Concerns over increasing corporate domination of the organic sector and the industrial food system’s contribution to climate change, fossil-fuel consumption, and food-borne illness have moved the issue of local food into the national spotlight. Yet just as local food has begun to receive unprecedented public attention, it has come under attack from a number of supporters of sustainable agriculture. The question is, why? The answer, it turns out, has a good deal to do with Michael Pollan.

Roger Burlingame’s optimism may seem somewhat naive and romantic today, but he made pioneering contributions to both this journal and the history of technology—or, in his apt words, “the Hardware of Culture.”

Art in the Age of Steam, at the Walker Gallery in Liverpool, brought together artworks on steam rail travel from a chronology of historical movements. The results were of interest to historians of technology and art historians alike.

Lehigh University’s Fritz Engineering Laboratory marks its centennial in 2010. For slightly more than half of its hundred-year history, Fritz Lab has been the home of what at the time of its dedication in 1955 was the world’s largest universal testing machine.

At some point in the 1970s or early 1980s, the capitalist system changed dramatically. Whether that change made the current crisis inevitable remains to be seen, but it did make it more likely.

Serafina Cuomo’s thoughtful book is an attempt to corrects the marginalization of the subject of ancient technology and to acknowledge its importance to understanding ancient culture.

The cold war was an era of transition, ornamented with ambivalence, hypocrisy, inconsistency, and paradox. Bringing these issues into focus matters now because we inhabit another era of transition—from cold war to placeless conflicts, from nation-based structures to global flows, from American ascendance to American declension, from just plain weather to global warming.