Technology and Culture

By Jon C. Teaford
In 1974 Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York debuted to the applause and acclaim of those fed up with the superhighway and slum-clearance policies of the recent past. The massive book portrayed Moses as an arrogant bastard who wreaked irreparable damage on the city and precipitated its fall from glory and transformation into a bankrupt, decaying hulk. In 2007, however, a Columbia University exhibition and symposium on Moses forced a reconsideration of his character and his legacy. But Moses’ fluctuating reputation is also a product of changing views of democracy and technology.

By Sharon Irish
Carl Condit’s The Chicago School of Architecture: A History of Commercial and Public Building in the Chicago Area, 1875–1925 deeply influenced the history of building technology and the history of urban form—so deeply that his midcentury interpretations have been frustratingly long-lived. Condit’s powerful prose and compelling polemics in The Chicago School have carried effectively across the decades, shaping the history of tall buildings into a myth that has its own shifting history.

By Bruce Seely
It is the rare scholar of American transportation history who has not used George Rogers Taylor’s The Transportation Revolution as the launchpad for his or her own research, and it remains a classic work of technological history.

By John Cloud
It is fifty years since the publication of A. Hunter Dupree’s Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities. No one would attempt such a project today, but after half a century the book still speaks to the present.

By Jeffrey Stine
Donald Worster’s 1979 Dust Bowl was a pioneering exploration of a profound ecological and economic crisis. History, for Worster, involves place: that context in which stories unfold, whose contours are shaped both by nature and by technology.

By Steven Usselman
Alfred Chandler’s magisterial history of the rise of big business in the United States remains a vibrant force in contemporary intellectual life. In helping us identify broadly felt, less resistible tendencies inherent in certain technologies, he helps us comprehend more clearly what remains in play.

By Megan Mullen
“Although McLuhan’s name is no longer a buzzword in the popular vernacular—or even in the communication classroom—we are living in an era when [his] predictions . . . are in evidence all around us. His variety of technological determinism is instructive.”

By George O’Har
Walter Prescott Webb’s The Great Plains cuts across geology, physiography, climatology, botany, zoology, anthropology, history, and literature to venture to the very boundaries of what historians are comfortable in calling history.