Race and gender theory can illuminate the boundaries we construct between technology and not-technology and help us explore the full implications of applying broad analytical definitions of the scholarly category “technology” to the historical stories we tell.

Both gender and race were largely absent from the history of technology in the early decades of the field. Twenty years ago historians of technology began urging one another to take gender seriously, and many have done so. Translating similar if more recent calls to take race seriously into action has proven more challenging. Part of the difficulty is the process of conducting the research upon which all historical scholarship must rest. We cannot rely on the archives or methods that have well served many others engaged in the history of technology to serve the study of race and technology.

Over its first fifty years SHOT has regularly reached out to a wide audience and sought to engage public concerns. In this essay, Colin Divall uses the history of transport and mobility to explore how that engagement might be reinvigorated, arguing that it will mean re-examining of some of the field’s fundamental professional assumptions and the recognition of a different kind of historiography.

The history of technology is a self-critical field, as many of NSF-sponsored essays published in this anniversary year’s volume of T&C demonstrate. The critical stance is essential, given the importance of that history to so many consequential questions in the present. But, as Bob Post notes in the concluding essay of a multipart reflection on Mel Kranzberg and the society he founded, which centers on Kranzberg’s long friendship and fruitful collaboration in SHOT and T&C with Peter Drucker, the payoff has been essential dialogue and a rich body of literature.

Concluding thoughts on authors, editing, and the journal, as it transitions to a new editorial team.

The Michigan Central Station is a singular ruin in a city that epitomizes decline. It is ironic that in the Motor City the most eloquent symbol of the ebbing of a technological system, and the culture in which it thrived, has far less to do with cars than with what cars displaced.

What makes the history of nuclear technology interesting or relevant in the post-cold-war era? Two new books give very different answers. But both Lawrence Badash’s A Nuclear Winter’s Tale and John Mueller’s Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda try to make the story of the nuclear arms race relevant to a new generation haunted not by nightmares of nuclear war but by memories of falling towers, and in different ways both succeed.

Loretta Lorance’s Becoming Bucky Fuller pays him the same kind of serious attention that Lewis Mumford has received—and confirms that his greatest invention was himself.

Roe Smith’s masterpiece broke new ground in 1977, when it won the OAH’s Frederick Jackson Turner Prize, and it remains a definitive model of how to write the history of technology.