Robert Moses is the most reviled man in the history of American urban planning. But recently a trio of exhibits in New York City, mounted this past spring in coordination with a symposium at Columbia University and the publication of an extensive catalog of Moses’s public works projects, summed up the extent to which historians’ perspectives on this brilliant and arrogant man have evolved.

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.

In 1892, when this photo of Frederick Wood and John Fowler of the Temple Street Cable Railway in Los Angeles demonstrating their cable-rail system was taken, electric streetcars were about to cast these two capable men into historical obscurity. One wonders whether the men at General Motors who have filled their basket with so many eggs bearing names like Suburban, Escalade, and Hummer have a similar sense of apprehension.

“E-books” are increasingly common, and scholars are being encouraged to publish electronically; Sarah Lowengard’s The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe is a case in point. It is worth pondering how traditional ideas of what makes a scholarly book will have to change in the face of that trend.

Neil Kamil’s Fortress of the Soul: Violence, Metaphysics, and Material Life in the Huguenots’ New World, 1517–1751, is a monumental work, a brilliant tapestry of objects, texts, artisanal networks, apocalyptic battles, and political maneuvers. Kamil elaborates the political context and material forms of an “artisanal soulishness” that stretches over two centuries and serves as the refuge, means of mobility, and stable center of unity for Huguenot Protestant culture in its diaspora throughout the Atlantic world.

In 2006, Tom Tits Experiment, a science center located south of Stockholm in Södertälje, Sweden, received the European Museum Forum’s Micheletti Award, a prize established in 1996 that goes to the year’s most promising technical or industrial museum. How does a hands-on science center capture a prize intended for technology museums?

Arnold Reisman’s Turkey’s Modernization brings to light the little-known story of how Turkey welcomed (and thus saved) several hundred prominent, predominantly Jewish, intellectuals, scientists, doctors, legal scholars, architects, librarians, and musicians fleeing the Nazis. Absent that welcome, the knowledge and expertise of these Jewish scientists and artists might have been lost forever—and Turkey’s own modernization and educational and social reforms set back as well.