For Americans, a trip to the European heartland has become routine. It was not so in 1959, when the authors made it for the first time. In 2010 they retraced those steps, a “generational journey of return and remembrance” that sparked this graceful reflection on time and chance, change and continuity.

Technology is an essential ingredient in the sound of rock and roll, and yet its presence in the Rock Hall of Fame is muted. But a reopened and expanded exhibit building on the original installation features a timeline of audio technology and displays devoted to three individuals—Les Paul, Alan Freed, and Sam Phillips—whose made pioneering contributions to the technology of radio, recording, and performance.

What is the motive force for scientific innovation? A deceptively straightforward question to which scholars offer different answers. A new history of the development of pyrotechny in the early modern period by Simon Werrett offers an intriguing affirmation of the thesis that the motive force for scientific innovation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was located in the interaction between artisans and scholars, and that crafts made a significant contribution to the creation of a “new science.”

While fifty years ago “history from below” reacted against the top-down approach typical of political and military history, recently what we might call “history from between” has presented a corrective to top-down and Eurocentric histories. The essays in this collection, exemplars of that historiographic trend, are particularly concerned wiht the processes of knowledge production that underwrite, and partly constitute, modern intellectual and economic power.

Asif Siddiqi’s masterly interweaving of social and political history with the narrative of technology development make this volume essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the interplay of science, technology, and Russian society in the twentieth century.