“The Relativity of History” appeared in the Political Science Quarterly for June 1933, the same year that Charles Beard delivered his presidential address to the American Historical Association, “Written History as an Act of Faith,” and not long after Carl Becker’s equally iconoclastic presidential address, “Every Man His Own Historian.”1 Beard and Becker were among the preeminent historians of their time, Charles Cole a twenty-seven-year-old assistant professor at Columbia, but no less committed to the emerging school of interpretation called historical relativism. The times they were a-changin’. In 1935 Cole would move on to Amherst College in Massachusetts, where the students who answered roll on his first day in class included a youngster named Melvin Kranzberg. He saw at once that Mel was a prize. Their relationship would evolve from teacher and pupil into friends and colleagues. Mel would be Cole’s assistant at a wartime agency in Washington and would then join his faculty when Cole became Amherst’s president after the war. They would remain close even as Cole became vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation, then ambassador to Chile. In later years Mel would thank Cole many times over for having opened so many doors, for taking “so large a role in shaping my destiny.”2

After Mel, Cole may have influenced nobody else quite so directly, though his vivid exemplification of chance and contingency would endure. More than a half-century later, Peter Novick would take note of his article in the context of “a more general breakdown of agreement on the meaning of the past” that was occurring in the 1930s.3 The larger question concerned the possibility of recounting “the past as it actually was, somewhat as the engineer describes a single machine.” This was the twist that Beard put on Leopold von Ranke’s storied remark about “wie es eigentlich gewesen,” and many historians would have agreed with him that it was simply not possible. Others, still a majority, remained committed to the “noble dream” of objectivity. About the conditional element in history, however, there would have been more accord. Historians would cite “providence” and write of events being “fated,” and yet there was so much evidence for the pervasive role of happenstance. What follows is a case in point.

That Charles Cole and Mel Kranzberg both showed up at Amherst, Cole a protégé of Columbia’s immensely learned Carlton J. H. Hayes and Mel the son of an immigrant merchant in Saint Louis—that would have entailed deliberative choices. But both of them at the same time? That was a matter of chance, as was Cole’s decision to do more than usual with the Industrial Revolution in his Economics I course because he could now assign a provocative new book by Lewis Mumford titled Technics and Civilization. And for many years afterward very little of Mel’s life story would seem to have been fated, and certainly not his decision to foster an organization called the Society for the History of Technology.

Today, fifty years after its founding, we see SHOT as the cornerstone of Mel’s legacy, a matter of invention and enterprise: first, putting a new discipline in academic cloaks (invention) and, second, securing its institutional foundations (enterprise). Had he not done this, would there still be a collaborative effort among scholars concerned with technology in historic perspective? Probably there would, although it seems unlikely that the intellectual ambience would be the same, nor the institutional configuration, with SHOT and with another slightly younger society fulfilling a somewhat different role, ICOHTEC.4 Here, I have no intention of trying to address a riddle basic to any and all historical inquiry, inevitability, nor to argue for Mel’s indispensability to this collaborative effort. I have only a modest aim: to set forth the evidence that he might have lived quite a different life, never to have become the inventor and entrepreneur whose results are epitomized in this journal.

Mel’s papers, archived by the Smithsonian Institution, indicate that he might well have gone on to finish his career as he began it under the tutelage of Charles Cole, in a history department somewhere, as a European political and social historian interested especially in nineteenth-century France—never to retool, never to begin pondering the relationship of technology and culture, never to set forth what is after all quite an elegant insight: Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral.

This essay considers Mel’s career as a study in contingency, a word that resonates in our literature and that the Random House Dictionary defines as “dependence on chance or on the fulfillment of a condition; uncertainty; fortuitousness.”5 Back when he was a modern European historian, Mel edited an anthology about the insurrections of 1848. He began the introduction by quoting George Trevelyan’s remark about 1848 being “the turning point at which history failed to turn.” To use the expression “turning point” is to imply that events can be fated, but to say that events failed to turn as expected is to admit the role of contingency, the element of chance—“randomness,” to borrow from the title of a best-seller by physicist Leonard Mlodinow.6

Mel Kranzberg was born in November 1917 and died in December 1995. Episodes from his life story were already in print by then, notably his “Informal Personal Reminiscences,” published in History of Technology on the occasion of ICOHTEC’s silver anniversary in 1994, and an interview published in Invention and Technology a few years earlier when he retired from teaching. Other parts were recounted by old friends after he died, often with due attention to contingency, as when Carroll Pursell told how Mel put together the graduate program at Case Institute by interlacing disciplines, like “a very modern artist” might create something “out of found objects.”7 But much of his odyssey has remained buried in the Kranzberg Papers.

When one reads in Mel’s correspondence, what’s obvious is that he did not start out sixty or seventy years ago to be an academic historian of technology; nobody did that. He did, however, start out in an extraordinary way, at least for a Jewish kid from Saint Louis whose father owned a firm that bought and sold glass bottles.8 There was Amherst College, then as now ranked as one of the nation’s best, and there was Charles Cole, who influenced him in many ways, but perhaps most fatefully by imparting to Mel his trust in Carl Becker’s observations about every generation writing its own history and every man being his own historian.9 Mel was an exceptional student, as is evident from the dozens of blue-book exams he saved and from undergraduate essays of rare maturity, all duly archived with his papers.10 These enabled him to go from Amherst right into one of the world’s most distinguished graduate programs in history.

At Amherst, he had studied economics as much as history, and it would have perhaps been more likely for him to pursue economics at Harvard.11 But instead he would concentrate—at Cole’s insistence, or at least his urging—on modern European history and particularly France since 1789. His “master” (the Harvard expression) was Cole’s good friend Donald Cope McKay.12 McKay was also master to David Pinkney, who would play an essential role in establishing the Society for French Historical Studies in the 1950s and then in 1980 deliver an AHA presidential address, “American Historians of the European Past,” that will bear analysis presently. In scholarly realms, McKay was best known for his 1933 book The National Workshops: A Study in the French Revolution of 1848, and 1848 was a subject to which Mel later turned his own attention with his contribution to D. C. Heath’s widely assigned Problems in European Civilization series.13

Mel’s other advisors included the Americanist Oscar Handlin (only two years older), the émigré Russian historian Michael Karpovich, and two modern-Europe scholars later to be presidents of the AHA. There was Sidney Bradshaw Fay, whose Origins of the World War (1928, 1930) became one of the chief origins of the term “revisionism” that was so closely linked to Becker’s remark about every generation writing its own history. And there was Crane Brinton, who published his classic The Anatomy of Revolution just before Mel came to Harvard and who seems to have influenced him in part by showing how it was possible to combine “profound conservatism with sharp criticism of traditional epistemology.”14

Among Mel’s graduate-school cohort were Pinkney and several others who achieved eminence as European historians, including Carl Schorske and H. Stuart Hughes. Hughes was likewise at Amherst when Mel was there, and—even though the two of them were much different in background and style—they would find cause to be engaged with one another for a long time.15 That cohort also included Henry Guerlac, who would wear the black hat in a tale that Mel enjoyed telling in his later years—namely, that the new discipline, history of technology, was formed in a stunned response to Guerlac’s assertion that so-called “tinkers” were simply not worthy of serious attention. “Thinkers” of the sort who concerned the mandarins of the History of Science Society are all that matter in retrospect because they provided the “shoulders” on which lesser men would stand.16

Kranzberg and Guerlac received their degrees one year apart, in 1942 and 1941, though Mel was six years younger, only twenty-five. Then as now that would help affirm him as the whiz kid his three older brothers had always known him to be, destined for the life of a scholar, and now seemingly bound for glory in a field of inquiry that had scarcely been touched from an American point of view. But one must note the possibility of a stumbling block. The upper echelons of the American historical profession were not hospitable to Jews, certainly not when Mel was starting out.17 Handlin on the Harvard faculty was very much an anomaly. I. B. Holley, a classmate of Mel’s at Amherst, writes that “Because he was Jewish he was not pledged to a fraternity but belonged to a club organized for all non-fraternity men, the Lord Jeffrey Amherst Club, which had a large meeting hall but no living quarters.”18 That was in the 1930s. Mel would later tell friends that he had been touched by anti-Semitism in the 1950s and even in the 1980s, when he sought the directorship of the National Air and Space Museum. But if you had asked him at the time he completed his doctorate, I believe he would have said that he felt confident of his future because he knew how to take matters into his own hands: Holley marveled at how quickly Mel had become “the heart and soul” of the Lord Jeffrey Amherst Club.

A decade afterward, in 1952, Mel would have said the same thing—if perhaps less assuredly, having had a close call during the war, for one thing. By then, the field of modern Europe was starting to take off, “fueled by a variety of potent forces,” as Pinkney remarked in his AHA presidential address, when “a generation of historians fresh from graduate school had the experience of participating in rapidly moving history.” By then, Mel had a revised version of his dissertation in print.19 He was a presence in the AHA. He knew he would soon have tenure. He had a second book under way, this one on the Second Empire, and he was even talking of plans for a big book on France since the Restoration.

The one major detour during the intervening decade was not so much a detour as it was the essence of that participatory experience mentioned by Pinkney. Of course it was the war, and Mel was one of those scholars whose “knowledge and skills gave them opportunities of privileged observation.” With Mel there was something else, something remarkable considering how his career ultimately turned out. He was trained as a technological practitioner long before he became a technological historian, long before the thought ever crossed his mind that there could be any such line of work, at least in academic realms.20

When the United States declared war in December 1941, Mel was finishing his dissertation while earning money as a teaching assistant (he called it “paper-marking and section work”) for Laurence Packard, who was described by Stuart Hughes as Amherst’s “most forceful and (deservedly) popular teacher.”21 Early in 1942, Charles Cole was called to the capital to become chief of the Services Trades Branch of the Office of Price Administration (OPA), the agency empowered to put wartime ceilings on commodities and ration consumer goods. In June, Cole summoned Mel as his administrative assistant. With the title of associate economist, he had a civil service rating of P-3 and a salary of $3,800, more than he would make as a teacher for many years after the war. His duties included liaison with OPA field offices, but what Cole remembered best was Mel’s “unusual administrative ability,” notably in setting up a mail control system that was widely emulated.22 For a while, Mel worked with a woman a few years older by the name of Patricia Ryan Nixon. He liked everything about Pat Nixon except when they were chatting and she would say “Well, [my husband] Dick said . . .” He never agreed with what Dick Nixon said, but these conversations did alert him, later, to the possibilities for networking with politically connected people as well as writers and academics.23

When he moved to Washington, D.C., Mel also enlisted in the U.S. Army Signal Corps Reserve and so began his initiation as a technician. He thought “the enlisting officer wasn’t much impressed with my Harvard Ph.D. in European history, but at least it suggested to him that I might be ‘educable.’”24 With an assurance of an eventual commission, he was assigned to electronics training in night school at Catholic University, then sent to Johns Hopkins for an accelerated course in electrical engineering (three years compressed into sixteen weeks), and finally to Philco Radio Laboratories in Philadelphia for another crash course, this one in radar. By the summer of 1943 Mel Kranzberg—who knew nearly all he knew about the history of technology from having read Mumford when he was an undergraduate, and from having audited A. P. Usher while at Harvard—was rather thoroughly trained in hands-on technics.

* * *

Armed forces muddle through, and after Mel finished his three months at Philco Labs the Signal Corps decided it already had enough officers with expertise in electronics. Expecting a commission, Mel had proposed to a young woman he met in Baltimore while at Hopkins, Nancy Fox, and they were married. But there was no commission. Instead, he was put in the infantry and sent to basic training. After a time, someone realized that this was a pretty unusual foot soldier and he was shuttled around some more, to Indiana University for study of German and Turkish (he was given to understand the possibility of an Allied invasion through Turkey), and from there into military intelligence service (MIS) training at Camp Ritchie, Maryland. And then he was deployed to France with George Patton’s Third Army during the Battle of the Bulge, charged with interrogating German prisoners about the location of artillery emplacements. Several of these prisoners “were shot out from under him,” and Mel came close to getting killed himself. During the Wehrmacht’s last-ditch offensive in the fall of 1944, he would recall that, of the six MIS men in his unit, “three were killed, two were wounded, and I was the only one who escaped unscathed.”25

In 1946, Mel was discharged as a master sergeant with three battle stars, a Combat Infantryman Badge, and a Bronze Star, the medal reserved for soldiers who qualified for “hostile fire/imminent danger pay.” Before mustering out, he studied for three months at the University of Heidelberg and for three more at the Sorbonne and the École Libre des Sciences Politiques.26 When he returned to teaching, it was as a quintessential representative of what William Palmer calls the World War II generation, “eager to make up for lost time and driven to succeed as quickly as possible.”27 After a brief stint at Harvard tutoring advanced students in historiography, he spent a year at Stevens Institute in Hoboken, New Jersey.28

At Stevens, Mel taught Western Civilization, “that great curricular innovation of the postwar years.”29 “Western Civ” became integral to the curriculum at nearly all engineering schools, the result of a growing concern about the need for graduates who were “well rounded.”30 He also published an article titled “The Humanistic-Social Studies in Engineering Education: Some Basic Fallacies.” But that was as far as he would stray from European history; there was no reason to stray, for it was a season of youth and here was yet another contingency, the exploding undergraduate population. In his 1980 AHA presidential address, Pinkney told how “the upsurge of university and college enrollments . . . created a market for historians, and European history became an economically viable occupation for all, losing its aura of a gentlemen’s avocation.” “Jobs were waiting,” he adds. “French history was an important and lively subject to many Americans, especially to those whose wartime duties had taken them to France or involved them in the study of France in military or political intelligence agencies.”31

This was Mel Kranzberg to a fare-thee-well, though his “wartime duties” were altogether different from those of Pinkney, Schorske, Brinton, or Hughes, all of whom were involved with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Hughes was in charge of the Research and Analysis Branch for the entire Mediterranean theater and finished the war as a lieutenant colonel, then spent two years as chief of European research for the State Department. Brinton headed the OSS’s European operation in London and then made a 1,600-mile tour of France after the Liberation.32 But Mel Kranzberg: Mel was never more than an E8 non-com in the infantry, and he actually put his life on the line.33

* * *

In 1947 Mel left Stevens to return to Amherst, joining the faculty at the invitation of Cole—by then Amherst’s president, and in the process of implementing a major change in curriculum—as an assistant professor of modern European history. While carrying the heavy teaching load of a young new hire (Mel was thirty), he worked nights revising his dissertation. He also worked to expand his circle of professional contacts by chairing a faculty committee that arranged for guest speakers. His correspondence suggests a sustained effort to get to know everybody in the history profession, especially in European history but far into other realms as well. By the time he got involved in organizing the fateful American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) meeting at Cornell and the visit to Guerlac in June 1957, he could write to potential speakers the likes of Herbert Muller, Kenneth Boulding, Clinton Rossiter, and even Margaret Mead with relaxed self-confidence.34

Mel’s contract with Amherst was renewed three times, but toward the end of his fourth year in 1951 he knew that his fifth would be his last. Whether this was entirely disappointing is not certain. Although he later told Cole that he “made only one mistake” as president of Amherst, meaning the mistake of not keeping him, Mel had a research agenda and—as was often true of elite colleges—faculty research was not emphasized at Amherst. In any event, he began filing applications along with letters from Cole that were powerfully supportive even if filled with academic circumlocutions. To the chair of a search committee at the University of Illinois, Cole wrote: “I would very much like to have Professor Kranzberg stay at Amherst, but I cannot feel justified in trying to keep him here because the departmental set-up does not, in the immediate future, provide the kind of opportunity and advancement that he ought to have.”35 To Robert Shurter at Case Institute in Cleveland: “We have been planning to keep Kranzberg with us next year and we would only let him go (with deep reluctance) because of our basic rotation policy in the younger brackets and also because of certain departmental road blocks ahead of him, which have nothing to do with him, but are with the structure and nature of our department.”36

Case is of course where Kranzberg ultimately landed, but not before going after several other jobs that were in history departments, not engineering schools. A tenured position at any one of these places might have precluded the emergence of the history of technology in an institutional guise that we would easily recognize. Think contingency.

Mel even flirted with the idea of leaving academe for the federal government, where year-round jobs paid better and attracted quite a few historians during the early years of the cold war. In March 1951, he was contacted by George Pettee, deputy director of the army’s Operations Research Office (ORO). Pettee, who had himself been at Amherst, was the author of a monograph on The Future of American Secret Intelligence said to have been instrumental in establishing the Central Intelligence Agency. He explained that the ORO was concerned with “operational problems of ground warfare, extending from what we call ‘hardware studies’ to psychological warfare and military government.” At Donald McKay’s suggestion he was writing to Mel, he said, partly because of his book on the Siege of Paris, which suggested a “bent towards military subjects,” and partly because of the need for social scientists who could work on “unfamiliar and unusual” problems “under high pressure,” an allusion to his wartime experience.37

Mel was flattered. He filled out an Application for Federal Employment—known then as now as a Standard Form 57—and sent it to Washington along with a letter saying that his interest “in the social and political implications of military operations” made the job appear to be “right up my alley, or at least very close to it.” He was about to go to D.C. for an interview when he got good news from another quarter: he had been awarded a Social Science Research Council Grant-in-Aid for a summer in French archives. Opportunities for primary research were treasured by nearly all French historians in America, so Mel put on the brakes with Pettee, telling him that he planned to go to Paris and then return to Amherst in the fall and use his spare time to organize his notes. He stayed in contact with the ORO, however, and later contracted to write historical memoranda for a group of men and women he got to know as “the gang” in its Connecticut Avenue offices. Mel’s primary engagement was with “Project Parabel,” an effort to address the relationship between Marxist-Leninist theory and the tactics employed by guerrilla fighters in French Indochina. Henry Kissinger became a casual acquaintance.

* * *

Part of what Mel learned from his interaction with the ORO was that there were “hardware studies,” a genre he decided he did not much care for.38 But the payoff for a would-be biographer is immeasurable, for the copy of his Form 57 tucked away among his papers at the Smithsonian provides the most fine-grained record of his educational and employment history before he went to Case. There is also evidence in his papers of a passing interest in various positions with the State Department and the Department of Defense. While he never looked into the Central Intelligence Agency, the frequent involvement of historians, especially European historians, with the CIA around this time provides background for another turning-point scenario, the most ironic moment in Mel’s career.39

As he was finishing up his final term on the Amherst faculty, Mel was negotiating with another top-tier liberal arts college, Oberlin, and things were moving along quickly. In March 1952, Oberlin’s dean, Blair Stewart, had sent Mel a letter that began: “Professor Crane Brinton has given us your name in connection with a vacancy in European history.” Mel would be filling in for Charles Cremeans, Oberlin’s Reformation specialist, who was taking leave to accept a CIA appointment, probably temporary, as most were.40 Within a few days, Mel was boarding the New England Wolverine in Springfield for an overnight train trip to Ohio. He spent a long day on the Oberlin campus being squired around by Frederick B. Artz, distinguished already for his scholarship in European political and intellectual history and whose canonical The Mind of the Middle Ages was then in press with Knopf. Shortly, Mel got an offer from Stewart, a one-year appointment as an associate professor, with a possibility of another year but a caveat to have “no expectation” beyond that. Much about the offer was tempting, not least the prospect of having “Freddie Artz” as a colleague and also having students who were truly engaged: Oberlin had a reputation for sending more men and women “on to professional careers in history than any other undergraduate institution in the country.”41

Mel seriously considered the offer, but declined. To Stewart he wrote that he felt he needed a position affording “some opportunity to establish myself on a more permanent basis and to grow in responsibility.” To Artz he explained further, saying that he did not “feel it fair to impose upon my family [Mel and Nancy now had two sons, Steven and John] the prospect of a series of moves.” He would prefer success to “depend primarily upon my own abilities, and not upon the action of outside forces [i.e., the likely return of Cremeans]. I am willing to gamble upon my own ability; I do not think it wise to gamble upon the action of forces over which I have no control.”42

Now irony. After Mel declined, Oberlin hired a Harvard student who was just finishing his dissertation, Barry McGill. A year passed, then two, and Cremeans did not return. Indeed, he became the man who never returned, instead serving the CIA for many years in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, most notably during the Cuban missile crisis. And McGill? Despite a publication record described as “spare,” he spent more than thirty years at Oberlin, finally retiring in the 1980s.43

Mel had told Artz that everything about Oberlin pleased him, that it was a place where “I should have liked to be able to pursue the rest of my academic career.” If he had “gambled,” would he have continued to pursue French history? Would he have never gone to Case Institute, where there had previously been no historians at all? Never have begun thinking about something new and interdisciplinary? We’ll never know. Mel might have left Oberlin anyway. For one thing, there was no “silent generation” at Oberlin, where the campus atmosphere was politically charged even in the 1950s. While Mel had been an ardent partisan of FDR and admired Stuart Hughes for his political passion, some of his deepest instincts were conservative, and he was brought to tears by campus upheavals later on. Moreover, he seems to have looked most longingly toward universities with graduate programs. And yet Oberlin was an extraordinary place, as any of his European-history cohort who had been there as undergraduates would have confirmed—David Pinkney, for one.44 If Mel had taken a chance, it is tempting to think he would have stayed “for the rest of his academic career,” never to retool.

* * *

After he knew that Amherst was letting him go, Mel had also interviewed for European history jobs with several midwestern universities, and when Brinton made inquiries on Mel’s behalf at Penn State he told of getting “a nibble.”45 But when Mel turned down Oberlin he had only one bird in hand, and that was in Cleveland. While serving on a committee to advise the Case administration on curriculum reform, Cole and Brinton had both been talking Mel up to the head of the Division of Humanities and Social Studies, Bob Shurter (Amherst ’28), emphasizing his inspired teaching and his experience at an engineering school. “When we got him from Stevens,” Cole told Shurter, “it was clear that he had made a really distinguished record there with engineers.”46

Case already had a general education program with required courses on “man’s cultural accumulation.” The foundation had been laid before the war by President William Wickenden, a notable figure in the annals of curriculum reform. Though Wickenden’s dream of transforming Case had been thwarted, he was succeeded in 1947 by a man determined to carry through, T. Keith Glennan. First, Glennan would address concerns of the Engineers’ Council for Professional Development about the “social knowledge” and “human skills” of graduate engineers. Bruce Seely writes that Glennan “wanted to build a reputation for the best general education program in the country.”47 In 1951 Case was awarded $150,000 by the Carnegie Corporation for the Advancement of Education to bring in a new faculty contingent. In addition to those who were already teaching “English for Engineers,” there would now be teachers drawn from diverse branches of the humanities and social sciences, including several historians.

The goal was defined by Shurter: In order to grasp the complexity of problems he would face, “the engineer as a citizen will have to study all the history, economics, government, and human relations he can muster.”48 As soon as he heard about the availability of Melvin Kranzberg from Cole and Brinton, Shurter was interested, and in the spring of 1952 Mel sailed into a job, with tenure a certainty. Time and opportunity to advance in his scholarly specialty would be limited; Mel knew that. But he was finally, at age thirty-five, in a position that would enable him “to grow in responsibility.” Oscar Handlin wrote warmly from Cambridge to tell him that he’d made a wise choice.

First, Shurter assigned Mel a major share of responsibility for reprogramming Case’s two-year course in The Development of Western Civilization. In a different academic climate a generation later, Western Civ would be depicted by William McNeill as “the record of progress of reason and liberty; and the place where it happened was Greece, Rome, western Europe and latterly the United States.”49 But in the 1950s, with communism on the march, any hint of sarcasm would have been lost on Mel Kranzberg, who called himself a “Gallophile” but was above all an unabashed patriot who had no qualms about imparting this progressivist narrative to undergraduates.50 Mel’s specific area was Greek civilization, and at first he envisioned his task in straightforward terms: to identify source materials and devise a new set of lectures on the birth of democracy. Before long, however, Shurter had him out talking to publishers about a textbook, and in early 1955 he signed a contract with Macmillan.

With two colleagues, Mel committed to delivering the manuscript for a two-volume Western Civ textbook within three years. The other signatories were John Culver, a Roman Empire specialist, and Harvey Buchanan, a Renaissance-Reformation specialist. Culver, like many of those hired with the Carnegie funding, was the furthest thing from a “producer,” and he was soon replaced on the textbook project by medievalist Dirk Jellema. Both Buchanan and Jellema published substantial scholarship (in Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte and Speculum, respectively). So did Mel. It seemed like a promising trio.

Their goal was to compete effectively in a crowded field that included Prentice Hall’s History of Civilization, coauthored by Brinton; A History of the Modern World, coauthored by Robert Palmer and Joel Colton; The United States in World History, coauthored by John Rae; and even included another text in the works at Macmillan coauthored by Cole and Carlton J. H. Hayes. Part of the competitive edge would supposedly be imparted by a text designed to “encompass everything: history, literature, art, music, religion, philosophy, science, technology, what have you.” Science and technology would appeal both to engineering students and those in the liberal arts: “Do not forget,” Mel wrote, “that the coming generation of college students is a generation of ‘hot-rodders’ and ‘space cadets.’”51 As the project went forward, however, science and technology proved to be pretty much a “what have you.” Jellema had studied history of science at Wisconsin, but none of the three authors really had time to stay current with the literature.

At one point, Mel received an inquiry from Purdue’s Herbert J. Muller, who was helping develop a course for engineering majors that would “emphasize the technological bases of Western Civilization.”52 Mel knew that the history of engineering was an elective at Clarkson College in New York state and at Michigan State, MIT, and the University of Detroit. At Fenn College, right in Cleveland, Sara Ruth Watson offered a popular course on the history of civil engineering, and Mel often brought his friend Sally Watson over to Case as a guest lecturer.53 But even with promise for getting the attention of students by teaching the history of their chosen profession, Mel had to confess that his textbook was not really going to “do the job” much better than others already in print, which did very little. He ended up steering Muller to R. J. Forbes’s Man the Maker, James Kip Finch’s Engineering and Western Civilization, and especially Mumford’s Technics and Civilization, calling it “extremely provocative” but warning of its “difficult vocabulary for students.”54

* * *

In order to fulfill Glennan’s plans, it seemed clear that Case needed a historian who specialized in science and technology (the two were invariably linked), and in the spring of 1953 Shurter had put Mel in charge of a search for a scholar who would be inspiring and productive but not “‘dilettantish’ and ‘arty’ since he will be teaching embryonic engineers who fancy themselves to be ‘he men.’”55 Over a period of several years, there were overtures to L. Pearce Williams, Edward Lurie, Thomas Kuhn, and Thomas Hughes, among others. Williams stayed at Delaware, Lurie opted for Wayne State, Kuhn for Berkeley, and Hughes (who, like Mel, had a Ph.D. in European history) was set on going somewhere he could teach about modern technology rather than courses “oriented according to the interests of the history of science society.”56 Finally, in 1958, Shurter handed the assignment to Mel himself, at least to “keep the seat warm.” He was to develop a course in an area of inquiry that he had long insisted was “only a sideline.” Again it is tempting to pose a counterfactual. What if Case had landed someone else and Mel had not ended up with this course by default?57 “Somewhere in my career,” he had once told a publisher when sending in a manuscript critique, “I appear to have established a totally unjustified reputation as an expert in the histories of science, technology, and engineering, but it would be nice to review a book in a field where I feel I have a moderate degree of competence.”58

Mel’s competence—now far beyond “moderate,” as evidenced by the lecture and reading notes included among his papers—lay in European history, and after arriving in Cleveland he often got opportunities to advance his status. In 1953, the University of Pennsylvania’s Lynn Case, on behalf of the AHA program committee, asked him to plan a session on modern France. Mel proposed recruiting Artz, Pinkney, and Stuart Hughes, and Case’s overture evolved into two linked retrospectives on the centennial of the Second Empire. At around the same time, Mel played a lead role in a Festschrift for Amherst’s Laurence Packard, which eventually appeared under the editorship of Hughes and with an introduction by Cole, who remarked that the book was “quite possibly, unique in that it was designed to do homage to an undergraduate teacher by students he inspired to pursue the difficult but rewarding vocation of historian.”59 With teachers and teaching as the theme, it was published in 1954 to the credit of each of the fifteen contributors, Mel among them. Without exception, the AHR reviewer wrote, they “handle the tools of their craft expertly and command a luminous and disciplined prose.” For once, here was a Festschrift notable for “the exceptionally high level of style and scholarship.”60

But Mel knew that his own contribution, “An Emperor Writes History: Napoleon III’s Histoire de Jules César,” owed a lot to Hughes’s editorial judgment when there was nobody at Case “trained in modern history . . . to whom I could turn for such advice.”61 While this may have been true, at nearby Western Reserve University there were several well-regarded historians including John Hall Stewart, a Revolution-Restoration specialist who had been a student of Carl Becker’s at Cornell. Mel was inclined, however, to keep wishing for kindred spirits right down the hall. His appetite whetted by teaching summer sessions at Washington University in his home town of Saint Louis, he made repeated efforts to secure a position in a university history department.62

There was the University of Nebraska, for example. After being urged to apply for an opening designed for a historian “of sufficient maturity that he could qualify immediately for the Graduate Faculty,” he responded: “I am not unhappy at Case—the job is a challenging one, and Case has been quite generous—[but] the Nebraska situation sounds very interesting. I am especially attracted by the prospect of the Graduate Faculty; at Case we don’t even have undergraduate history majors!”63 Mel fretted about needing to ask for time away from specialized research while finishing his textbook. Not to worry, said Cole, advising him to make an all-out run at a job that would clearly be a step up professionally because it promised “a good deal of graduate teaching.”64 Cole could not have couched a recommendation to the chairman in more glowing terms:

Kranzberg is one of the ablest of the younger historians I know. He is a top-notch teacher, both in small and large classes, and his course in 19th century European history was both a demanding and a most popular one here at Amherst. I have read his book on the Siege of Paris and some of the things he has written on the Second Empire. They seem to me sound and incisive history and good writing at the same time. Before very long I expect that he will produce a major work on the Liberal Empire. . . .

Cole added that he had known Mel for twenty years and knew him to be “a fine team man, but also a leader. He gets on with students and with colleagues. I have heard from the people at Case . . . that he has done wonders in invigorating their history program there.”65

Everything about the job sounded like an ideal fit, and yet Mel never even went to Lincoln for an interview. What happened? The paper trail runs cold. Why miss this chance to get connected to a fine graduate program in European history? Partly if not entirely it was a different sort of contingency: His personal life—not for the only time—was in shambles. People writing on his behalf had often remarked that “Mel and Nancy” were a popular duo in faculty social circles. But Nancy was not a happy spouse, and in the summer of 1955 she sued Mel for divorce and moved back to Baltimore with their two sons, leaving him to pay off her $580 sheared beaver coat, with alimony and child support that amounted to more than half his earnings, and apparently disinclined to risk anything uncertain in his daily life.66 Instead, he tried to keep busy every waking moment seven days a week, and friends would repeatedly warn him to slow down and “draw a breath now and then.”

* * *

In the mid-1950s two different institutional initiatives consumed great amounts of Mel’s time and energy. For one, there was a new society designed to serve the needs of French historians in North America, the Society for French Historical Studies (SFHS): French history à l’américaine. Although the lead was taken by a professor at New Paltz State College (now SUNY New Paltz), Evelyn Acomb, it was Mel’s old graduate-school comrade Pinkney whose career was “intimately interwoven with the life of the society.”67 As secretary-treasurer (de facto chief executive), Pinkney wanted to dispel an image of a narrow East Coast alignment and sought volunteers to host meetings in other parts of the country. In 1959, when the society was five years old, Mel and John Hall Stewart took joint responsibility for a meeting in Cleveland, both the program and local arrangements, and in the bargain they were named the society’s vice president and president. Social events included a cocktail party cosponsored by the Western Reserve Historical Society and the French consular agent in Cleveland, as well as a concert by the Cleveland Orchestra featuring Chausson, Saint-Saëns, and Debussy.68 Though it had been assumed there might be only fifty registrants, the number was well over a hundred, and afterward people wondered whether it would ever be possible to match “the unusual hospitality” Stewart and Kranzberg offered in Cleveland.69

As he watched Pinkney marshal his resources over a period of several years, the SFHS startup made a big impression on Mel, affording him a glimpse of a similar role for himself with a new organization of his own invention.70 At around the same time, he also rose to leadership with a project sponsored by the American Society for Engineering Education, which had secured Carnegie Corporation funding for a study of the nontechnical elements of the curriculum, “the stem.” It was called the Humanistic-Social Research Project. Mel had been disengaged from the ASEE since his year in Hoboken, but Glennan and Shurter were both active and they drew Mel in. By the time its report was published in 1956, he was vice chairman of the ASEE’s Humanistic-Social Division, soon to become chairman. In that interim he had become a “field worker,” contacting historians “who were teaching courses in the history of technology at other engineering schools,” such as John Rae at MIT.71 Through the project Mel met several of his closest friends, not only Rae (who spent a year at Case and eventually moved on to Harvey Mudd in California) but also Carl Condit, a professor at Northwestern, and George Gullette, the director, who was a professor at North Carolina State.72 Years later, after Gullette died, Mel told his widow that “I found myself inspired by his ideas and ideals, and the result was that I changed the whole direction of my academic and professional career. A whole new world of scholarship opened before me—the history of technology— and ever since then I have been committed to its propagation.”73

Can we take a letter to a bereaved widow at face value, along with the remark that “it was George’s wisdom and encouragement that provided direct inspiration”? Perhaps so, for it was not long after publication of the ASEE report, when Mel accepted Gullette’s appointment as a liaison with the History of Science Society and with its president, Guerlac, that he first mentioned “a History of Technology Society,” and the idea of perhaps “getting one started.”74 A month after that, he received his now-fabled note from Lynn White jr., in which White remarked that “It has long seemed a matter of high comedy that the United States, probably the most technological nation in all history, has so far exhibited so little interest in the contemplation of technology as a human activity.”75 And a week after that Mel wrote Marie Boas to say that “Public pressure might actually force me to get going on the deal—as if I didn’t have enough to do already!”76

* * *

French political and social history, or history of technology? Or both? We can only imagine Mel’s ambivalence throughout the late 1950s. He would hear one day from White about his enthusiasm for a new society, but he would also be cautioned by Condit and Gullette about the dangers of “fragmentation.” Another day he would end up on an airplane flight with Bernadotte Schmitt, long-time editor of the Journal of Modern History, Pulitzer Prize winner, and soon-to-be AHA president—who would be enthusiastic about Mel’s future in European history.77 When he ran into Schmitt, he was in the process of exploring a move with the University of Pittsburgh’s Robert Carlson, who taught a new course in the history of American technology. One of his “gripes” about Case, he told Carlson, was that “it does not give me the opportunity to teach history majors or graduate students, as I would normally be doing if I taught elsewhere than in a specialized engineering and scientific institution.”78 And in the same vein, there had been this remark to Cole, whose confidence he always kept: “As an engineering educator, I have gone just about as far as I can go, but I am primarily a historian, and a liberal arts college or large university affords me greater opportunity for teaching and research in history.”79

When inquiring about job postings, Mel became less and less reticent about assigning himself a stature comparable to scholars in the top ranks of European history, and he would outline an ambitious research agenda: after his Second Empire monograph, a synthesis of French history since 1815. He worked and reworked a paper titled (with variations) “What Constitutes an Industrial Revolution?” and a presentation to the AHA in Chicago drew attention from several major newspapers. Editors were after him for a book of readings. He contributed substantially to several encyclopedias, not least William L. Langer’s canonical Encyclopedia of World History.

In addition to his yen for a position congenial to a research agenda, there was another push in the direction of “a liberal arts college or large university,” personal. In January 1957 Mel married Eva Mannering, whom he had first met while at the Sorbonne after the war. Eva was a poet, essayist, and editor of elegant folio volumes of prints showing fruits, flowers, and tropical birds. She was English and had an interest in a London publishing house. (In two unfortunate phrases that Mel would often utter with reference to spouses, she was “a person in her own right,” both “decorative and talented.”) Eva thought Cleveland an “ugly city, quite devoid of charm or grace,” and she was particularly keen on Mel’s prospects in California. Mel would get long letters from Lynn White proposing a move to UCLA, and there was also a prospect in the Humanities Department at Harvey Mudd, the new engineering school affiliated with the Claremont Colleges. The atmosphere at Claremont struck Mel as a world away from “a business or a factory,” a dig at Case.80

Eva loved the idea of sunny California, and California was almost as appealing to Mel as New England was. Even after chartering SHOT in mid-1958, he told Cole that he hoped “to wed my interests in the history of technology with my interest in French history.”81 Within the next year or so, however, he felt a strong push away from French history and a pull toward “a whole new world of scholarship.” The Society for French Historical Studies got the first issue of its new journal into print even as Mel was still searching for the means to publish what he envisioned as “a quarterly of 150–200 pages with a circulation of 1,000 to 2,000.” Mel had to be impressed by Pinkney’s enterprise and especially that of publications-committee chair Lynn Case and editor Marvin Brown, who had managed to get his journal through the print shop at the University of North Carolina, where he taught. And there was something else, an article by Pinkney in that premier issue of French Historical Studies, an article that Mel would have felt was speaking directly to him. Pinkney spotlighted the dilemma of a specialist who lacked ready access to French archives: Beyond a dissertation, he wrote, there was “little chance of making a significant original contribution.”82

Mel knew this, of course, just as he knew the answer to a rhetorical challenge posed by Pinkney: “Have American scholars produced any books of original research in modern French history that rank with many monumental works by our colleagues in American history?”“Outside the fields of international relations and intellectual history,” the answer was no. Sure, there were important works “of synthesis and interpretation” by scholars like Brinton—and now Pinkney himself, whose Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris was garnering unanimous praise from reviewers, Mel in the AHR among them, and would go through many printings. Mel had been uncommonly youthful when he published his first book, and perhaps he had in his power a worthy synthesis of his own. But his correspondence increasingly suggests that he was feeling the seductions of an original contribution and realizing that his main chance for originality would not be in books he might write, but rather as an academic entrepreneur with “unusual administrative ability” (remembering Cole’s remark in 1943)—and for that realizing that he might be best positioned at an institution where he could construct an interdisciplinary foundation.

Carroll Pursell remarks that what Mel had in mind for Case sounds like an STS program, long before anyone had ever heard of any such thing. He wanted to make certain it would not bear the stigma of “hardware studies” that afflicted the multivolume Oxford History of Technology edited by Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, Trevor I. Williams, and A. R. Hall, nor have the shortcomings of the literature produced by sociologists that seemed insufficiently anchored. It would be, à la Carl Becker, a new generation writing its own history.

When he chartered SHOT in May 1958, Mel still planned to keep his original bonds with French history. Shortly after the SFHS met in Cleveland, however, that changed, in part the result of a contingency familiar to all academics, a turf war. Case’s President Glennan had departed for Washington to head up NASA, a huge loss for Mel because he had always been able to count on Glennan’s good will and support. Then he had lost the support and even the friendship of Shurter, who was apparently in the throes of a personal crisis. And then, after a confrontation involving the curriculum and assertions that “the historians” were gaining an unfair advantage, Shurter lost a lopsided vote of confidence and was replaced as chair by Morrell “Bo” Heald, a student of Ralph Henry Gabriel’s at Yale who had come to Case shortly after Mel and was his staunch ally. (Bo had presented a paper at the seminal ASEE meeting in Ithaca in June 1957 and was one of the three signatories to SHOT’s articles of incorporation a year later). As chair, he expressed full confidence in Mel’s initiative, and he also provided him with tangibles—making sure he got his own secretary and sufficient office space to accommodate an editorial operation as well as the affairs of a learned society.83

“Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small.” This remark—Laurence Peter called it the “theory of entrepreneurial aggressiveness in higher education”—has been attributed to everyone from Woodrow Wilson to C. P. Snow, but of course most often to Henry Kissinger. Now, hold on, Professor Kissinger! Secretarial help and office space: small stakes, maybe, for a man who called power the ultimate aphrodisiac, and yet for Melvin Kranzberg the contingency that finally made the difference. To paraphrase Lynn White, a door had already been opened and now Mel stepped through, into the SHOT office whose crackling energy became legendary. The history of science traced its origins as an academic discipline to George Sarton, who edited Isis for forty years and also taught at Harvard when Mel was in graduate school. Mel would tell Sarton’s disciple Guerlac in 1957 that he had no ambitions as an “operator” and tell his editor at Macmillan even in late 1958 that the history of technology had “no Sarton.”84 But he really meant “not yet,” and in 1959—with a new friend in a high place—he finally elected to reprise Sarton’s role with a new specialty that was immensely relevant to current events, unlike the history of science, a branch of intellectual history whose concerns were, in a word, academic.85

* * *

In the late 1950s Mel created a new institutional matrix, SHOT. A decade later there was a second matrix, ICOHTEC. Pursell remarks that SHOT “was not only very Mel but very American,” meaning very American in a good sense—its lack of rigid hierarchy and “the stifling bureaucracy of international science congresses.”86 It was American in a more literal sense, as well. Even though it was formally chartered as an “international society,” the membership was almost entirely from the United States. SHOT was parochial: “an international society with a few foreign members,” as Svante Lindqvist recalls someone saying. And yet Mel was deeply committed to something more. He may have chosen to turn away from a career in European history, but he had no desire to part with Europe, nor with the rest of the world.87

Missionary, ambassador, all the one-word tags that befit Mel Kranzberg carry an implication of “internationalism.” When ICOHTEC met at Metz in 1970, he was taken back to 1944, when he fell under fire from soldiers of the Third Reich. But he was also taken back much farther, to 1870 and the fog of war again—to the surrender of Marshal Bazaine, one of the most compelling passages in a book full of passion for European history, The Siege of Paris. After he moved to Atlanta to assume the Callaway Professorship at Georgia Tech, his colleagues would joke that “the Callaway chair was really an aisle seat on Delta Airlines.”88 How often someone trying to reach Mel by telephone would hear a secretary say, “Dr. Kranzberg is away in Europe.”

In 1958 Mel had applied for a second SSRC travel grant, this one for a trip to Barcelona. The specific purpose was to deliver a paper at the Ninth International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science. But he had a more general purpose, and that was “to make international contacts.”89 In Barcelona he met the Polish scholar Eugeniusz Olszewski, and this was the start of a friendship that eventually led to a proposal for a History of Technology section within the framework of the International Union, soon to be called ICOHTEC. Years afterward, Bob Multhauf got it right: “Mel Kranzberg had the wit and stamina to invent a new field and to establish it firmly . . . and not only in the United States.”90

But ICOHTEC is a story for another day, and, with the tale just told in mind, it’s time to conclude with some more “what if” questions like those posed in the epigraph. What if Mel’s arrival at Amherst had not coincided with Charles Cole’s? What if, a decade later, he had died under enemy fire somewhere on the Rhine? What if, a decade after that, Amherst had kept him, or he had gotten a job at Oberlin, or Penn, Illinois, Nebraska, Harvey Mudd, or UCLA? What if he had not been involved with the Society for French Historical Studies or the American Society for Engineering Education? What if Case had landed Ed Lurie or Tom Hughes, and the job of developing a course in the history of science and technology had not gone to Mel by default? What of his topsy-turvy personal life, what of his professional relationships—if he had not hit it off so famously with Lynn White, or not had a falling out with Robert Shurter, and Bo Heald not been there to watch his back? What about the influence he attributed to George Gullette? And Keith Glennan: Not even mentioning “the time and material assistance” Glennan provided, what if Mel had never had the opportunity to observe and learn from a great academic entrepreneur in action?91

What if? Chance and contingency. For many reasons, there might today be no Kranzberg Prize or no Kranzberg Dissertation Fellowship. No Kranzberg Lecture or Kranzberg Professorship. No Technology and Culture. But the history of technology as a discipline? Was Mel essential for that? As Art Molella points out, “a vigorous scholarly tradition” dates to the turn of the twentieth century, with Ludwig Beck, Franz Maria Feldhaus, and Conrad Matchoss.92 Usher’s History of Mechanical Inventions was published when Mel was twelve years old and Mumford’s Technics and Civilization just before he started Amherst. When he was a freshman there was the special issue of Annales d’histoire économique et sociale that Pam Long calls “a landmark in the historiography of technology.”93

Without Mel, would the history of technology exist within a context something like what we have? It is worth remembering that a notable sociologist had an idea for a “Society for the Social Study of Invention” several years before Mel thought of juxtaposing “technology and culture”:

SOCIAL STUDY OF INVENTION—Organization of a Society for the Social Study of Invention was achieved at the AAAS meeting in Chicago. According to the organizational procedures, which were proposed by S. C. Gilfillan (research associate in sociology at the University of Chicago) and adopted with certain amendments, the aims of the Society are “to study, promote, rationalize, and economize invention and its utilization, and incidentally to build the structure of culture generally.”94

Gilfillan had lined up a stellar array of advisors concerned with “the structure of culture,” including Robert K. Merton and William F. Ogburn. But he did not know what to do next, and, when Mel inquired several years later, Gilfillan had to confess that his society “died a-borning” because “it appeared that there was no one else much interested.”95 What if Gilfillan had kept after Merton and Ogburn and the others, as we can imagine Mel Kranzberg would have done?

When Stuart Hughes went to Amherst, his fraternity brothers were a “natural constituency,” a world away from the “makeshift existence in the interstices of the system” (a ghetto, if you will) where Mel Kranzberg was.96 But, for Mel, the Lord Jeffrey Amherst Club became an opportunity to infuse an organization—recalling the words of I. B. Holley—with “a heart and soul.” With a heart and soul of its own, the Society for the Social Study of Invention might have fared differently, but there was always the element of chance. Oscar Handlin, who joined the Harvard faculty during Mel’s second year in graduate school, writes about how much his career depended “on luck in timing”: “Had I turned up a decade earlier, some doors would have been closed to me; a decade later they would have opened upon rooms either empty or crowded.”97

Everyone confronts different doors and finds different rooms, and yet the point about luck in timing so often applies. With Mel, on one level it was Keith Glennan and then Bo Heald flying his banner at Case, on another level it was Yuri Gagarin and then John Glenn flying off into space—it was all the factors that put questions and concerns about the relationship of technology and culture in the air as never before. Contextualism, writes Hayden White, is “surpassingly modest in what it asks of the historian and demands of the reader.”98 Perhaps, but it is hard to understand White’s remarks about contextualism lacking explanatory power. Was Mel Kranzberg “fated” to establish a collaborative effort among historians seeking to analyze and explain this relationship of technology and culture? No—his correspondence is crowded with evidence for the possibility of a different outcome. Once he did take responsibility for such a collaborative effort, however, there is equally voluminous evidence that many other men and women would have had different careers had he not done so, more than a few readers of this essay, I imagine—indeed I’m sure—along with the author. The lengthened shadow of one man: A shopworn expression, yes, but in the case at hand—Mel Kranzberg’s influence on the style and substance of a new discipline—no other expression fills the bill nearly as well.

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1. Every AHA presidential address from 1884 to the present can be found online at http://www.historians.org/info/aha_history/pres_index.htm (accessed 13 July 2009).

2. Melvin Kranzberg to Charles W. Cole, 4 November 1977, Kranzberg Papers, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Box 77 (hereafter KP and box number: KP77). Cole and others who would affect Mel Kranzberg’s destiny to one degree or another are pictured on pages 846–47 and 870.

3. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988), 239–40.

4. For a resourceful effort to define differences, see R. Angus Buchanan, “From Cold War Peacemakers to Environmental Crusaders: The Development of ICOHTEC over Forty Years,” in International Committee for the History of Technology, 1968–2008, ed. Wolfhard Weber (Bochum, 2008), 7–15.

5. A collection of essays about contingency, including George M. Trevelyan’s classic from 1907, “If Napoleon Had Won Waterloo,” had been published just before Cole’s article appeared—J. C. Squire, ed., If It Had Happened Otherwise (London, 1932)—and Cole had posed his own version of this question: “What if Grouchy had obeyed his orders at Waterloo?” I appreciate Bart Hacker bringing the Squire book to my attention, as well as his own article, coauthored with Gordon B. Chamberlain, “Pasts That Might Have Been: An Annotated Bibliography of Alternative History,” Extrapolation 22 (1981): 334–68.

6. Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Affects Our Lives (New York, 2008). In the 2008 Academy Award–winning movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, there is an enumeration of random events that destroy the heroine’s career as a dancer.

7. Carroll Pursell, “In Memoriam, Melvin Kranzberg (1917–1995): Case Years,” Technology and Culture 37 (1996): 407–12. See also the remarks by John Staudenmaier, Robert P. Multhauf, R. Angus Buchanan, August Giebelhaus, and Robert C. Post in this same issue, and also Howard P. Segal’s “Technology, History, and Culture: An Appreciation of Melvin Kranzberg” in Virginia Quarterly Review 74 (1998): 641–52.

8. According to a 12 July 1961 article in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Mel’s grandfather Mordecai emigrated from Kiev in 1892 along with his second wife Rose and thirteen children, including Mel’s father Samuel, who founded the Northwestern Bottle Company in Saint Louis in 1902. As a distributor for Owens-Illinois, the Alton firm that pioneered the manufacture of blow-molded glass bottles, the company was later headed by Mel’s brother Mickey and then by Mickey’s son Kenneth, greatly expanding with the introduction of high-density plastics into the “rigid container” industry. As Kranson Industries, it became the world’s leading distributor of such containers, with annual revenue in the 1990s near $400 million. Mel never had anything to do with the bottle business, but he did many favors for his nephew Kenny (such as putting in a word with college admissions offices), and in 2008 Kenny and his wife Nancy provided funding which, along with a larger amount from the Stern Foundation, established a permanent Kranzberg Professorship at Georgia Tech.

9. Cole’s paraphrase of Becker was that “every age writes its own history according to its own beliefs and ideas” (“The Relativity of History,” 165). His Columbia mentor, Hayes, was a Catholic convert whose politics alarmed some younger men in the AHA so much that there was an effort to block his path to the presidency: hating liberalism, perhaps sympathetic to Franco, profoundly anti-Marxist. Cole shared Hayes’s aversion to Marx, at least, and imparted this aversion to Mel, but he was also attuned to Becker’s moderation and allegiance to relativism, and Mel would later demonstrate his own allegiance by quoting Becker’s famous spoof of “factualism,” the question of “whether Charles the Fat was at Ingelheim or Lustnau on July 1, 887” (Kranzberg, “The Newest History: Science and Technology,” Science 136, 11 May 1962, 463).

10. Mel attended Saint Louis’s Soldan High, a secondary school for unusually promising students who were told that “you are here because you believe in higher education as the avenue to greater opportunity and larger service.” As a college freshman, he does not appear to have been daunted by exam questions like “What elements in the career of Petrarch illustrate his reaction against the spirit of the Middle Ages?” or “Why is it difficult to determine the causes for the breakup of the Roman Empire?”

11. Novick (n. 3 above), 172, writes that “Selig Perlman, a professor of economics at Wisconsin, is said to have regularly summoned Jewish graduate students in history to his office and warned them, in a deep Yiddish accent, that ‘History belongs to the AngloSaxons. You belong in economics or sociology.’” At Amherst, Mel studied economics not only with Cole but also with Colston Warne, who cofounded Consumers Union in 1936 and was later summoned before the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee. Controversy aside, the success of Warne’s organizational initiative surely impressed Mel.

12. McKay had been a student of Harvard’s William L. Langer (he later edited a Langer Festschrift titled Essays in the History of Modern Europe) and was strongly influenced by Langer’s idea that historical knowledge was “fluid,” as was Mel. Just as Mel credited Cole with fostering his interest in the Industrial Revolution, he told of McKay “getting me involved in the Second Empire—when industrialization really began to hit France” (Kranzberg to Charles Cole, 3 June 1971, KP77). After McKay’s death at age fifty-seven in 1959, Mel took the initiative in establishing a memorial fund along with a group of scholars that also included Langer, Cole, and Pinkney, as well as David Landes and Elizabeth Eisenstein.

13. Melvin Kranzberg, ed., 1848: A Turning Point? (Boston, 1959). During the 1960s and 1970s, I’ll wager that no graduate student in European or American history ever escaped an encounter with “Heath pamphlets.”

14. Novick, 266. During Mel’s years in graduate school, most of the history faculty was politically conservative, though—as with Brinton—this would not necessarily coincide with an adherence to factualism. On the “comparative quiet of Harvard’s political scene,” see Carl E. Schorske, Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism (Princeton, 1998), 22–24. See also William Palmer, Engagement with the Past: The Lives and Works of the World War II Generation of Historians (Lexington, Ky., 2001), chap. 2.

15. The grandson of a Republican presidential candidate and Supreme Court chief justice, Hughes’s social milieu could not have differed more. Nor, in many ways, his politics: During the 1960s Hughes would cochair, with Dr. Benjamin Spock, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, and because of his activism the FBI would instruct the State Department to monitor his affairs while he was in Europe on sabbatical. In a blurb for Gentleman Rebel: The Memoirs of H. Stuart Hughes (New York, 1990), Irving Howe called the book “the story of a certain kind of American who may be disappearing from the scene: the native patrician intellectual with a strong social conscience and intense moral convictions.”

16. Had Guerlac actually said something of the sort (he probably did not), he would have been quoting Harvard’s George Sarton. Guerlac’s student Marie Boas Hall tells how Carl Stephenson, the Cornell medievalist, “turned seriously to the history of medieval technology, writing an excellent little article ‘In Praise of Medieval Tinkers.’” When he received an offprint, Sarton “replied brusquely, indeed rudely, that he was interested in medieval thinkers, not tinkers.” “Recollections of a History of Science Guinea Pig,” in Catching Up with the Vision: Essays on the Occasion of the 75th Anniversary of the Founding of the History of Science Society, ed. Margaret W. Rossiter, a supplement to Isis 90 (1999): S72. An understanding that there is a fanciful element to Mel’s tale—indeed, that it partakes of a classic “creation myth”—is owing to the research of Bruce Seely, the first scholar to investigate the Kranzberg Papers at the Smithsonian: Seely, “SHOT, the History of Technology, and Engineering Education,” Technology and Culture 36 (1995): 739–72.

17. Novick’s That Noble Dream is full of evidence, as is William Palmer’s From Gentleman’s Club to Professional Body: The Evolution of History Departments in the United States, 1940–1980 (http://www.booksurge.com, 2008). Novick quotes Arthur Schlesinger Sr. writing a letter on behalf of Oscar Handlin in 1935 and saying that he “has none of the offensive traits which some people associate with his race,” and another on behalf of Daniel Boorstin in 1934 saying that he “is a Jew, though not the kind to which one takes exception.” Novick also tells of Kranzberg’s advisor Brinton mentioning his fear that J. H. Hexter was “unemployable” (Novick, 172, 173). John Hope Franklin, who received his Harvard doctorate in 1941, along with Guerlac, writes that “the most traumatic experience I had there was not racist but anti-Semitic”—opposition to the idea of a Jewish president of the club for graduate students in American history, the Henry Adams Club (quoted in Jeremy Popkin, “The Historian-Autobiographers: Harvard in the Memoirs of Its Own History Scholars,” Harvard Magazine, November–December 2004, available online at http://harvardmagazine.com/2004/11/the-historian-autobiog.html [accessed 13 July 2009]).

18. I. B. Holley to the author, 29 August 2008. Holley adds that he, too, “joined the LJA Club,” and this was the beginning of a lifelong friendship. When Mel finally decided to give up the editorship of Technology and Culture in 1979, a very difficult decision, he entrusted Holley with chairing the search committee. Mel addressed anti-Semitism in print only once, in an article for The Reconstructionist (5 October 1956), a periodical that appeared under the aegis of a Jewish group influenced by John Dewey.

19. Melvin Kranzberg, The Siege of Paris, 1870–71: A Political and Social History (Ithaca, N.Y., 1950). Concluding a joint review with Jacques Desmarest’s La Défense Nationale, 1870–71 (Paris, 1949), Edward L. Katzenbach Jr. wrote that both books were “judicious, vital accounts, and deserve to be read widely” (American Historical Review 56 [1950]: 103). Katzenbach would later be instrumental in the publication of Technology and Western Civilization, edited by Kranzberg and Carroll Pursell under the aegis of the United States Armed Forces Institute, as well as contributing an essay to the second volume of that publication titled “The Mechanization of War, 1880–1919,” 548–61 (see Paul Ceruzzi, “‘A Broad Canvas’: Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll Pursell, eds., Technology and Western Civilization,” Technology and Culture 50 [July 2009]: 658–68). The Siege of Paris was reprinted by Greenwood in 1971 and still holds up well, even in the context of more ambitious books such as Alistair Horne’s The Fall of Paris (New York, 1965).

20. Guerlac is probably the first historian Mel knew who actually had a vital interest in technology; his dissertation was on the engineering school of Mézières under the Old Regime, and he would later write the official history of the U.S. radar program during World War II.

21. Gentleman Rebel (n. 15 above), 96. Hughes, who was two years ahead of Mel, writes of his “twinge of nostalgia for the simplicity of the Amherst I knew.” The faculty, about sixty in number, “resembled traditional French lycée professors in living, breathing, and serving to perpetuate as best they could the classics of the subjects they taught.”

22. Charles Cole to George Pettee, 19 March 1952, KP77. Because it touched the life of every citizen (unfairly, many felt), the OPA “had the stormiest history of all the wartime agencies” (Thomas G. Manning, The Office of Price Administration: A World War II Agency of Control [New York, 1960], xiii; see also Shane Hamilton, Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy [Princeton, 2008], 70–82). Perhaps Mel’s mail control system served him well later on when his own volume of mail reached titanic proportions. His correspondence archived by the Smithsonian fills 359 manuscript boxes, exclusive of hundreds more in a separate collection concerned with SHOT. A 141-page Register of the Melvin Kranzberg Papers, 1934–1988, compiled by Robert S. Harding, is available from the Archives Center, National Museum of American History.

23. Mel sent a copy of the first issue of T&C to Mrs. Nixon, asking her to call it to the attention of her husband, who was vice president. Mrs. Nixon wrote back to tell him that she would pass it on and also that she “enjoyed ever so much hearing from you again and your letter truly brought back very many memories.” Kranzberg to Mrs. Richard Nixon, 6 April 1960; Mrs. Nixon to Kranzberg, 11 May 1960, KP163.

24. “Missionary: An Interview with Melvin Kranzberg by Robert C. Post,” Invention and Technology, winter 1989, 36.

25. Kranzberg to Lynn White jr., 19 December 1984, KP217. Mel told about his MIS experiences many times but rarely mentioned the death of his three comrades. His thirty-year correspondence with White fills nearly an entire manuscript box and serves as a reminder of how fortunate historians are that long-distance telephone calls used to be expensive.

26. The lecturers at the École included Charles Morazé—author of The Logic of History—with whom Mel would later be involved in editorial work for UNESCO’s six-volume History of the Scientific and Cultural Development of Mankind, published by Allen and Unwin between 1963 and 1968.

27. Palmer, Engagement with the Past (n. 14 above), 91. The extensive roll of important historians born at nearly the same time as Mel and “tempered by war” (John F. Kennedy’s expression) includes William McNeill and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a few weeks older, and Eric Hobsbawm, a few months. JFK himself was born on 29 May 1917, Mel on 22 November, the day JFK died.

28. Among Mel’s “tutees” at Harvard was Bradford Perkins, who had also fought in the Battle of the Bulge. Later an honored historian of international relations at the University of Michigan, he first taught at UCLA. There, because he liked a senior thesis I wrote on Henry Lane Wilson, Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador to Mexico, Perkins suggested that I consider graduate school, and I now enjoy contemplating this fortuitous two-degrees-of-separation from Mel Kranzberg. Hoboken was not quite the barren island it might seem: Joseph Strayer, who later chaired the Princeton history department for two decades, taught at Stevens in the early 1930s.

29. Gilbert Allardyce, “The Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course,” American Historical Review 87 (1982): 717. For a revisionist take on the inception of Western Civilization courses, see Daniel A. Segal, “‘Western Civ’ and the Staging of History in American Higher Education,” American Historical Review 105 (2000): 770–805.

30. Mel loved telling how Robert Frost, having been informed of such a program, remarked,“Why? Are you going to roll him down a hill?” To which Mel replied, “No, uphill, and it helps to remove the square corners.”

31. Pinkney, “American Historians on the European Past” (see n. 1 above).

32. After long remaining classified, Brinton’s “Letters from Liberated France” were published in French Historical Studies 2 (1961): 1–27 and 133–56.

33. I appreciate Steve Thompson’s observations about Mel’s military service, that it was “no joke to be promised a commission and then denied it,” and that “they didn’t hand out Bronze Stars and CIBs to just anybody back then.”

34. With Pamela Laird’s superb Pull: Networking and Success since Benjamin Franklin (Cambridge, Mass., 2006) in mind, one can readily think of Mel’s career as a case study in the acquisition and deployment of social capital. (In the 1980s his Rolodex file was so immense that it always put me in mind of a ferris wheel.) The classic account of the SHOT creation story (“we were crestfallen as we walked down the hill from Guerlac’s home in Ithaca,” and so on) appears in John Staudenmaier’s Technology’s Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric (Cambridge, Mass., 1985). Mel embellished in 1991 when he was awarded the Bernal Prize by the Society for the Social Studies of Science.

35. Charles Cole to Frederick Dietz, 14 May 1951, KP77.

36. Charles Cole to Robert Shurter, 14 May 1951, KP77. Did a “basic rotation policy in the younger brackets” simply indicate that Amherst would offer its graduates “a running start on their careers,” but rarely promoted from within? Probably so, though Mel may have found it difficult to dismiss anti-Semitism as a contingent factor. In a review of Richard M. Cook’s Alfred Kazin: A Biography (New Haven, Conn., 2007), Edward Mendelson quotes Sir Isaiah Berlin: “There isn’t a Jew in the world known to me who somewhere inside them does not have a tiny drop of uneasiness vis-à-vis THEM, the majority among whom they live. They may be very friendly, they may be entirely happy, but one has to behave particularly well, because if we don’t behave well THEY won’t like us” (“New York Everyman,” New York Review of Books, 10 June 2008). In his Amherst memoir, English Papers: A Teaching Life (Saint Paul, Minn., 1996), 42, William H. Pritchard writes that at midcentury there were “very few Jews” on the faculty, and that the English department was “WASP to the core.” That soon changed: In 1957 the English department would appoint Leo Marx, and he would become dean of the Amherst faculty.

37. George S. Pettee to Kranzberg, 19 March 1951, KP240. Pettee was a Harvard Ph.D. who had taught there as well. The ORO, later known as the Research Analysis Corporation, initially operated under contract to Johns Hopkins University. See U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, A History of the Department of Defense Federally Funded Research and Development Centers, OTA-BP-ISS-157 (Washington, D.C., June 1995), available online at http://www.dau.mil/educdept/mm_dept_resources/reports/ OTA-History-FFRDC.pdf (accessed 13 July 2009).

38. Kranzberg, often short of worthy articles of any sort during T&C’s early years, usually kept this opinion to himself, but in a 1961 letter to Peter Drucker (18 May, KP88) he lamented “the constant struggle I must wage against those who want to limit the history of technology to a narrative account of the development of the ‘hardware.’” Yet T&C had hardware studies galore, often with a compelling problematique, as with Silvio Bedini’s “The Compartmented Cylindrical Clepsydra” and Robert Woodbury’s “The Legend of Eli Whitney and Interchangeable Parts,” which won the first two Usher Prizes in 1960 and 1961. In his March/June 2007 issue, the editor of History and Technology published an article in which the author alleged—with evidence nonexistent—that Mel sought to impose a “disciplinary orthodoxy” on the historiography of technology. For my response, see “Forman: An Exchange between Bob Post and John Krige,” History and Technology 24 (2008): 379–81.

39. On the involvement of historians with the CIA (and before that with the Office of Strategic Services), see Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939–1961 (New York, 1987), and In and Out of the Ivory Tower: The Autobiography of William L. Langer (New York, 1977).

40. Blair Stewart to Kranzberg, 8 March 1952, KP50. Cremeans was the author of The Reception of Calvinistic Thought in England (Urbana, Ill., 1949), whose reception in the AHR had been rather lukewarm.

41. Oberlin College LGBT Community History Project, “Behind the Masks— Professor Frederick Artz and the Cultural Stance of the ‘Queer,’” available online at http://www.oberlinlgbt.org/content/Behind-the-Masks/Professor-Frederick-Artz-/Cultural-Stance/professor-fredrick-artz-and-the-cultural-stance-of-the-queer-b-1894d-1983-page-1-of-2.html (accessed 13 July 2009).

42. Kranzberg to Blair Stewart, 11 April 1952, and to Frederick Artz, 15 April 1950 [sic, actually 1952], KP240.

43. Harry Dawe, “Barry McGill Revisited,” available online at http://www.oberlin. edu/alummag/oampast/oam_winter/barrymcgill.html (accessed 13 July 2009).

44. In collaboration with the Duke University military historian Theodore Ropp, also an Oberlin graduate, Pinkney later edited a Festschrift for Artz, who had been a mentor to literally dozens of top-tier scholars.

45. Donald McKay to Kranzberg, 13 February 1952, KP240.

46. Charles Cole to Robert L. Shurter, 20 April 1951, KP77

47. Seely (n. 16 above), 750 and passim.

48. Robert L. Shurter, “Today’s Education and Tomorrow’s Engineer,” General Electric Review 55 (September 1952): 8, quoted in Seely, 75.

49. William H. McNeill, quoted in Novick (n. 3 above), 313.

50. In November 1954, Mel got a letter from a Radcliffe junior who had been assigned to make a “qualitative analysis” of his book and had written him asking “What are your prejudices?” and “How has your background influenced the manner in which you write history?” Mel told her that he was “a solid bourgeois, New Deal-ish and anti-Marxist,” or at least “skeptical” of Marx, perhaps the result of “my work under Crane Brinton at Harvard.” Mel did not elaborate, but no doubt his reference was to moral absolutes and political abstractions, the same skepticism that runs throughout Brinton’s writings, notably The Lives of Talleyrand (New York, 1936). (Patricia Van Doren to Kranzberg, 19 November 1954; Kranzberg to Van Doren, 23 November 1954, KP240.) In his own book, Mel included an epilogue on the Paris Commune in which he refuted Marx’s attempt to foster a revolutionary mythology, calling this “unhistorical” because “it involved lifting the Commune out of its context in French history and conceiving it as an episode in socialist history occurring in a vacuum” (Kranzberg, The Siege of Paris [n. 19 above], 181).

51. Kranzberg to William H. Mitchell, Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 13 January 1954, KP283. Several other publishers had been interested in the textbook.

52. Herbert J. Muller to Kranzberg, 3 January 1955; Kranzberg to Muller, 25 January 1955, 9 May 1955, KP240. Mel was thrilled to hear from Muller, whose recently published The Uses of the Past: Profiles of Former Societies had garnered extravagant attention from reviewers, notably H. Stuart Hughes in the AHR (58 [1952]: 73–74): “If Toynbee has been likened to St. Augustine, Professor Muller may with no greater injustice be compared to Gibbon—a Gibbon chastened by a century and a half of turmoil and disaster, but still girded for battle with forces of barbarism and religion.”

53. Fenn College became part of Cleveland State University in 1965. On Watson, who was the very first person to send Mel a check for a SHOT membership, see Robert C. Post, “The Bridge at Mackinac Straits: Another Fiftieth Anniversary,” Technology and Culture 49 (July 2008): 755–56. The University of Detroit was offering courses in “Industrial Economic History” as early as 1930. My thanks to Pat Higo, archivist at the University of Detroit Mercy, for a rich yield of information from her search through course catalogs.

54. Kranzberg to Herbert J. Muller, 9 May 1955, KP240.

55. Kranzberg to Robert Stauffer, 20 April 1953, KP240.

56. Thomas P. Hughes to Kranzberg, 31 December 1957, KP122.

57. Harvard’s I. Bernard Cohen was recommending his student Robert Schofield as early as 1954, before he had finished his Ph.D. But Schofield was not hired by Case until 1960, to share with Mel “History of Science and Technology I and II” as well as to teach courses in the history of chemistry. See Pursell, “In Memoriam, Melvin Kranzberg” (n. 7 above), 408–9.

58. Kranzberg to W. Webster, 30 March 1955, KP167. The manuscript was John W. Oliver’s History of American Technology, which the Ronald Press subsequently published even though Mel said he was “very disappointed.”

59. Charles W. Cole, “Introduction: Laurence Bradford Packard, Anson D. Morse Professor of History at Amherst College,” in H. Stuart Hughes, ed., Teachers of History: Essays in Honor of Laurence Bradford Packard (Ithaca, N.Y., 1954), 1. Mel chaired a steering committee that identified seventy Packard students between 1927 and 1950, with Cole the earliest. A Packard honor student in 1940 was Mel’s friend Bill Holley, whose 1953 book, Ideas and Weapons, “remains fundamental to the current understanding of military technology” (Timothy Moy, “Structure Ascendant: I. B. Holley, Ideas and Weapons,” Technology and Culture 46 [October 2005]: 797–804, quote on 804).

60. Geoffrey Bruun, review of Teachers of History, in American Historical Review 60 (1955): 576–77. Among the other contributors were Paul L. Ward, who would become president of Sarah Lawrence College and executive director of the AHA, and John Whitney Hall, who would reinterpret the Tokugawa period in terms of Japan’s modernization and become director of the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan. Another was the prolific American historian Edwin Rozwenc. In his own essay, Hughes cast a revisionist eye on the political theorist Gaetano Mosca.

61. Kranzberg to H. Stuart Hughes, 26 June 1953, KP240.

62. In this he was like Stewart’s Americanist colleague at Western Reserve, Harvey Wish (the first member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences who was Jewish, as was Mel in Humanities and Social Studies at Case), whose attempts to relocate are said to have “become chronic.” “History of the Department: The Mid-Twentieth Century, the War Years to the 1960s,” available online at http://www.cwru.edu/artsci/hsty/hsty4.html (accessed 13 July 2009).

63. Thomas LeDuc to Kranzberg, 6 April 1955; Kranzberg to LeDuc, 8 April 1955, KP140. The opening at Nebraska had been created by the departure of the charismatic Eugene Anderson for UCLA, which, with others soon to come, was building one of the strongest history departments in the country.

64. Charles Cole to Kranzberg, 9 April 1955, KP77.

65. Charles Cole to James Lee Sellers, 22 April 1955, KP77.

66. Mel’s monthly take-home pay was $485. “My financial situation is terrifying,” he confessed to an official of his temple, and his nephew Kenneth tells how “the company sent him money every year,” sometimes several thousand dollars. Mel never passed up a chance for extra income: lectures, summer sessions, manuscript critiques. At one point he had an idea for reinventing himself as a news analyst and tried to interest a Cleveland radio station in a program called “Behind and Ahead of the Headlines.” He discussed with Glennan a plan for writing a history of Case, which Shurter advised against because of Mel’s commitment to the textbook. Here was real irony, for the textbook was the one project that promised substantial income . . . and it was never finished. There is nothing sadder in the Kranzberg Papers than the records of the Macmillan project, with two boxes of correspondence and a dozen boxes of draft manuscript. After things had dragged on for thirteen years—with Case’s director of public relations brought in as a rewrite man and with Mel’s fabled optimism stretched beyond all reason—Macmillian dropped the project, its history editor telling the authors that they simply did not understand “historical writing at this level” (Robert J. Patterson to Kranzberg, Buchanan, and Jellema, 26 January 1968, KP284). While this remark was rather unfair to the authors, they certainly did need to be taught a lesson about deadlines.

67. Gordon Wright, “In Memoriam: David H. Pinkney,” French Historical Studies 18 (1994): iii–vii, quoted in “David Pinkney, French Historian,” available online at http:// www.washington.edu/research/showcase/1966c.html (accessed 13 July 2009). Pinkney was the secretary-treasurer for the first six years. He was also the second editor of the society’s journal, from 1967 to 1976, and served on the editorial board for twenty-seven years. See Edward Berenson and Nancy L. Green, “The Society for French Historical Studies: The Early Years,” French Historical Studies 28 (2005): 579–600.

68. Unlike most less gregarious people, Mel actually seems to have enjoyed making local arrangements, and only a month later he took a similar role for a Cleveland meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine.

69. David Pinkney to Stewart, Kranzberg, et al., 28 March 1959, KP279.

70. Once he had decided to start a new society, Mel was strikingly frank about his ambitions, telling Lynn White that he “should like to occupy the same position in relation to the Society [SHOT] as Boyd Schaefer does with the AHA, i.e., secretary of the organization and editor of its journal, both on a permanent basis” (Kranzberg to White, 31 March 1958, KP217). (The SFHS was in many ways a mirror image of SHOT, even to a creation story about French historians having been slighted by the AHA, just as historians of technology were said to have been slighted by the History of Science Society.) Eventually, and probably inevitably, there would be a perception that Mel had “too much power,” and for what happened at that point see Robert C. Post, “‘A Very Special Relationship’: SHOT and the Smithsonian’s Museum of History and Technology,” Technology and Culture 42 (July 2001): 401–35, esp. 432–33.

71. Seely (n. 16 above), 753. The ASEE report was published as “General Education in Engineering” in the Journal of Engineering Education 46 (1956): 619–750.

72. Records of the ASEE Humanistic-Social Research Project are archived with the North Carolina State University Libraries Special Collections Research Center in Raleigh. In the summer of 1956, Mel arranged a symposium at Iowa State with a session on pedagogy that featured Condit, Alfred Chandler, and several other notables, including Henry Guerlac!

73. Kranzberg to Mrs. George Gullette, 11 February 1970, KP112. Italics added.

74. Kranzberg to Marie Boas, 16 October 1956, Records of the Society for the History of Technology, Record Group 400, Box 1, Archives Center, National Museum of American History (hereafter SHOT and the box number: SHOT 1). Boas, whom Mel had known when they both lived in Amherst, had just succeeded Thomas Kuhn as HSS secretary and was shortly to join the faculty at UCLA and later to be joined by her new spouse, A. Rupert Hall. Boas, who first stirred my own enthusiasm for historiography, died in March 2009, as did Hall.

75. Lynn White to Kranzberg, 14 November 1956, SHOT 1. The correspondence from this period with White, Boas, Guerlac, Gullette, and many others is online at the SHOT website (“Looking Back: Selections from the Kranzberg Papers,” http://fiftieth. shotnews.net/?cat=15> [accessed 13 July 2009]).

76. Kranzberg to Marie Boas, 20 November 1956, SHOT 1.

77. Kranzberg to Bernadotte Schmitt, 13 March 1959, KP240. Mel had led off his Heath pamphlet with Schmitt’s “1848—as Seen from 1948,” reprinted from Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society.

78. Kranzberg to Robert E. Carlson, 20 February 1959, KP50. This is one of the more remarkable letters in the Kranzberg Papers, some 4,000 words of history and autobiography. Of course nothing came of Mel’s proposed move to Pitt, though Carlson became a faithful reviewer for Technology and Culture and Mel repaid his loyalty with an upbeat review of The Liverpool and Manchester Railway Project, 1821–1831 (New York, 1969) in the American Historical Review 75 (1970): 2056–57, one of many reviews he wrote for the AHR throughout his career, as well as reviews for The Historian and Journal of Modern History.

79. Kranzberg to Charles Cole, draft, January 1958, KP77.

80. Kranzberg to William H. Davenport, draft, 11 March 1958, KP82. Although this position went to John Rae, Mel remained in close contact with Davenport, chair of the department and one of the “Seven Samurai” who comprised the original Harvey Mudd faculty. Later they would collaborate on an anthology from Technology and Culture, and Mel would become a candidate for provost at Claremont. As for UCLA, Lynn White did not abandon his enthusiasm for getting Mel to Westwood for a long time, asking him as late as 1967 (3 April, KP 217), “In specific and realistic terms, what would be necessary to move you and your shop here?”

81. Kranzberg to Charles Cole, 9 March 1959, KP73.

82. David H. Pinkney, “The Dilemma of the American Historian of Modern France,” French Historical Studies 1 (1958): 19–20.

83. Mel described the bleak situation with Shurter (the two had not spoken in nearly a year) and Heald’s rescue in a letter to White (9 July 1959, KP217). And in a memorable conversation during SHOT’s fiftieth-anniversary meeting in October 2007—with Carroll Pursell, Bruce Sinclair, Darwin Stapleton, Donna Stapleton, Bo’s wife Barbara, and me present—Bo recounted the crisis from his own perspective. As he relived the bustle of the society’s formative years, when he taught a course he called “Technology in American History and Thought,” all of us realized that this remarkable man was the unsung hero in SHOT annals. Before coming to Case, Bo had been an author of the so-called Yale Report commissioned by the CIA’s Sherman Kent (also a Yale history professor) to show how much the USSR could know about U.S. military preparedness just from unclassified sources: see Winks, Cloak and Gown (n. 39 above), 457–61. Though Winks identified Heald as “an instructor in history with an interest in technology,” he would largely make his mark as a scholar in American studies. Bo arrived at Case in 1953 and retired as Samuel B. and Virginia C. Knight Professor of Humanities in 1988, which was also the year that Pursell returned to Case, where he had first taught between 1963 and 1965 and had played an essential role in the launch of a pathbreaking survey, coedited with Kranzberg, Technology and Western Civilization (see Ceruzzi, “‘A Broad Canvas’” [n. 19 above]).

84. Kranzberg to Henry Guerlac, 28 June 1957, SHOT 1; Kranzberg to Roger Howley, 22 October 1958, KP284.

85. At the time of the departmental crisis, Mel confessed to being “mentally exhausted,” one of the unusual occasions when his correspondence reveals something of his private state of mind, which must seldom have been tranquil in his Case years. On the verge of retirement from Georgia Tech, he wrote to an old friend: “Looking back on my own career, I sometimes wonder whether I did the wise thing in moving from Case 15 years ago. But there were developments in my personal life—especially a new wife—that made the move seem very attractive” (Kranzberg to W. David Lewis, 6 January 1987, KP142). The new wife was Deaux, who died at age fifty in 1979, breaking Mel’s heart. Mel would find Les, a love as dear as Deaux, and they would marry in 1984. But to try and understand what it means that there were three other wives while Mel was at Case, Nancy, Eva, and Heidi? Charles Beard once cautioned that he could “never write the life of anyone” because of his awe for the complexity of human personality. In The Nature of Biography (New York, 1957), 11, John Garraty quotes Beard and also these lines from T. S. Eliot’s The Confidential Clerk: “There’s always something one’s ignorant of/About anyone, however well one knows them/And that may be something of the greatest importance.”

86. Carroll Pursell to the author, 19 May 2008.

87. Mel’s concern about parochialism is echoed in the Richard Cook biography of Alfred Kazin (n. 36 above, e.g., 94), a book that continually engenders reflections about Kranzberg. Kazin, two years older, many times married, with spouses who may have “felt trapped in the role of duty-bound faculty wife” (Cook, 191), began a teaching stint at Amherst—at Cole’s invitation—three years after Mel left.

88. Gus Giebelhaus, “In Memoriam, Melvin Kranzberg (1917–1995): Georgia Tech Years,” Technology and Culture 37 (1996): 417. Mel might have written as compelling a World War II memoir as Brooke Hindle’s Lucky Lady and the Navy Mystique or Henry May’s account of the battle of Okinawa in his Coming to Terms: A Study in Memory and History. (May was similarly charged with interrogating prisoners about gun emplacements.) Mel understood that “a great many Americans put on a different personality in wartime and took it off with their uniforms” (May, p. 294), and yet, when ICOHTEC met in Lerbach nearly forty years after the end of the war, he still found it difficult “not to visit the sins of the fathers upon their sons.” My heartfelt appreciation to Karen Freeze for sharing with me Mel’s letters about the war; you are missed.

89. Mel boasted to Cole that there were only three such grants, the others going to Harry Wolfe, the editor of Isis, and to Bernard Cohen, “a big name in the history of science” (7 May 1959, KP77). Mel soon stepped right into a leading role with the IUHPS as secretary.

90. Robert P. Multhauf, “In Memoriam, Melvin Kranzberg (1917–1995): Inventor,” Technology and Culture 37 (1996): 406 (emphasis added).

91. Melvin Kranzberg, “T. Keith Glennan (1905–1995),” Technology and Culture 37 (1996): 659.

92. Arthur P. Molella, “The First Generation: Usher, Mumford, and Giedion,” in Stephen H. Cutcliffe and Robert C. Post, eds., In Context: History and the History of Technology—Essays in Honor of Melvin Kranzberg (Bethlehem, Pa., 1989), 88.

93. Pamela O. Long, “The Annales and the History of Technology: Annales d’histoire économique et sociale 7 (November 1935), Les techniques, l’histoire et la vie,” Technology and Culture 46 (January 2005): 178.

94. Isis 41 (March 1950): 47.

95. S. Colum Gilfillan to Kranzberg, 15 March 1957, SHOT 1.

96. Gentleman Rebel (n. 15 above), 95.

97. Oscar Handlin, Truth in History (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 417. Nearly all the contributors to a new book edited by James R. Banner Jr. and John R. Gillis, Becoming Historians (Chicago, 2009), make similar remarks. On “timing” and the postwar trajectory of history in academe, worth noting is the membership of learned societies. In the first years after Mel went to Case in 1952, membership in the AHA was flat at around 5,600; in the five years after 1956, there was an increase of 3,000 members to nearly 9,000. Was history of technology a specialization with a “dubious” rationale (per Leo Marx), merely a manifestation of “careerism” (per David Noble)? Believe what you will, but, when T&C had reached only its fourth year, circulation topped 1,300, a remarkable indication of Mel’s success in bringing together a large and diverse group of men and women “who were but slightly conscious of their common interest” (Brooke Hindle, foreword to Staudenmaier, Technology’s Storytellers [n. 34 above], ix).

98. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973), 19.

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This is the 200th issue of T&C and the ninety-fifth with which Bob Post has had an editorial role, a contingency he could never, ever have imagined when he first sent Mel Kranzberg a manuscript in 1970. For help with this essay, he wishes to express his deep appreciation to Alison Oswald and her colleagues at the Archives Center, National Museum of American History; thanks to Hans-Joaquim Braun, Jim Williams, Timo Myllyntaus, Wolfhard Weber, David Zimmerman, and Wendy Tyler for facilitating the pres- entation of an early version at ICOHTEC’s annual Kranzberg Lecture at the University of Victoria, B.C., in August 2008; thanks to Mia Clark, Chris Eareckson, Joyce Macijeski, and their colleagues at the Talbot County Free Library for their interlibrary loan alacrity; and thanks for many different reasons to Edward Berenson, Larry Bird, Angus Buchanan, Paul Ceruzzi, Steve Cutcliffe, Mimi Dakin, Gus Giebelhaus, Bart Hacker, Daryl Hafter, Bo and Barbara Heald, Pat Higo, Bill Holley, Kenneth Kranzberg, Miriam Levin, Art Molella, Carroll Pursell, Alex Roland, Len Rosenband, Matt Roth, Joe Schultz, Bruce Seely, Howard Segal, John Servos, Bruce Sinclair, Harold Skramstad, John Staudenmaier, Jeffrey Stine, Jody Thompson, Steve Thompson, Steve Usselman, Eugene Uyeki, Roz Williams, Julie Wosk, and most especially Dian Post. He also wishes to take this opportunity to correct two errors in previous articles about the history of SHOT: Marie Boas Hall was related to Franz Boas but was not his daughter, and Bo Heald was a signatory to SHOT’s charter but did not accompany Mel to the Cuyahoga County Courthouse when it was filed.

©2009 by the Society for the History of Technology.