Do humanists and social scientists face the same problem? This research note marks the first published attempt to answer that question in any field of the humanities or social sciences.{2} We examined the reliability of World Wide Web citations in two leading history journals (Journal of American History and American Historical Review) over seven years and found that 18 percent of web links cited over that period were inactive. The problem increased over time. In articles published seven years earlier, 38 percent of web citations were dead. A digital archive enabled us to locate 57 percent of the missing web pages, leaving 43 percent unavailable even to scholars who use the archive. 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.

Readers who have used the Internet already know that web links die. The contribution of this research note is to quantify the extent of the problem and place it on our professional agenda. Historians of technology are well positioned to consider this problem because of our focus on the interaction between tools and social practice.

In the first section, we briefly survey the development of source citations as integral parts of historical practice. The key point here is that historians over time increasingly valued comprehensive, verifiable references for information in their texts. The footnote evolved in tandem with this desire, especially as history professionalized in the nineteenth century. Central to the success of this system was the reliance on a particular technology, paper. The second section comments on the introduction of a new technology, the Internet, as a historical source. In the third section we turn to the heart of this research note, our quantitative analysis of the reliability of the Internet as a source for historians. The fourth section discusses some efforts to address the problem of “link rot” by creating archives of web sites, and it describes the way we tested the completeness of the archive. We conclude with a call for professional societies and journals to create better means for ensuring the durability of Internet citations.

Documentation and Paper

Before the modern era, historians felt little need to document their sources in footnotes. Political historians wrote under a rhetorical tradition that focused on lessons in virtue and vice, and they prized the conveyance of moral and political lessons that would be valid in all times and places. They alluded to authorities, but often eschewed citing chapter and verse and expected readers to trust their veracity. Some fields, notably law, developed systems for citing sources as early as the Middle Ages, but these practices apparently had little impact on historiography.{3}

The footnote flowered in the nineteenth century as a way to prove historical arguments. During the eighteenth century, the footnote was an entertaining form of literary art, and its popularity in fiction helped the footnote spread to historical writings. Its importance grew in the nineteenth century as history professionalized. Archives and libraries opened their collections to more scholars, including younger historians, who now had to demonstrate their mastery of a literature rather than allude to authorities. A professional culture developed in which historians made their arguments in the text and proved them in the footnotes.{4}

If the purpose of a footnote was to prove assertions, other historians needed to be able to examine the same material. Scholars developed conventions that enabled them to retrace one another’s steps. Publication information sufficed for books and journals because readers could find them in multiple bookstores and libraries. Citations of archival material required enough data to locate both the archives and the documents within them. Oral historians created a durable record of ephemeral words by depositing transcripts and tapes of interviews in archives. When using material stored by no institution, authors cited it as belonging to their personal collections.{5}

Almost all these practices placed a premium on a particular technology: paper. Paper did not provide truly permanent storage—libraries and archives burned or were bombed, insects chewed their way through pages, acidic paper rotted of its own accord, and the trash beckoned for administrators who ran out of room for books and files. But paper had a number of virtues. In proper conditions, it survived for long periods even if neglected. People could access the information on a page without the aid of other technologies (although some, such as eyeglasses, proved useful). Printing presses made it easy to store copies in multiple places, increasing the odds of survival.

Computers and the Internet

The development of a new technology—personal computers—revolutionized some fields of history in the late twentieth century. Historical demographers, for example, could collect and analyze vast amounts of data. Personal computers made it easy to store and copy files, and they saved the tedium of calculating how much space to leave for footnotes at the bottom of a page of typescript. But computers also made it harder to retrace a historian’s steps. Examining source data usually meant asking for another historian’s computer files. One could not read the early data directly; it required a machine to translate binary data into numbers, letters, or other code legible to human beings. The machines that produced and read these data became obsolete in short order, making older files hard or impossible to access. Storage media, such as magnetic tapes and disks, rotted away in a matter of years. Data preservation required frequent copying and updating to suit new machines (or saving old machines for occasional use).

Digital technology—an Internet linking vast numbers of computers—offered several advantages to historians: it eased and democratized access to data; it enabled libraries and archives to disseminate facsimiles of rare and unique documents while protecting fragile originals; researchers could copy electronic information quickly and reliably. Internet content expanded at an exponential rate, and search engines such as Google indexed over a billion web pages.{6} With the aid of hypertext, historians could navigate among electronic sources and break down conceptual boundaries.{7}

At the same time, the Internet posed challenges. Those who posted information also could revise it, so visitors to the same site might not always find the same information.{8} Web sites, or pages within them, often disappeared. No one policed the veracity of most sites. History sites came from both academics and amateurs, and the latter often had little sense of professional standards.{9} The concept of “learning all there is to know” became unrealistic in the face of information glut. As Roy Rosenzweig put it, historians faced the problem of “simultaneous fragility and promiscuity of digital data.”{10} Many historians, however, did not view fragility as a problem. Almost half (46 percent) of historians polled in 2002 believed that Internet sources were permanent enough to be cited in professional publications.{11}

Humanists developed new professional standards to adapt to this new technology. Style manuals added sections on web sources and counseled the inclusion of the Universal (now Uniform) Resource Locator (URL) as the key to enabling others to find the same data. It became standard practice to include the date when an author viewed a particular web site. This measure acknowledged that posted information changed, but it did not enable researchers to find earlier versions of revised documents or sites that disappeared.

Fig. 1 Total Internet citations. This figure pools the data for American Historical Review and Journal of American History. It only reflects data from 2000–2005 because all issues for those years were searchable on the History Cooperative web site (versus incomplete runs for 1999 and 2006). Thus, although the growth of Internet citations flattened during 2004–05, it might have increased later. Each journal had posted one 2006 issue by April 2006; those two issues included 40 web citations. If this rate continued in the seven subsequent issues for that year, 2006 would have seen 180 web citations.

When discussing the reliability of Internet citations humanists tended to focus more on students than on their peers. They rarely discussed durability and instead emphasized what they saw as a tendency among students to assume the veracity of web sources and to rely on them to the exclusion of books and journals. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that any reader can edit, became the touchstone for debates about accuracy. Instructors created rules about whether and how students could cite online sources.{12}

Testing the Reliability of Internet Citations

This research note shifts the focus from the classroom to the professor’s study, and from the accuracy of information to its durability. It quantifies the rate at which Internet documents disappeared after being cited in history journals. In order to give Internet citations the strongest chance of proving reliable, we selected two journals known for their high standards of scholarship, peer review, and editing: Journal of American History and American Historical Review. We examined only research articles, since they undergo peer review and are expected to thoroughly document sources. We narrowed our study to the most common type of Internet source, the World Wide Web. Both journals have posted all their issues from June 1999 to early 2006 on the web site of the History Cooperative, so we used that site’s keyword search function to find all occurrences of “www” or “http” (parts of the URL of World Wide Web sites) in all research articles.{13} All searches took place between 10–19 April 2006.

We first documented the number of times that articles cited the Internet. Next we graphed the data and performed a regression analysis to look for trends over time. Finally, we tested the reliability of links by trying to access all of them with a web browser. We avoided introducing typographical or pasting errors by clicking directly on URLs in the online (History Cooperative) version of each article. The result of each click led us to classify a link as active or inactive. In the active category we included links that took us directly or indirectly (via a redirect) to an active site. Because our focus was on the durability of Internet sites, we did not verify the accuracy of the cited information within the sites themselves, nor did we try to gauge whether the information had been revised since the author had cited it.{14}

In the inactive category, we included links that directly or indirectly (via a redirect) produced error messages. We did not try to determine whether an entire web site or just a page was unavailable, because both resulted in the inability to locate cited information. We counted sites that denied access because we lacked a password as inactive; such protection made the information as unavailable to readers as did taking it down. Our measure of inactivity is conservative because we used computers on a university network with access to large numbers of online databases that require subscriptions.

Results

A significant number of articles—a total of 132—cited the web (table 1). Between them, these articles included a total of 510 web citations. The degree of reliance differed: more than twice as many articles in the Journal of American History cited the web compared to the American Historical Review (96 versus 36), and the maximum number of citations in a single article was also twice as large (44 versus 20). The average number of citations per article, however, varied less: 4.1 versus 3.3 respectively. The overall average number of citations per article, 3.9, suggests that reliance on the web was broad but shallow.

The trend in reliance was less clear (fig. 1). After surging between 2000 and 2003, the rate dropped and leveled off during 2004–2005. Between them, the journals published nine issues per year. If the rate in the first 2006 issue of each journal continued, we would expect more than twice as many Internet citations in 2006 as in 2005 (180 versus 77).

Fig. 2 Rate of link inactivity. The rate of inactivity rose from 10 percent in the year of publication to 38 percent after seven years. (We urge caution about the rate at six years because it is based on only two data points.) A linear regression of the rate of inactivity as a function of time fell just short of statistical significance (p = 0.074).

Our tests of link activity produced three findings:

1. Overall, 18 percent of cited web sites were inactive (table 1). The journals differed little in this regard (18 versus 16 percent). This is our most important and robust finding.
2. Inactivity began almost immediately. Within two months of publication of the first 2006 issue of each journal, 10 percent of web citations were inactive. This result is based on a small sample size (one issue for each journal), so we consider these findings to be in need of verification.
3. The rate of inactivity rose with time, though the trend was not statistically significant (fig. 2). Beginning at 10 percent in the year of publication, the rate of inactivity rose to 38 percent after seven years. A linear regression of inactivity as a function of time fell just short of statistical significance (p = 0.074; r² = 0.44).{15}

Efficacy of Web Archiving

Our findings demonstrate that historians have been citing ephemeral information from the Internet. Ephemeral evidence is not a new problem for historians. One of the virtues of archives and museums is that they collect ephemera. In a parallel way, some groups have tried to address the ephemeral nature of web pages by archiving large parts of the World Wide Web. These groups use the strength of information technology—its ability to store large amounts of information—to take snapshots of the web at regular intervals and store those snapshots. One of the most popular is the Wayback Machine operated by the Internet Archive.{16}

To assess the efficacy of the Wayback Machine, we searched it on 22 June 2007 for all the links we had found missing. As before, we tested only whether the URL supplied by the author of an article led us to a live link, not whether the information there was accurate. We found that the Wayback Machine had archived 57 percent of the missing web pages, leaving 43 percent still unavailable. Current archival methods ameliorate, but do not solve, the problem of link rot.

Several factors could have caused the omission of that 43 percent of our missing web content from the archive. The automated web crawlers used by the machine might not have found the page when it was still posted on the web. Some sites could not be archived because they were blocked by passwords or other means. One of these means was called robots.txt, which prevented automated crawlers from accessing sites. The Wayback Machine identified several of the sites in our sample as unavailable because of robots.txt. The Wayback Machine also honored requests from site owners to remove their sites from the archive.{17}

Conclusion

The World Wide Web has offered an increasingly common though ephemeral source of information. In research articles in two of the most highly respected history journals, 18 percent of web citations decayed within seven years of publication; 10 percent were inactive shortly after publication. Our findings are roughly consistent with those for science journals; we suspect that this problem extends to other humanities and social science publications. A means created to preserve Internet sites—the Wayback Machine—made 57 percent of the missing articles in our sample available to scholars who knew about the archive. The other 43 percent of the missing links remained beyond the reach even of those searching the archive.

Reliance on unarchived ephemera is distressing given our commitment to a documented past. We urge professional societies, journals, and presses to create and adopt professional standards for the use of Internet documents, including means for preserving materials in a way that ensures their accessibility into the indefinite future. Doing so would be a boon to current and future historians.

{2} As far as we could determine, no humanities or social science journal has published an article quantifying the rate of link decay within their fields. Fred O’Bryant and Kathryn Soule‚ librarians at the University of Virginia‚ searched databases for us using the following terms: link rot, persistence and URL, permanence and URL, web-site links, and web sites/maintenance. The databases were Historical Abstracts, MLA Bibliography, Web of Science (including the Social Sciences and Arts/Humanities components), and Education Full Text. In Web of Science, they also did a citation search for Dellavalle et al., “Going, Going, Gone,” for all disciplines.

{3} Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 23, 30; Chuck Zerby, The Devil’s Details: A History of Footnotes (New York, 2002).

{4} Grafton, 4, 220, 225.

{5} Citation methods varied, but the University of Chicago Press standardized the system historians have come to use most frequently (University of Chicago Press, The Chicago Manual of Style, 14th ed. [Chicago, 1993]); see also Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier, From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001).

{6} Roy Rosenzweig, “The Road to Xanadu: Public and Private Pathways on the History Web,” Journal of American History 88 (2001): 548–79.

{7} Stephen Robertson, “Doing History in Hypertext,” Journal of the Association for History and Computing 7 (August 2004) (n.p.), http://mcel.pacificu.edu/jahc/JAHCVII2/ARTICLES/robertson/robertson.html (accessed 1 May 2006). We are aware of the irony of citing web sources in our research note and have filed hardcopies of all cited documents.

{8} Deborah Lines Anderson, “Benchmarks: Controlling Digital Data,” Journal of the Association for History and Computing 6 (April 2003) (n.p.), http://mcel.pacificu.edu/jahc/JAHCVI1/benchmarks.HTML (accessed 1 May 2006).

{9} Rosenzweig, “The Road to Xanadu.”

{10} Roy Rosenzweig, “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era,” American Historical Review 108 (2003): 735–62.

{11} Suzanne R. Graham, “Historians and Electronic Resources: Patterns and Use,” Journal of the Association for History and Computing 5 (September 2002) (n.p.), http://mcel.pacificu.edu/JAHC/JAHCV2/ARTICLES/graham/graham.html (accessed 3 May 2006). The question was posed in the negative, with 46 percent of historians disagreeing with the statement that Internet resources lack adequate permanence to be cited.

{12} Philip M. Davis and Suzanne A. Cohen, “The Effect of the Web on Undergraduate Citation Behavior, 1996–1999,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 52 (2001): 309–14.

{13} For American Historical Review, the issues spanned volume 104, issue 3 (June 1999) through volume 11, issue 1 (February 2006). For Journal of American History, coverage extended from volume 86, issue 1 (June 1999) through volume 92, issue 4 (March 2006). All issues are available at the History Cooperative, http://www.historycooperative.org (accessed 12–18 April 2006).

{14} A number of cited sources charge users for subscriptions or for individual articles. Examples include all or parts of Project Muse, History Cooperative, JSTOR, www.nytimes.com, www.theweeklystandard.com, and www.washingtonpost.com. We counted these links as active because, although not free, the information was available.

{15} Here is a simplified primer for readers unfamiliar with statistics. We wanted to know if link decay increased with time, so we used Microsoft Excel to calculate the straight line (a linear regression) that best followed the overall trend. If the data had followed an exact stepwise pattern (e.g., by increasing 10 percent each year), the straight line would have exactly intersected each year’s proportion of inactive sites. In our data, though, some data points fell above and some below that straight line. This was not surprising, since the line was a simplified, rather than an exact model. To determine how simplified, we had Excel calculate how much the data points fell above or below the line. The result of that calculation is called r². If the data had increased 10 percent each year, r² would have been 1.00 because all data points would have fallen exactly on the line. We would probably feel confident predicting that another 10 percent of links would decay next year. Our r² was 0.44, which told us that our simplified model “explained” 44 percent of the pattern in the data. We seem to have identified an important, but not the only, variable in predicting the rate at which links decayed.

Still, knowing what causes 44 percent of the rate at which links decay could be useful information. So, given our data, how confidently can we say that links decay with time? Statistics provide a way to answer that question. Statistics never prove that something is true, since it is always possible that chance (in other words, all the variables other than the one we are studying) caused a pattern. Instead, statistics tells us how often we would expect a pattern if chance alone were at work. If the pattern is extremely unlikely, our confidence increases that our hypothesis is true and we call the result statistically significant. By convention, scientists use 5 percent as the cutoff for significance; that is, if chance alone would have created our pattern five or fewer times out of 100, we have enough confidence that our hypothesis is correct to consider the result significant. With Excel, we calculated that chance alone would have created the pattern in our data (showing that links decayed over time) 7 percent of the time. Because that is more than 5 percent, we call it statistically insignificant—but it is not far from 5 percent, so we consider the result strongly suggestive.

{16} The archive’s web site describes itself this way: “The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in the Presidio of San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections.” The Internet Archive, “About the Internet Archive,” http://www.archive.org/about/about.php (accessed 22 June 2007).

{17} The Internet Archive, “About the Internet Archive,” http://www.archive.org/about/faqs.php#5 (accessed 22 June 2007); Internet Archive, “Frequently Asked Questions,” http://web.archive.org/collections/web/faqs.html#exclusions (accessed 22 June 2007).

Edmund Russell is associate professor of science, technology, and society and history at the University of Virginia. Jennifer Kane graduated from the University of Virginia in 2007 with a major in social and political thought. She is now a legislative correspondent for U.S. Senator Tom Carper. The authors thank Kathryn Soule and Fred O’Bryant, librarians at the University of Virginia, for searching databases. They benefited from discussions of this issue with the Committee on the History of Environment and Technology group at the University of Virginia and Frank Smith of Cambridge University Press. Thanks also go to the two anonymous referees and to John Staudenmaier, S.J., for their helpful suggestions.

©2008 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved.

What do first-year students do in a virtual classroom? They build motorcycles and go-karts and speed across the landscape. They cause trees to sprout from tables, chairs, and teaching stations, as conversations careen out of control. Our efforts to discuss the day’s readings collapsed under the weight of simultaneously typed comments that could not possibly carry forward a conversational thread, as all the while spinning cylinders, the sudden appearance of tall grasses, and nonsensical interruptions distracted us.

Second Life is the new 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. On the Saturday night before my encounter with my shaggy new friend, in the company of a group of people from around the world, I had attended a live digital simulcast in Second Life of a concert performed by Red {an orchestra}, a Cleveland-based classical ensemble.{2} Many people, including Philip Rosedale, its founder, are quick to say that Second Life is not a game, like the popular World of Warcraft, although gaming communities do exist in Second Life.{3} Rather, it is a virtual environment inhabited by all kinds of people, from staid professors such as myself to (more typically) people in their twenties and thirties who were born to the virtual life. Second Life distinguishes itself from other virtual worlds by its economy, where Linden dollars (named after Second Life’s developer, the Linden Lab) convert to real U.S. dollars. (As I write this, the exchange rate is about L$265 to US$1.) Enterprising Second Life residents have been known to earn as much as a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year selling virtual real estate, clothing, cars, hairdos, and other representations of consumer society.{4}

All of this can be gleaned from the dozens of articles that pepper newspapers and the Internet each time a major corporation sets up a hotel (Starwood’s Aloft Hotel), a car dealership (Pontiac, Mercedes Benz), or a news bureau (Reuters) in Second Life. In March 2007, a violent virtual attack (using exploding pig grenades) against the virtual political offices there of the extremist French presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen rated a front-page story in the Washington Post.{5} Universities have been experimenting with classroom and other activities in Second Life. Distance-learning instructors report that the graphical virtual classroom can create a community for learners, bridging the gap between asynchronous online-course participation and the experience of a real-life classroom. Institutions with islands in Second Life include Case Western Reserve University (where I work), Harvard, Ball State University, Pepperdine, and New York University.{6} The Office of Undergraduate Admissions at Case Western Reserve has started inviting admitted and prospective students to a virtual campus that includes representations of the library, a local diner, and the residential village, and I recently gave a presentation with a colleague at a university-sponsored information technology fair that was streamed live into Second Life.

My first experience with a virtual classroom took place in fall 2001, when I taught an undergraduate seminar called “Culture and Computers.” The class met once a week for two and a half hours, with the first half of each session taking place in the university’s virtual environment, known then as the CWRU MOO. (MOO stands for MUD—Object Oriented, and MUD for multi-user domain.) The MOO was essentially a text-based real-time chat room that functioned much like Second Life does, but without the graphics and avatars. The students adopted pseudonyms and described themselves with words rather than images, although they could attach small icons to their names if they chose. In discussions, lines of text quickly filled the computer screen and often scrolled almost too fast to follow. This excerpt from an outside-class evening discussion is a good example of how discussions moved along, demonstrating the informal mix of on- and off-topic dialogue.

The holy fishboy has entered.

Serena says, “i agree, the article was so dull and could have been summarized”

Gray arrives from Mather House

MoMan says, “yes”

MollyB says, “Monk, then how would you paraphrase it in a short sentence?”

MollyB says, “Hi holy fishboy”

The_Monk says, “Computers are a tool, they could have been used to cause a revolution, but instead became tools of the establishment due to elitism.”

fishboy says, “hey, i just got back from 2 hrs of basketball so i might not say much while i recover”

Except in the case of these extra-help evening meetings in the MOO (students referred to the activity as “mooing”), we did not connect from remote locations. Instead, we mooed together in a computer lab located in the Kelvin Smith Library. In hindsight, remote connections would have been a more instructive experience—sometimes in frustration we resorted to talking to each other—but because we were all very new to this, it helped a great deal to meet in the lab. After a short break, we would reconvene in a library seminar room to discuss the day’s topic face-to-face, the goal being to compare and learn from the different methods of communication and discussion, to both learn about and experience computer culture. One of the students in the class, Jared Bendis, worked in the library’s New Media Studio and had been responsible for introducing me to our experimental online community. He was enormously helpful, particularly when our virtual world crashed around us, as it occasionally did.

I rostered the course in early May, after students had left for the long summer break, and so the course enrolled fifteen students, twelve of them freshman boys, most of whom planned to major in computer science or electrical engineering. I always imagined that, when registering for their first semester’s classes, they saw the word “computer” and ignored the word “culture.” We read books such as Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen, Douglas Coupland’s novel Microserfs, Paulina Borsook’s Cyberselfish, and William J. Mitchell’s e-topia: “Urban life, Jim—but not as we know it”.{7} Early conversations in the MOO were like the wild West—students getting completely off-track, typing cryptic lines about the virtues of various hardware and software, making jokes, holding conversations an eighth-inch deep. Even though we were in the same room, we did not necessarily know to whom the adopted names belonged, and that anonymity encouraged a heightened degree of informality. Eventually things settled down. There was a striking transition when we regrouped in the seminar room, an instantaneous reversion to the more typical respectful atmosphere of a traditional classroom. Students addressed me as Professor Berger, rather than MollyB. I found the semester a little traumatizing, the culminating experience being the day in the computer lab when students talked about their “handles” and BinaryBoy revealed that he had his name tattooed on his back in binary code. Driven by a chorus of disbelieving taunts, he ripped his shirt off to reveal that, indeed, he did. Throughout the four years these students were on campus they would yell “TUR-R-R-KLE” when they saw me, in homage to Life on the Screen, which had caused them so much emotional stress.

It was five years before I thought I could attempt the course again. With every passing year the idea of offering it became more daunting, as both the literature and the technology developed exponentially. During this period the university adopted a new general education curriculum, known as Seminar Approach to General Education and Scholarship, or SAGES. It begins with first-year seminars, limited to seventeen students, and is designed to launch new students coherently into the common enterprise of a research university. These courses serve as vehicles for teaching first-year students a variety of skills, including college-level written and oral communication, “seminaring” (as we’ve begun to call the necessary skills for engaging in intellectual discussions), and what it means to pursue a “life of the mind.” This approach allows faculty to teach creative topics that might not otherwise address disciplinary curricular needs, and it provided a perfect opportunity for me to retool Culture and Computers. In the meantime, Jared had earned his degree and entered and completed a master’s program, all the while continuing to work for various iterations of the media office. He is currently the creative director of new media in the Kelvin Smith Library’s Freedman Center, a cutting-edge multimedia service center. We saw each other frequently and often talked about the course and when I would teach it again. In the spring of 2006, he began telling me about Second Life and how the university was investing in an island there to support virtual classroom activities, similar to what I had done in the MOO. He had been in discussions with a colleague in the Department of Theater and Dance about the possibilities of building a theater. I decided to redesign Culture and Computers into a first seminar—it had functioned in much the same way the first time around—using Second Life as the virtual classroom. And so the adventure began.

My portfolio in the Office of the Dean included oversight of a grant to train faculty to integrate service learning into their classes. I had gone through the training myself and incorporated it into a course I taught on technology in America. Though I had been dissatisfied with the results that time around, I decided to include a service component in my new Culture and Computers seminar, to temper the whiz-bang fun of Second Life. I had worked before with the Ashbury Avenue Senior Computing and Community Center (ASC-3), a neighborhood computer center where low-income, underserved seniors could learn various computer skills. I required my new seminar students to volunteer six times during the semester as teaching aides for ASC-3’s computer classes. The center is within walking distance of the first year dormitories, so this activity fulfilled another of SAGES’s goals, to introduce entering students to the city that will be their home for the next four years. Thus, in effect, our class would be meeting in three different classrooms: a state-of-the-art seminar room, the Second Life SAGES classroom built by Jared and his colleagues, and the computer labs of the Ashbury Center.

The course enrolled fifteen students, ten of whom were young men and most of whom planned to study engineering. Déjà vu? The first thing we learned is that Second Life is not aggravation free. Real life conspired against us in the very first meeting, as between a balky wireless network, a computer battery failure, and the wrong AV connector, we were unable to log in. Jared was finally able to remotely log in to his own computer, access Second Life, and project it on the screen, but the whole experience left the students unimpressed.

Still, everyone went home, set up accounts, fussed with their avatars, practiced navigating, and did a little exploring. My own first experiences of SL, prior to the beginning of the semester, had included an invitation to tour someone’s virtual home, which featured a seductive little setting for “entertaining.” I suspected that my new friend did not know I was a fifty-eight-year-old grandmother and would not have been happy to learn of it. Although, who knows? He might have also been a fifty-eight-year-old grandmother. I excused myself politely and teleported away home, where I quickly added a disclaimer to the course syllabus: “The instructors do not promote, advocate, or bear responsibility for student activity in other areas of Second Life. Students are urged to use caution and take appropriate measures for safety if they choose to explore other areas of Second Life.” I am certain this disclaimer would not hold up in a court of law, but even my brief moments getting to know SL had made its underside apparent. My SL classroom required that participants have an invitation to teleport in, so I was not worried about random visitors, but the students’ membership in SL allowed them to roam the virtual world at will.

On the day of our first scheduled meeting in Second Life, about ten of us gathered in our real-life classroom to access the virtual classroom together; the remaining students joined us from remote locations. Giddily we logged on over the wireless network. The virtual classroom had been built with a teaching station—not unlike our real-life ones—facing theater-style rows of seats. A large three-screen video display served as a backdrop. Except for the fact that the classroom had no walls and was “out-of-doors” on the virtual shores of Lake Erie, the Second Life SAGES classroom closely resembled a typical university one. Many of the young men’s avatars arrived wearing the generic James Dean jeans and white t-shirt that male SL avatars are “born” with, but a few of the more savvy students arrived in terrific outfits—one came as a dragon, another as a robot constructed of white boxes. I was still in my default jeans and sweater for that first meeting, but decided afterwards to give myself more professorial clothes (the aforementioned magenta suit) because the jeans just added to the informality that our virtuality encouraged. As I gazed out at my class, their names hovering in the air above their heads, they seemed expectant. But it quickly became clear that, for our first meeting, chaos would reign.

What do first-year students do in a virtual classroom? They build motorcycles and go-karts and speed across the landscape. They cause trees to sprout from tables, chairs, and teaching stations, as conversations careen out of control. Our efforts to discuss the day’s readings collapsed under the weight of simultaneously typed comments that could not possibly carry forward a conversational thread, as all the while spinning cylinders, the sudden appearance of tall grasses, and nonsensical interruptions distracted us. Even the act of typing—slow for some, fast for others—hampered what a person could say with any intelligence. The following excerpt from a discussion of a number of articles about the gendering of computer games is fairly representative of that first day’s conversation:

[9:45] Manon Bouchard: what does it mean to be “an object”

[9:45] Andie Ziemia: inhuman

[9:45] Rich Ellis: if people got to do what they wanted to thats what they would do

[9:45] Seriah Ringgold: To be looked at as less human

[9:45] Mikey Eddy: the sole purpose of

[9:45] Mike Hwasung: something one can or wishes to own/possess

[9:45] Manon Bouchard: so, how are women objectified in games?

[9:45] Andie Ziemia: incapable of doing anything in life — or in the case of a game, incapable of changing anything in the game

[9:45] Clyde Moxing: to not have that persons personal feelings being taken into account

[9:45] You: I suppose that an object has a purpose, but not a soul.

[9:45] Julia Giacomin: its to have no feelings or opinions

[9:46] Rich Ellis: just look at Tomb Raider

Fifteen minutes later, we paused to reflect on how the discussion was proceeding. (The numerous misspellings are also typical.)

[9:59] Manon Bouchard: can we take a minute to think about how this discussion is going?

[9:59] Rich Ellis: its understood that violence is not caused by video games

[9:59] Manon Bouchard: what are the advantages?

[9:59] Andy Budich: i don’t see any at all

[9:59] Manon Bouchard: of the online discussion?

[10:00] You: Everyone can speak at once.

[10:00] Seriah Ringgold: We can easily speak our minds.

[10:00] Clyde Moxing: people are more willing to participate

[10:00] You: That can be both good and bad.

[10:00] Rich Ellis: we all say a whole heck of a lot more

[10:00] Danny Shams: Do people who don’t talk in class feel more comfortable talking here?

[10:00] Wejank Sol: is thaqt an advantage?

[10:00] Manon Bouchard: is everyone joining in?

[10:00] You: YEs.

[10:00] Mikey Eddy: yeah but then we lose ionts here and there

[10:00] Andy Budich: but how much of that is productive

[10:00] Jocelyn Battery: well not really. we don’t have time to think for very long, which might make for more meaningful conversations….

[10:00] Ishmael Ortega: im talking more

[10:00] Manon Bouchard: who hasn’t said much?

[10:00] Rich Ellis: and we can ride go carts

[10:00] Amy Potvin: i dont know if there is an advantage becasue it is really hard to follow the conversation

[10:00] Andie Ziemia: pretty much none is productive

[10:00] You: You have to filter through the comments.

[10:00] Wejank Sol: I haven’t, and I usually say a lot

[10:00] Mikey Eddy: i agree

[10:00] Rich Ellis: we should find a way to take turns

[10:00] Andie Ziemia: yeah, i have no idea what is going on

[10:01] Mike Hwasung: yeah the conversation is somewhat difficult to follow

[10:01] Manon Bouchard: and the toys are distracting

[10:01] You: There are parallel conversations goiong on.

[10:01] Seriah Ringgold: One of the main disadvantages is that the class seems to have a hard time keeping focus.

[10:01] Julia Giacomin: and two different convos go at once

[10:01] Voden Liebknecht: its harder to get an idea out that is relevant ot the time

[10:01] Ishmael Ortega: i think we had 3 convos at one point

[10:01] Jocelyn Battery: i like to think, but with so many comments going on at once, i dont have time to because by then, my relevant point then has passed…

[10:01] You: I think that we got rid of teh toys.

[10:01] Manon Bouchard: do you want to establish any rules?

[10:01] Mikey Eddy: nooo mommy thats no fun

As this excerpt shows, despite the pandemonium some students found that the online environment freed them from debilitating shyness and allowed them to express themselves more comfortably than they could in the seminar room, where they often—despite what I believe was a collegial and supportive atmosphere—feared having their comments and opinions judged harshly by their peers. But by the end of that first class period everyone (especially me) was exhausted from the effort of carrying on a conversation and the fruitless attempts to reign in the playfulness. When we next met in seminar, we agreed that the first online session, while fun, had been frustrating. We needed rules. The class decided that for our next session we would divide into two groups. Each group would have a discussion leader, students would come prepared with questions, and one student would take responsibility for keeping the discussions on task. For reasons I cannot explain, this person was to be called the “lumberjack.”

We met in Second Life a total of five times during the semester. The students embraced their self-devised rules, and while they occasionally ignored the lumberjacks’ entreaties to stay on course, discussions improved, if at a much tamer level. One of my goals in using Second Life was to encourage students to think deliberately about different communications media. These experiences generated a significant awareness about their strengths, weaknesses, and appropriate use. (Most of the students agreed, for example, that you should not end a relationship online, by telephone, or—worst of all—via text message.) But, as important, their experiences communicating through their avatars and constructing personalities helped them to understand some of our readings on a more experiential level. For example, Sherry Turkle’s exploration of virtual and real identities, the mutable boundaries between them, and the ability of postmodern theory to help us consider ideas about “the instability of meanings and the lack of universal and knowable truths” raised real issues for the students as they grappled with reconciling their own and their classmates’ multiple identities.{8} Why did students who never spoke in class babble on in online discussion? Why did the one student present himself as a robot of boxes? One passage from Turkle’s book in particular captured their attention, in which she described a young adult with multiple online identities who questioned why “superior status” was granted to the self with the body when the other selves seemed to be so much more interesting and had far more intriguing and exciting experiences.{9}

One of the most compelling readings for the students to build on this idea of multiple selves was Julian Dibbell’s “A Rape in Cyberspace,” from his book My Tiny Life.{10} Dibbell tells the story of Mr. Bungle, a persona who assaulted and raped another character in the closeknit community of the LambdaMOO, an early predecessor to worlds such as Second Life. The incident horrified the victim, witnesses, and broader community, and it initiated a firestorm of discussion about governance, behavior, and the meaning of actions in a virtual world, much of it turning on explorations of distinctions between mind and body. As it turned out, Mr. Bungle was the creation of an entire dorm floor of freshmen boys at New York University. The difficulty my students had deciding whether or not the assault was “real” stood in contrast to the ease with which they could understand the dynamics of prankish communal actions. Not quite able to concede authenticity to virtual selves, some students could not understand why the victim did not just turn off the computer and walk away. Others could not conceive of the virtual actions as being anything more than mean-spirited mischief. Only after I asked whether or not they would tell their mothers they did this (a question followed by a profound silence and pained grimaces) did they begin to comprehend the degree to which one’s virtual actions connected to one’s real self.

While the students enjoyed their classes in Second Life, especially when logging in from their dorm rooms saved them a trek across campus, they found the conversations frustrating when compared to their seminar room discussions. Evaluations confirmed that while many students had an easier time contributing to the online conversation, the quality of exchange did not rise to that of our real-life meetings. They also recognized that typing skills translated directly into ability to participate in the discussion. As Jared put it in a recent presentation: “Imagine a gregarious student talking at length whenever they desired without moderation—now imagine trying to get a word in edgewise with three such students typing at lightning speed.”{11} One student commented that “it was sometimes difficult to say something you wanted because by the time you had typed it out, the conversation had moved on to a different point.” Thus, rather than equalizing access to the conversation, the online environment tended to favor those whose fingers were one with the keyboard.

The students’ experiences in Second Life contrasted with their work at the Ashbury Center. There they met interesting older adults eager to explore the Worldwide Web, communicate with friends and grandchildren, write newsletters, and pay bills online, whose lack of basic skills—a stunning revelation for the students—left them stymied. Just learning to use a mouse was a challenge. By requiring the students to help these senior citizens acquire the basic computer skills they lacked, I hoped that they might not so much learn about the somewhat outdated notion of the “digital divide” as become aware of the extent of their own tacit knowledge about computers and online environments. Being able to recognize these as learned rather than innate skills would help them to understand more viscerally the challenges facing people who did not grow up with computers and the Internet but who do, nevertheless, still need to negotiate them, for their livelihood or just for information. Coordinated readings introduced issues of access and what the lack of it meant in terms job skills, education, and economic and neighborhood development; others acquainted the students with debates among academics and grassroots activists about how best to reach and educate underserved populations.

As the semester progressed, the class explored aspects of computer culture through films such as Office Space and eXistenZ, Facebook, computer games, readings on posthumanism, and Microserfs, Douglas Coupland’s quintessential novel about the Microsoft generation. My students developed their abilities to think critically about the digital world, and the Ashbury Center students’ skills flourished dramatically. At the beginning of the semester the Case students felt as though their task at the center was just about hopeless, but by the end of it they felt superfluous, because the Ashbury Center students had mastered most of the basic functions. We celebrated the end of the semester with a breakfast in our seminar room, where the Case students presented their final projects to a curious and appreciative audience of Ashbury Center graduates. Their experiences in Second Life and the discussions about avatars and multiple identities helped to frame critiques of such topics as online dating, artificial intelligence, social networking, and online gaming. The senior adults enjoyed seeing the smart classroom’s capabilities, and the Case students fielded a barrage of insightful questions.

No doubt the virtual environment of Second Life can be useful for academic pursuits. For example, I have a colleague in speech pathology who hopes to develop a menu of speech anomalies that can be adopted by avatars, so that family members and others can experience the difficulties encountered by people with speech disorders. The director of Case Western Reserve’s Office of Instructional Technology and Academic Computing is using Second Life to teach a seminar on digital storytelling. I used it as a vehicle for helping students to think about online interaction and communities, and particularly to encourage them to think theoretically about how they portray and conduct themselves online. The experience in a virtual world also helped them to understand how wide the gap can be between those like themselves, who have been immersed in computer culture for as long as they can remember, and those who, as older teenagers or adults, only begin to learn about how to use a computer and what it can do. Perhaps more important, the experience of Second Life stood for my students as a metaphor for contemplating technology in general. How do we think about technologies critically, not just to evaluate their advantages and disadvantages but to understand how they function culturally and socially? How do digital technologies affect people across the three significant social categories of analysis—race, class, and gender?

Functioning in Second Life comes with its own set of frustrations. Linden Labs releases software updates every week, and these take a good bit of time to download. Often enough we encountered significant delay between our furious typing and the appearance of our thoughts and comments onscreen. Occasionally students had difficulty teleporting in to the classroom. If students built anything in the virtual classroom, the island’s administrator (Jared) would come along and remove it, which made them feel as though their creativity was stifled. These annoyances were, well, annoying, and in some ways compromised the experience, yet they also served as lessons about the realities of virtuality. And finally, my conservative self could not get past the fact that I had introduced a group of young people to a world that could be, for the most part, pretty seamy. Despite all of this, I was pleased that the students enjoyed their Second Life classes and that these experiences were instrumental in helping them to puzzle out questions raised in the seminar. Pedagogically, it proved satisfying.

In the years that I have been teaching, I have found popular culture to be a meaningful entry for students in helping them think about technology. It is a world they know and understand but rarely step back from to view with a sophisticated or theoretical eye. Our adventures in Second Life, protected and controlled as they were in some ways, nonetheless created an opportunity for exploring significant ideas about our digital lives.

{2} The concert, That Red Guy, was sponsored in partnership with Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland State University, and OneCommunity and the New Media Consortium of Austin, Texas. It was performed live on 14 April 2007 at Cleveland’s Masonic Auditorium and simulcast into three venues in Second Life. See <http://www.redanorchestra.org> (accessed 16 January 2008).

{3} Robert K. Elder, “1.4 Million Get a Virtual Life,” Chicago Tribune, 13 November 2006, 1.

{4} Clay Risen, “Gaming the System—Is It Time for the Real Government to Step into the Virtual World?” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 10 December 2006, H1.

{5} Molly Moore, “French Politics in 3-D on Fantasy Web Site,” Washington Post, 30 March 2007, A1.

{6} Christine Lagorio, “Pepperdine in a Treehouse,” New York Times, 7 January 2007.

{7} Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen (New York, 1997); Douglas Coupland, Microserfs (New York, 1996); Paulina Borsook, Cyberselfish (New York, 2000); William J. Mitchell, e-topia, “Urban life, Jim—but not as we know it” (Cambridge, Mass., 1999).

{8} Turkle, 18.

{9} Turkle, 14.

{10} Julian Dibbell, My Tiny Life (New York, 1998).

{11} Jared Bendis, “Developing Educational Virtual Worlds with Game Engines” (paper delivered to the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques), 8 August 2007, (accessed 16 January 2008). See also <http://www.jaredjared.com> (accessed 16 January 2008).

Molly Berger is associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Case Western Reserve University, where she also teaches in the history department. She is writing a cultural history of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American hotels.

©2008 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Not only did Caro’s monumental volume go through twenty-seven printings by 2000, it won both the Pulitzer Prize for biography and the Society of American Historians’ Francis Parkman Prize, awarded to works of history that achieve literary distinction. To the growing number of city dwellers opposed to the meat ax of highway programs slashing through neighborhoods and the bulldozers of urban renewal, it became a sacred text second only to Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). Those dedicated to preserving the inherited urban fabric had found their savior in Jacobs; Caro recorded the fall from paradise of their Satan. Together Jacobs and Caro established the Manichaean scenario that has influenced urban policy debates ever since.

The Power Broker’s appearance coincided with a general decline in faith in the public sector. Robert Moses was one of the false gods whose missteps ignited this apostasy.

Caro owed his success in part to fortuitous timing. The Power Broker appeared in the wake of the Watergate scandal, when investigative reporting aimed at toppling the powerful was at high tide. A disenchanted and cynical public was primed to enjoy hatchet attacks on the reputations of public officials. The Power Broker’s publication also coincided with the much-publicized burning and abandonment of the South Bronx and the city’s slide into financial disaster. Rather than blaming themselves for selfishly blocking subway fare increases necessary for improving service, for electing successive amiable but ineffectual mayors, and for advocating a social policy agenda that they could not or would not adequately fund, New Yorkers could, courtesy of Robert Caro, agree on a scapegoat for their city’s problems, targeting an irascible old man who had overstayed his welcome in public office. Instead of recognizing that older central cities across the nation no longer suited the lifestyle of a majority of Americans and that New York City was no longer the preferred mecca for youngsters seeking their fortune, New Yorkers could take solace that their city’s relative fall from grace was an aberration, not an inevitability. It was not preordained by larger social forces, but the product of Robert Moses’ misdeeds. New York City had been stabbed in the back, and Robert Moses was the assassin.

The Power Broker’s appearance also coincided with a general decline in faith in the public sector. Robert Moses was one of the false gods whose missteps ignited this apostasy. During his heyday in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s Moses represented the benevolent efficacy of government. Ahead of schedule and under budget, he created great public beaches, swimming pools, parks, bridges, and parkways, all monumental landmarks to what government could do for the people. Like his enemy Franklin Roosevelt, Moses demonstrated to Americans raised with a laissez-faire bias and a devotion to private enterprise that the public sector and the public bureaucrat could produce great good. The private industrialist Henry Ford manufactured the automobiles, but the public servant Robert Moses produced the pavements and park destinations for motorists eager to enjoy their Fords. By 1974, however, the New Deal–inspired faith in public endeavor had waned and disillusioned Americans were no longer true believers. The Great Society had not been so great, and Lyndon Johnson was the last president who dared to fashion a New Deal–type slogan for his administration and thereby promise the electorate a path to utopia. Given these new doubts about government’s ability to solve problems, Americans were ready and willing to find their villain in the public sector. Wall Street, greedy landlords, and rapacious bankers were no longer the primary targets of those seeking a scapegoat. Instead, Robert Moses, a public-sector bureaucrat who profited little from his works and died a relatively poor man, was the preferred choice of those seeking to personify New York’s decline.

Though the reading public and award committees generally embraced Caro’s work, the book did not initially receive universal plaudits. The 85-year-old Moses issued a lengthy and characteristically biting denunciation of the work. But other more detached figures also expressed reservations. In a New York Times review, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt pronounced The Power Broker “vastly entertaining . . . as long as you don’t take it too seriously from the historical point of view.” He claimed that some of Caro’s accusations suggested “nothing so much as vindictiveness” and referred to his “devil theorizing.”{1} In another New York Times review, the distinguished urban historian Richard Wade contended that Caro had “little historical perspective in which to place Moses” and claimed that the master builder’s “great success lay in the fact that he was swimming with the tide of history.” What Moses did conformed to the prevailing American notions of city rebuilding. “Perhaps Moses pioneered” Wade argued, “but the physical shape of urban America would no doubt look very much the same whether Moses had lived or not.” If New York City suffered, the prevailing tides of history were to blame; Moses was just an instrument of the dominant perceptions of his age. Wade further criticized Caro for placing “too much emphasis on interviews and anonymous sources.” Moreover, Wade claimed to have talked to some of those interviewed by Caro and found that “important ones and none who could be described as friends of Moses” were “all generally skeptical about the author’s use of their recollection of events or his description of their views.”{2}

While generally praising The Power Broker, other scholars also noted that it “lacks historical depth” and embraced a great-man theory of history by attributing too much to a single figure rather than presenting him as representative of his generation.{3} One of the preeminent students of New York City government, Herbert Kaufman, complained that “the book is not a balanced appraisal; it is an indictment and a prosecutor’s brief, illuminated by hindsight and motivated by some values that were not abroad a generation ago.” He judged it “an instructive and stimulating book, but it is not the last word on Robert Moses.”{4}

Yet for over three decades Caro’s book was basically the last word on Moses. Caro’s indictment stood, and Moses remained a dirty word in the lexicon of urban scholars and observers. He was the Attila the Hun of urbanity, the symbol of all that was wrong with mid-twentieth-century urban policy. In New York City he was the public-sector bogeyman, a frightening specter haunting the metropolis which continued to suffer from his misdeeds. Caro had assigned him to the pantheon of arch-villains, and most New Yorkers seemed content to leave him there.

In 2007, however, Columbia University professors Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson forced a reconsideration of the master builder, organizing an exhibition titled Robert Moses and the Modern City at three New York museums, conducting a symposium on his legacy, and compiling a book of essays on Moses and his work that included a catalog of Moses’ projects in New York City. As the criticisms from 1974 indicated, the reevaluation was long overdue, but Ballon and Jackson made up for lost time with a stimulating reassessment that raised the ire of many diehard Moses haters. In his opening essay in Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York, Jackson quickly reconsiders Moses’ vision and his place in the national context and examines Caro’s claims that Moses was corrupt and racist. Jackson contends that “we should acknowledge that Robert Moses was a dedicated public servant in the best sense of that term” and that “the evidence does not support Caro’s claims that racism was a defining aspect of Moses’s character, so that his actions had a disproportionately negative effect upon African-Americans.” He concludes with a judgment sure to stir the anger of Caro and the true believers of the hate-Moses cult: “Robert Moses will be remembered as a key actor in the rise of New York, not its fall.”{5}

Hilary Ballon’s superb essay, “Robert Moses and Urban Renewal: The Title I Program,” presents a nuanced and informed account of the realities of Title I implementation, a useful corrective to Caro’s black-and-white journalistic morality play.{6} Title I was a classic public-policy debacle. It was hampered by an obstructive federal bureaucracy which seemed to believe that renewal proposals should age like fine wine. Moreover, it was dependent on a partnership between local government and private developers at a time when such public-private alliances were rare and could not benefit from the corrective hand of long experience. Across the nation Title I blighted the careers of public officials, bankrupted private developers, and produced little that is appreciated today. But one of the few figures who could make the program work, a near miracle in itself, was Robert Moses. Ballon accurately records the restraints facing Moses and how he was forced to maneuver around federal policy, local politics, the demands of lending institutions, and the complaints of citizens groups. She makes a good case for the limitations on Moses’s power and demonstrates how these limitations restricted his options. Rather than an unfettered dictator as portrayed by Caro, Moses was an adroit implementer of a program that required an administrator who could dodge the quicksand and land mines lining the path to ultimate success.

It is time, however, to recognize that Moses’ fluctuating reputation is also a product of changing views of democracy and technology. Notions of right and wrong are not static, and the perceived virtues of one age can appear abhorrent to a later generation. Attitudes toward both democracy and technology shifted markedly during the twentieth century, and Robert Moses’ reputation was a casualty of this shift.

Some of the other contributors to the Ballon and Jackson volume are not so supportive of Moses. Urban historian Robert Fishman’s essay “Revolt of the Urbs: Robert Moses and His Critics” discusses those who rose up against the master builder, focusing specifically on opposition to Moses’ proposal to build a roadway through Manhattan’s Washington Square Park. Seemingly a reluctant recruit to the Ballon-Jackson reassessment, Fishman concludes: “It would be deeply satisfying to end this essay with the observation that Robert Moses fully merits the obloquy that has become the conventional response whenever his name is mentioned. But perhaps he deserves a brief attempt at fairness that he so seldom accorded to others.”{7}

Fishman’s reluctant admission that perhaps fairness is in order sums up the feelings of many other urban observers. Moses is a man many love to hate, and to yield that reassuring hatred is a difficult and unwanted sacrifice. Caro’s book was a simplistic journalistic account lacking in appropriate historical context. But for many readers it was highly satisfying. When faced with debacle, there is solace in identifying the demon responsible and shifting blame to that convenient figure. Caro’s The Power Broker fits the bill.

Yet the efforts of Ballon and Jackson fit the bill for others viewing Moses from the perspective of the early twenty-first century. Since Moses left the scene, major public-works projects have proceeded slowly if at all. Obstruction and delay seem the order of the day, and Moses’ success in getting things done seems to warrant a reconsideration of his methods and legacy. “In the twenty-first century, after a long period when the city’s infrastructure has been ignored,” Ballon and Jackson explain in their introduction, “the desire for governmental actors that can tame the bureaucracy and overcome the opposition is projected onto Moses, who, we imagine, would have capitalized on the opportunity to rebuild lower Manhattan after 9/11.” For Ballon and Jackson, Moses “has become a symbolic figure in discourse about the future of the city, its capacity to think and build big.”{8} A frustrated Alexander Garvin, past planner for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, expressed much the same sentiment when he asked, “New Yorkers are asking if our city needs another Robert Moses.” “In truth, Moses was not omnipotent,” Garvin correctly observed, “but rather an unusually gifted public servant who had mastered the Art of Getting Things Done. That art deserves attention more than ever.”{9}

Today few people would argue that New York City fell. Abandonment is largely a phenomenon of the past, the population is rising, and the crime rate has plummeted. The city has not become a reservation for the very poor, but rather much of Manhattan is off-limits to any but the wealthy, with the zone of affluence annexing new territory each year. Thus today many are not searching for an answer to why New York City declined; instead they want to know why a city of such wealth and talent cannot realize big projects and accomplish big dreams. Hence the Ballon-Jackson reassessment. Though for many New Yorkers Moses is still a dirty word, for others it is the talisman that might open the door to a greater city.

It is time, however, to recognize that Moses’ fluctuating reputation is also a product of changing views of democracy and technology. Notions of right and wrong are not static, and the perceived virtues of one age can appear abhorrent to a later generation. Attitudes toward both democracy and technology shifted markedly during the twentieth century, and Robert Moses’ reputation was a casualty of this shift.

Moses was the product of the early-twentieth-century Progressive Era and its notions of democratic rule. Progressives rebelled against special-interest politics and emphasized the broader public interest. They hated ward politics and favored at-large representation to ensure that government policy would reflect the will of the people of the city as a whole. Neighborhood nabobs in the form of the ward aldermen were just one more special-interest obstacle in the path of the commonweal. Yet in the 1960s and 1970s a new view of democracy emerged in which activists claiming to speak for a neighborhood or ethnic group became the supposed tribunes of the people battling elected officials and their appointees. Democracy now seemed to mean the right of a fragment of the city to thwart the will of those who represented the majority of the larger electorate.

Under the older view of democracy, Moses was democratic. He was appointed by elected officials and his projects were subject to the approval of the elected members of the city’s Board of Estimate and city council; his authority came from laws approved by the elected lawmakers in the state legislature; much of his funding came from programs authorized by elected representatives in the United States Congress. Though Caro deems Moses a dictator dedicated to usurping power, Ballon and Jackson as well as anyone knowledgeable about the complexities of government know that he acted within the legal and structural constraints imposed by the representative system of American government. He did not force his projects down the throat of an unwilling city. In the late 1920s, before Moses had assumed any city office, the Regional Plan Association drafted the blueprint for proposed highways that Moses would later attempt to implement. Every mayor from the 1930s to the early 1960s was dedicated to realizing that plan, as was every major public official at the state and federal levels. Likewise his slum-clearance efforts enjoyed the mandate of elected representatives at each level of American government.

Under the new concept of democracy of the late twentieth century, however, Moses’ disregard for the will of the fragment as opposed to the people as a whole doomed him to public damnation. Across the nation, at-large election now yielded to schemes for renewed ward representation, and self-chosen “grassroots” spokespersons such as Jane Jacobs became the voice of democracy. Special-interest neighborhood, ethnic, and environmental organizations assumed new legitimacy and a heightened role in decision making.

Similarly, Moses ran afoul of changing views of technology. During the first half of the twentieth century technology was deemed a force for good; the automobile was the greatest advance in the history of human transportation and the ultimate in freedom and mobility. Society embraced speed, streamlining, smooth concrete, and clean, machine-like design. The Futurama exhibit at the New York World’s Fair of 1939 was a dream world of futuristic technology embodying these attributes. For millions of Americans it portrayed a coming paradise. It also accorded with the aesthetic and vision of Robert Moses.

In the late twentieth century, however, an increasing number of Americans lost their faith in the merits of technology and modernism. The automobile now seemed the harbinger of pollution and congestion rather than speed and freedom. Moses’ highways were nightmares rather than dreams. Critics lambasted the unadorned, clean lines of urban renewal architecture as bland and grim. To be machine-like was a virtue in 1939; fifty years later it was villainy. Many New Yorkers embraced Jane Jacobs’s evocative portrait of the small-scale life of the sidewalk in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village and eschewed the gigantism of Moses’ soaring bridges and high-rise renewal projects. The small and aged were deemed more attractive than the mammoth and modern.

Basically, Moses was the victim of these changing perceptions. He stayed too long in power and suffered the consequences of his cultural obsolescence. Had he retired in 1953 at the age of 65 he would have been universally proclaimed a hero. Even had he left office at 70 in 1958 he would have stepped down with his reputation intact. But he held power until 1968 when he was almost 80. By that time he was a symbol of a hated recent past. A good performer knows when to leave the stage. In the end Moses suffered from poor timing.

Perhaps in coming years Moses’ reputation will revive further as perceptions of democracy and technology shift yet again. In his essay in the Ballon and Jackson volume, Joel Schwartz seems to lay the groundwork for a critique of the participatory democracy of Jane Jacobs and her ilk. “Was Jane Jacobs a heroine or did she merely give an eloquent voice to Greenwich Village chauvinism, bolstered by reform Democratic politics, which combined into a selfish NIMBYism?”{10} As the selfish “Not in My Backyard” opposition of neighborhood spokespersons paralyzes public policy aimed at enhancing the welfare of the city as a whole, perhaps Moses might seem less of a dictator and more of a democrat. Similarly, as Americans balance the comfort and convenience promised by technology against the preservation of dingy, abandoned factories or the habitat of slimy, obscure snails, perhaps bridges, highways, and slum clearance might win new adherents. Just as changing perceptions of the present state of New York City and its infrastructure underlay the current reassessment of Robert Moses and Caro’s work, so changing notions of democracy and technology might yet redeem the master builder’s reputation and raise new doubts as to the merits of the biography that consigned him to infamy.

{3} Edward N. Saveth, “The Moses Model,” Reviews in American History 4 (1976): 451.

{4} Herbert Kaufman, “Moses: Charismatic Bureaucrat,” Political Science Quarterly 90 (1975): 537–38.

{5} Kenneth T. Jackson, “Robert Moses and the Rise of New York: The Power Broker in Perspective,” in Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York, ed. Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson (New York, 2007), 70–71.

{6} Hilary Ballon, “Robert Moses and Urban Renewal: The Title I Program,” in Ballon and Jackson, 94–115.

{7} Robert Fishman, “Revolt of the Urbs: Robert Moses and his Critics,” in Robert Moses and the Modern City, 129.

{8} Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson, “Introduction,” in Ballon and Jackson, 66.

{9} As quoted in Erica Pearson, “The Power Broker Revisited,” Gotham Gazette, 18 August 2003, available online at http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/feature-commentary/20030818/202/494 (accessed 16 January 2008).

{10} Joel Schwartz, “Robert Moses and City Planning,” in Ballon and Jackson, 133.

Jon C. Teaford is professor emeritus of history at Purdue University. His most recent book is The American Suburb: The Basics (New York, 2008).

©2008 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Unlike others who have written about Dundonald, Stephenson takes his ideas seriously and treats his plans as feasible. He makes a defensible case. His concluding hypothesis—that in the early stages of World War I crucial elements of the “Plans” fell into German hands and inspired their initial use of poison gas—is less credible. In presenting it, however, he establishes beyond dispute that the British were, from the beginning, at least as interested in the prospects of deploying asphyxiants on the western front as were the often-vilified Huns.

According to Kim Coleman’s useful brief overview, A History of Chemical Warfare, the systematic integration of chemistry into war after 1918 had two consequences. One was the near-certain invention of new and more lethal compounds. The other was the threat of rapid, large-scale production of those chemicals in easily convertible facilities for use in a surprise attack. The League of Nations sought—vainly—to establish effective legal restraints on the development and use of chemical agents. But the Royal Air Force allegedly dropped gas bombs on Afghans in 1920 and the French and Spanish used gas in Morocco five years later. Research continued unabated. In 1933 Japan established an Army Chemical School that turned out more than 3,000 specialists in its twelve-year run. As early as 1936 a German scientist seeking a more effective insecticide discovered tabun, the first effective nerve gas. Odorless and colorless, it was lethal whether inhaled or absorbed through the skin.

A new era in chemical warfare seemed to be emerging. Italy in Abyssinia and Japan in China gave point to the notion by extensive use of chemicals against opponents unable for practical purposes to retaliate. During World War II the major combatants maintained large stocks of chemical weapons, frequently close to operational sectors. That they were not used has often been ascribed to a mutual deterrent effect. Coleman is more convincing in her argument that circumstances were never quite sufficient to convince anyone that chemical weapons would have an effect decisive enough to overcome the combination of military and nonmilitary restraints on their use.

That barrier was frequently approached, however, and during the cold war chemical weapons underwent continued development alongside nuclear weapons. While briefly mentioning Soviet and British experiments, Coleman concentrates on the development of gases and delivery systems by the United States, culminating in their employment in Vietnam on a scale more significant than generally understood or acknowledged. Nonlethals, especially defoliants, and derivatives like napalm made up by far the largest body of use. Coleman nevertheless argues that, at the very least, the United States used allegedly nonlethal gases in concentrations and circumstances with lethal potential. Nor have American authorities been exactly forthcoming on the details of chemical war in Vietnam.

Coleman’s discussion of post-Vietnam developments emphasizes the increasing use of chemical agents in regional conflicts. The most notable of these involved the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s and Saddam Hussein’s repeated use of gas against rebels and dissidents. A major consequence has been a growing public fear of chemicals, especially nerve gases. This certainly has been the case when chemicals are linked with terrorism, despite what Coleman considers convincing evidence that chemical attacks are likely to be smaller and less effective than more conventional operations. Her relative—and predictable—optimism regarding control of chemical weapons through the Chemical Weapons Convention that came into force (a poor choice of words given its lack of enforcing instruments) in 1997 is tempered by the—equally predictable—denunciation of the United States for its “nonchalant” approach to the agreement. Coleman’s indictment of the U.S. and British governments for allegedly playing on fear to secure domestic support for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 nevertheless emerges as somewhat of a contradiction. Her own demonstration that chemical attack has come close to developing the image of an ultimate weapon in the nuclear category does not encourage placing a great deal of faith in pieces of paper, no matter how many signatures they collect.

In War of Nerves Jonathan Tucker, a well-known specialist in arms-control issues, offers a well-developed analysis of the nature and history of chemical warfare. His emphasis is on the years after World War II, and he describes a cold war chemical competition paralleling the more familiar nuclear rivalry, focusing on ever more lethal forms of nerve gas and plans for their mass production and storage. Like Coleman, Tucker focuses on British and American programs, especially the latter, while barely acknowledging corresponding Soviet efforts and policies. He emphasizes accidents like the one in 1968 at Skull Valley, Arizona, in which thousands of sheep were poisoned when gas escaped from the Dugway Proving Ground, a facility presumed to be secure. He also discusses the ongoing tension between a Congress reluctant to fund chemical weapons and a military establishment—particularly the Chemical Corps—remaining committed to their development throughout the cold war’s waning years.

Tucker’s discussion of Iraq’s virtually routine use of chemical weapons before the Gulf War is comprehensively hair-raising, and inadvertently helps to explain the widespread reluctance in U.S. political circles a decade later to take chances on Saddam Hussein’s moderation and goodwill. Tucker takes more seriously than Coleman the potential of terrorist use of chemical weapons. At the same time he is relatively optimistic about the prospects for control. He describes the taboo against poison warfare as “deeply rooted in the human psyche” (p. 385) and he considers the Chemical Weapons Convention a major step toward strengthening moral and legal barriers against the use of chemicals for war-making purposes. Though the conclusion represents the triumph of hope over experience, may it be so.

Dr. Showalter is professor of history at Colorado College.

©2008 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Four years ago I reviewed Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree’s New Media: 1740–1915 (2003). This diverse anthology established a new direction for media studies, away from the postmodernist theorization that seems to have characterized the field since its inception. As I wrote in that review, “New Media is an attempt by historians of technology to reclaim territory from the posthistorical theorizing common in new media studies” (Technology and Culture 45 [January 2004], p. 209). Gitelman takes this mission one step further in Always Already New, a title that hammers home the dictum 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 dictum of “media determine our situation.” Gitelman’s approach to media history resists “thinking of media themselves as social and economic forces” and resists “the idea of an intrinsic technological logic” (p. 10). What matters then, beyond the materiality of media itself (which does matter a great deal to Gitelman, as it does to McLuhan and Kittler), is fleshing out the social and economic forces into which new media are born. This is a complex and daunting task, to be sure, but Gitelman handles it carefully by focusing on specific “case studies” and by limiting her investigation to two particular media phenomena: the phonograph and the web.

In the first section, “The Case of Phonographs,” Gitelman examines how this technology was received by “New Media Publics” in the 1870s as a sort of vaudeville apparatus, which evolved over the next couple of decades into a device for individual “New Media Users.” Whereas the traveling snake oil hawker of the early 1800s appealed to the docile bodies of skeptical crowds, Edison-sanctioned phonograph exhibits in the late 1870s served to give audiences a veritable out-of-body experience. Gitelman notes that after recording a snippet of their own voices and listening to it with uncanny pleasure, audience members would eagerly collect strips of foil from the cylinders, “authentication of actual sounds that had been shared” (p. 39). These strips of foil, each of which served as a material (though functionally useless) record of a precise event, tell us a great deal about the emergence of the phonograph in the newsprint-stained culture of the 1870s, just as the fonts used in J. C. R. Licklider’s Ph.D. dissertation tell us about the emergence of the web. Both of these technologies are about disembodiment, but they differ in important ways since, as Gitelman suggests, dematerialization “can only be experienced in relation to a preexisting sense of matter and materialization” (p. 86). This explains why her study focuses on newspapers and punch cards as well as wax cylinders and microchips. Gitelman’s work, after all, is about “records and documents” in general, with all of the etymological connotations that these words have accumulated.

The experience of reading Gitelman ’s history of the web in the second section of the book is, to borrow Janet Abbate’s description of using the ARPANET, “rather like taking a tank for a joyride” (p. 114). As Gitelman herself admits, the history of the web begins with the “paper cards and bureaucracy” that characterize cold war government-funded research (p. 86). But as her discussion of Licklider’s “self-writing” documents (pp. 98–107) waxes into a dissection of the Pentagon’s code-cluttered booklet “Scenarios for Using the ARPANET” (pp. 112–17), and then moves at last into the bracketed minutiae of the William Blake Archive’s cryptic revision history (pp. 141–45), an unsettling thought occurred to me: perhaps Gitelman’s well-disciplined and rigorous methodology, which eschews storytelling in the name of objectivity, is born of the same technobureaucratic ideology that gave us ARPANET. Always Already New, like much of the work in humanities computing today, struck me as the product of a higher education system that values data over aesthetics, lines of code over sonnets. And that is why this book left me longing for the visionary and unrigorous storytelling of both Friedrich Kittler and William Blake.

In the epilogue of Always Already New, Gitelman suggests that her version of media history offers “a methodological detour around the aesthetic” (p. 154). She also suggests that John Guillory employs a similar methodology in his book Cultural Capital (1993), which explores the crisis of the humanities in the late twentieth century. Ironically, Guillory himself notes in his study that an appeal to “rigor,” sponsored by the ruling technobureaucracy of universities, is precisely what led to the crisis of the humanities in the first place. The crisis was allayed momentarily in English departments when critical theory served to provide an “aura of rigor” to the humanities, but that time has passed. Today, humanities computing is attempting to be the rigorous savior of the humanities, and it should come as no surprise that the specialists in this area may soon be sharing the supercomputing power of the Pentagon. Given this situation, the second section of Gitelman’s book, both in method and content, serves not as an enlightening documentation of the past, but as a sobering harbinger of the anti-aesthetic, technocratic—and yes, perhaps posthuman—future of the humanities in a culture of data.

Gitelman concludes this coolly intelligent and rigorous study by noting that while she chose to focus on phonograph records and electronic documents, “one might think as well of draft cards, green cards, and other paperwork, for instance, or of missing minutes of audiotape, enigmatic assassination footage, or satellite images of suspected missile sites” (p. 155). I would hope that humanities scholars will indeed consider these topics very carefully, and that they will do so not only with a cold, technoscientific zeal for data, but also with the aesthetic enthusiasm and the subjective, risk-taking interest of a postmodern media critic or a William Blake.

Dr. O’Gorman is an associate professor in the English Language and Literature Department at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.

©2008 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved.

One person’s faith is another’s fantasy, and those who look upon Apollo as either a blessing or a waste are unlikely to be dissuaded. Choosing one or the other, though, isn’t really the point. What made Apollo special is the fact that for once, the inmates actually did have the keys to the asylum—and the treasury.

Apollo soon earned the kind of literary canon reserved for major wars, with thousands of works produced ranging from pop-up books to solid institutional histories. For Walter McDougall, military service in Southeast Asia in the summer of 1969 provided little respite for contemplating interplanetary spaceflight. His Pulitzer Prize– and Dexter Prize–winning 1985 political history of the early years of the space age (and warnings of its consequences for the American polity), . . . the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, informs virtually every history of the subject written since.{2} So does Tom Wolfe’s uproarious The Right Stuff, disabusing people of their illusions about America’s earliest astronauts while still somehow burnishing their reputations.{3} In recent years, a spate of biographies and memoirs of astronauts and engineers have further broadened the story of the first great space age.{4} And these have been joined by scholarly treatises on Apollo’s innovative management, resonance in popular culture, unique workplace, foreign competition, and gendered construction.{5} Meanwhile, popular media have found renewed inspiration in homeric retellings of the Apollo missions themselves, with contributions like Ron Howard’s 1995 film Apollo 13, Andrew Chaikin’s A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts (1994),{6} and Tom Hanks’s 1998 miniseries adaptation From the Earth to the Moon. These works, if offering little new to experienced space scholars, combined stirring narratives with hyperrealism and visceral awe, a formula that made them hits.

Authors tackling the legacy of Apollo these days must grapple with a literature already so vast that it would seem to leave few historical Moon rocks unturned; new works from Gerard DeGroot and the interplanetary tag team of Francis French and Colin Burgess confront this problem in different ways. For DeGroot, trawling through libraries for evidence of the collective insanity of lunar flight in Dark Side of the Moon: The Magnificent Madness of the American Lunar Quest, well-worn anecdotes take on a sinister gloss as the characters and motivations of the Moon race are reimagined as less reasoned than they may have once seemed.{7} For French and Burgess, the technical and political histories of Project Apollo are the backdrop for the almost mythic accounts of participating individuals, whose recollections the authors exhaustively compile and lavishly annotate for In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965–1969.{8}

Until Dark Side of the Moon came along, freeing people of their illusions about Apollo appeared to be going out of style; spaceflight historiography had mostly wrested free of the cold war. Lest we forget that Apollo was expensive and pointless, though, DeGroot reminds readers of the paranoia that spawned the Moon race and the zeal that sustained it. Like “two bald men fighting over a comb,” DeGroot writes (p. xiii), the United States and Soviet Union expended vast sums in the 1960s pursuing a goal with no intrinsic worth to either of them. The public that supported this Moon race was irrational, misled by starry-eyed fantasists, political opportunists, and greedy industrial profiteers who recognized that rockets accomplish much more through what they influence on Earth than what they discover in space. These crooked dreamers, DeGroot argues, had been hawking the idea of piloted flight through space at least a few hundred years before Apollo, always with the same mix of utopianism and pandering. He concedes that some of them may have earnestly believed that humankind’s future required the colonization of distant worlds, but others were hucksters and showboats willing to sell their souls to the war machine to see their beloved rockets “raping the atmosphere” (p. 12).

If readers know what happened next, it is no doubt due to the work of McDougall and others, from which DeGroot liberally draws. Flush with victory, cash, and German engineers, postwar America at first seemed ripe for space travel, but military rocket researchers like Wernher von Braun spent the late 1940s and early 1950s killing monkeys and writing magazine articles while American military leaders debated spaceflight’s future. A cautious President Dwight D. Eisenhower at first doled out limited funds for space research, but the Soviets, desperate for a weapon to pierce the North Atlantic shield, shoveled money into rockets with intercontinental reach. The Soviet launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 changed everything, and nothing—instead of fundamentally altering the power balance between the United States and Soviet Union, artificial satellites merely provided them with another arena in which to battle for the world’s hearts and minds, and an opportunity for a variety of politicians to make their reputations.

Nothing sold papers quite like people in space; before either nation knew it, both were readying rockets for piloted flight. Degenerate, foulmouthed drunks, America’s test-pilot astronauts made poor role models, but at least they did not masturbate in front of the cameras like their chimpanzee colleagues. Again, in 1961, the Soviets beat the Americans to the punch by shooting the first undertrained human being into space, but the Americans’ eventual success in matching this feat with Project Mercury emboldened the young National Aeronautics and Space Administration to think big. For President John F. Kennedy, the manned Moon shot of Project Apollo would be the great propaganda equalizer, requiring only $35 billion in pork barrel congressional handouts and a few dozen expendable pilots. Before too long, DeGroot writes, Apollo had a life of its own, and no amount of political second-guessing could extinguish it.

As American space mania grew and congressional districts became wealthy on appropriations, astronauts risked death trying to master the space environment, while on the other side of the world, Soviet cosmonauts did the same, racing each other to the imaginary lunar finish line. The Americans’ arrival in lunar orbit in December 1968 marked a major milestone for the Moon program but also let the wind out of its sails: there was nothing there. Nevertheless, not even the civil rights spoilsports could dampen enthusiasm for Apollo 11’s flight the following year, so drunk were the American people on the glamour of their real-life rocket men. Compared to the windup, though, the Moon landing was a metaphysical bust. If Americans drank themselves silly on the promise of spaceflight, the buzz was short-lived and followed by one heck of a hangover. Even before the Apollo 11 astronauts returned to Earth, President Richard M. Nixon had slowly begun to chip away at the edifice of American human spaceflight.

DeGroot’s spaceflight hatchet job is, as one might imagine, a blast: his prose is short and pithy and awash in clever turns of phrase. But readers are likely to have encountered the author’s arguments in a variety of other places, and some are a bit overbroad. If all a historian can conclude about an era is that those who lived in it were insane, one must wonder if more work remains to be done. DeGroot quite admirably refuses to allow himself to be flimflammed by NASA propaganda, but he has little sympathy for the motivations of those in the space program who were quite sane, quite decent, and quite reasonably convinced that what they were doing would be remembered. The existence of a book like Dark Side has proven them right.

If doubts about the space program emerge in French and Burgess’s In the Shadow of the Moon, they are never enough to derail a respectful account of space navigation as told by those who wore the diapers. The second book in a series from the University of Nebraska Press edited by Burgess, Shadow picks up the space race in 1965 (where the authors’ Into that Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961–1965 left off), telling the story of human spaceflight through the eyes of its most direct participants: astronauts and the people who knew them.{9} Burgess’s series is subtitled A People’s History of Spaceflight, but social history of the downtrodden is not on the menu—unless one considers Apollo’s lunar module pilots (LMP) downtrodden. (As it turns out, many LMPs actually do.) Shadow, rather, eschews Marxism for character vignettes so affectionate that few of the individuals discussed are likely to have their feelings hurt. Walter Cunningham, an Apollo LMP whose own 1977 memoir pulled few punches about the astronaut mystique,{10} introduces Shadow with his usual pizzazz, but French and Burgess are far more sympathetic to their sources, even when criticizing them.

The story of spaceflight between 1965 and 1969 has been told elsewhere and offers little opportunity for artistic deviation: American spaceflight was never more energized than during this period, which began with America’s Project Gemini flights into Earth orbit and ended with the first Apollo Moon landing. Shadow jumps right into the former, dissecting early two-man Gemini missions commanded by veteran astronauts Gus Grissom and Gordon Cooper and rookie pilots Jim McDivitt and Frank Borman, who would become central figures in Project Apollo. Over the first three chapters, French and Burgess complete the Gemini saga, lavishing attention on the difficulties each crew encountered and surmounted while tumbling through space with overheating spacesuits and faulty thrusters. These accounts create an image of one of the most capable groups of individuals any nation has ever assembled for any purpose.

DeGroot caricatures NASA’s astronauts as overgrown kids rushing headlong into a foolishly dangerous endeavor; French and Burgess cannot help but lionize them. Minute detail and lesser-known facts pour from the pages of Shadow, but to complete their accounts of men they clearly respect, the authors occasionally deviate from the master narrative to dwell on the astronauts’ later lives and eventual passing, lending the work the mournful tone of their previous volume. This elegiac spirit is never more apparent than in chapter 4, where the authors examine the 1967 deaths of Apollo 1 crewmembers Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, and the demise of cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov on the maiden flight of his Soyuz spacecraft. Following this somber interlude is an equally jarring chapter on Apollo’s return to flight in 1968 by Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Cunningham, centering on the clash of personalities among the members of the mission team in space and on the ground. In discussing the “enigmatic” Eisele, French and Burgess wrestle with issues of marital discord and lackluster job performance, but they seek to redeem rather than condemn the now-deceased astronaut, one of many efforts at image rehabilitation the authors have attempted of late. (Unheralded LMPs like Apollo 8’s Bill Anders and Apollo 9’s Rusty Schweickart also enjoy their well-earned moments in the Sun.) As with Silent Sea, the ascendance—and, occasionally, decline—of the space program’s minor somebodies provide readers with most of the book’s new insights.

Like NASA itself, French and Burgess are unwilling to let bad vibes and a few dead bodies derail their adventure, and America’s conquest of space resumes in late 1968 after a brief return to Russia, where an almost stagnated Soviet space program struggles with a series of harrowing Earth-orbit missions probably less familiar to American readers. If Silent Sea toiled to maintain parity in American and Soviet narratives, Shadow resigns itself to telling the story of spaceflight in this period as mostly an American one, with cosmonauts making infrequent (though engrossing) appearances, slipping in the race to the Moon, and trying desperately to make their translunar Soyuz spacecraft work. In short order, American successes pile up in 1968 and 1969: led by a familiar cast of characters, Apollo crews prove out their spacecraft, circumnavigate the Moon, and put their lunar module through the rigors of flight testing. In this crescendo of milestones, Apollo 11’s triumph seems almost anticlimactic; the authors stress that Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins reached the Moon on the shoulders of previous, less-heralded flights, and the point sticks.

In Silent Sea, French and Burgess suggested that the earliest astronauts were far more thoughtful than most people imagined, but Shadow leaves the reader with the impression that Apollo’s spacemen are far more important for what they did than for what they felt. The reverence of Shadow is more than mere naiveté. Apollo was cold war theater, but even to cold warriors it signaled what one steely-eyed missile man, the U.S. Army’s Major General John Medaris, described as “‘a new understanding of man’s relationship with the infinity of Divine Creation’” (DeGroot, p. 93). For true believers (and there were millions) space travel would rescue humanity from nuclear annihilation, resource depletion, and the Sun’s eventual extinguishment. A human footprint on the Moon, if tainted by nationalism, was an essential milestone from which mostly good would come.

One person’s faith is another’s fantasy, and those who look upon Apollo as either a blessing or a waste are unlikely to be dissuaded by either of these works. Choosing one or the other, though, isn’t really the point. What made Apollo special is the fact that for once, the inmates actually did have the keys to the asylum—and the treasury. 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 the Moon program 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.

Nearly four decades after its first publication, Norman Mailer’s self-indulgent, often frustrating 1970 book, Of a Fire on the Moon, may still be the best account of the events of July 1969, precisely because it erupted from a man not inclined to give the squares gratuitous praise.{11} Apollo was ridiculous; it could be dull; the people involved were cartoonish in their obsessions and robotic in their attention to Apollo’s manifold details. As American counterculture crested, though, even the hippies had to admit that tie-dye and LSD seemed a little less radical in the light of the Moon; space travel was where it’s at. The latest books on Apollo reveal quite a bit of fuel still left in the tanks. History tends to remember each civilization for a single achievement: the Egyptians, their pyramids; the Chinese, their Great Wall; the Romans, their roads. Two thousand years from now, future humans may well remember of Americans only one thing: they went to the Moon.

{2} Walter A. McDougall, . . . the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York, 1985).

{3} Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (New York, 1979).

{4} For example, James R. Hansen, First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong (New York, 2005) and Michael J. Neufeld, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (New York, 2007).

{5} Examples include Stephen B. Johnson, The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs (Baltimore, 2002); Howard E. McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination (Washington, D.C., 1997); David A. Mindell, Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Space Flight (Cambridge, Mass., 2008); Asif A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945–1974 (Washington, D.C., 2000); Margaret A. Weitekamp, Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: America’s First Women in Space Program (Baltimore, 2004).

{6} Andrew Chaikin, A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts (New York, 1994).

{7} Gerard J. DeGroot, Dark Side of the Moon: The Magnificent Madness of the American Lunar Quest (New York, 2006, pp. xiv+320, $30).

{8} Francis French and Colin Burgess, In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965–1969 (Lincoln, Neb., 2007, pp. xix+425, $29.95).

{9} Francis French and Colin Burgess, Into that Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961–1965 (Lincoln, Neb., 2007).

{10} Walter Cunningham and Mickey Herskowitz, The All-American Boys (New York, 1977).

{11} Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon (Boston, 1970).

Mr. Hersch is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania and the 2007–08 Guggenheim Fellow of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

©2008 by the Society for the History of Technology.