Understanding the transnational networks that shape the power of technology in the contemporary world is a complex and difficult proposition. Only a bird’s eye view can reveal the patterns, flows, and imbalances that map the distribution of technologies and the powers they serve or exert. Yet the view from above is always partial; it runs the risk of deceiving us into thinking that some places don’t matter enough to deserve our attention. This is a dangerous illusion. We must land in unfamiliar places and study them on their own terms. The result is necessarily a fractured history.

John McDermott’s 1969 essay “Technology: The Opiate of the Intellectuals” was once part of the history of technology canon. Revisiting it offers one measure of how far the field has traveled in four decades—and where it might go.

Shane Hamilton’s history of the independent trucking industry adds a lot to our understanding of the emergence of a low-wage, low-price, retail-driven economy in the postwar United States, and offers a strikingly original explanation of the shift away from New Deal economic liberalism.

Frank Donoghue thinks that humanities professors, as we usually imagine them, are on the road to extinction—and that the humanities have been complicit in their own demise.

In his elegant and thought-provoking Liquid City: Megalopolis and the Contemporary Northeast, John Rennie Short revisits and updates Jean Gottmann’s conception of the supermetropolitan urban region.

More than 150 books have been published through the NASA history program since it was founded by NASA’s first administrator, T. Keith Glennan. The current strengths of space history are evident in a new volume edited by Steven J. Dick and Roger D. Launius, Societal Impact of Spaceflight. Some weaknesses are apparent as well.

Material knowledge and recycling matter to people who live in an economy of scarcity and face the gradual deterioration of their built environment. In Synthetic Socialism, Eli Rubin makes skillful use of such insights as he traces the history of the East German welfare dictatorship through the ascension of plastic.