Technology and Culture

By Michael Bess
Some of the most important watersheds in human history have been associated with new applications of technology in everyday life: the shift from stone to metal tools, the transition from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture, the substitution of steam power for human and animal energy. Today we are in the early stages of a similarly epochal change. But this time around, the new techniques and technologies are transforming not our tools, our methods of food production, our means of manufacturing. We ourselves are being refashioned. We are applying our ingenuity to the challenge of redesigning our own physical and mental capabilities. And we are unprepared for the dramatic and destabilizing changes we are about to experience.

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
Hype pervades research into nanotechnology. In Nano-Hype, David Berube examines the various reasons that supporters of the NNI and nanotechnology have used to justify the massive commitment of funds: enormous economic payoffs in the form of new technologies; fundamental transformations in the nature of science and technology itself; the insuring of national competitiveness and national security. But he also surveys the field at this stage of its history, and the book is a comprehensive primer on the process of developing nanotechnology.

Stephen Richards
Since it returned from the Falkland Islands in 1970, the SS Great Britain has been a powerful symbol for the city of Bristol and its maritime history. The ship was designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and was launched at Bristol in 1843; she was both the world’s largest ship and the first screw-propelled ocean-going [...]

Thomas J. Misa
For many years historians of technology have been arguing that technology needs to be understood in a contextual and historical framework, situated within ongoing social and political processes; above all, that it is not to be understood as an exogenous force with outside impacts. This message is beginning to seep into mainstream historical [...]