Technology and Culture

By Edmund Russell and Jennifer Kane
Historians, like other researchers, increasingly cite sources from the Internet. Scholars in the sciences, however, have raised alarms about the frequency with which Internet sources have disappeared after their citation in journals. Do humanists and social scientists face the same problem? This article examined the reliability of World Wide Web citations in two leading history journals over seven years and found that 18 percent of web links referenced over that period were inactive, and that the problem increased over time. These findings suggest that historians (and probably other humanists) face a major problem in scholarly practice: we are citing Internet sources as though they were permanent, when in fact they are ephemeral.

By Molly Berger
Second Life is a darling of the media and of tech enthusiasts, a virtual, 3-D graphical world where people adopt avatars that may or may not resemble their real-life personas. Corporations as well as educational and cultural institutions are setting up shop there, hoping to attract customers and serve patrons and students in a hip, twenty-first-century kind of way. Molly Berger decided it might be a good virtual classroom for a seminar on culture and computers for first-year engineering students at Case Western Reserve.

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 Dennis E. Showalter
Recent books by Charles Stephenson, Kim Coleman, and Jonathan Tucker trace the history of chemical warfare from its roots in the nineteenth century to the modern era and present-day concerns about terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

By Marcel O’Gorman
The title of Lisa Gitelman’s Always Already New hammers home the idea that all media were once new media. But this monograph does not concern itself with making that argument once again as much as it does with correcting Marshall McLuhan’s dictum of “the medium is the message” and Friedrich Kittler’s that “media determine our situation.” What matters to Gitelman, beyond the materiality of media itself, is fleshing out the social and economic forces into which new media are born.

By Matthew Hersch
Unsurprisingly, the upcoming fortieth anniversary of the first journey by humans to the surface of the Moon has inspired new works on the program that took them there. Perhaps when the politics of the 1960s no longer have the same power to inflame, historians will feel less compelled to spill ink on the opportunity cost of Apollo and focus their attentions more clearly on some of its more interesting implications—like where spaceflight fits into a long history of “big” science, “big” technology, and “big” government.

By Robert C. Post

“[A] seeking mind always filled with new projects”—so wrote Silvio Bedini in his T&C memorial for Bern Dibner, who died in 1988 at the age of ninety. Exactly the same might be said of Silvio, who died at ninety on 14 November 2007.