also in the context of USAFI sponsorship.
27. Byron Hollingshead, Editor-in-Chief, Oxford University Press, to Mel Kranzberg, 27 December 1968, Kranzberg Papers, Box 302, folder 16.
28. One such refusal came from Paul Goodman, who initially agreed to write an essay but later, after repeated queries from Kranzberg about the lateness of his submission, decided not to contribute because of the USAFI’s role. Kranzberg Papers, Box 302, folder 12.
29. Kranzberg to Pursell, 18 January 1966, Kranzberg Papers, Box 307, folder 64. Although the epilogue was published under both editors’ names, Pursell did most of the writing. See also Kranzberg to Donald Kaiser, 12 July 1966, Box 307, folder 63.
Copyright© 2009, the Society for the History of Technology
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