Historical Perspectives on Technology, Society and Culture
A series cosponsored by the American Historical Association and the Society for the History of Technology
Edited by Robert C. Post and Pamela O. Long
Technology reflects and shapes human history. From hunting and gathering cultures and the establishment of neolithic villages, farming, and food storage techniques to the development of metallurgy, ceramics, weaving, sculpture and writing, sailing ships and wheeled vehicles, firearms, printing, mechanized power, aeronautics and spaceflight, automation, electronics, and computers, history and technology have been integral with one another. The role and function of specific technologies—from the stirrup in the early middle ages to gunpowder and the mechanical clock in the thirteenth century, printing presses in the fifteenth and sixteenth, the steam engine in the eighteenth, and the automobile, rocketry, and nuclear power in the twentieth—are all the subject of an extensive literature as well as animated scholarly controversies.
In the past several decades, specialists in the history of technology have produced a substantial body of work that analyzes the role of technology in diverse cultures. This scholarship has characteristically viewed technology within specific historical contexts. The material, social, and cultural components of technological choices, the effects of particular technologies on particular constituencies, the relationship of technology to labor, to the organization of production, to economic structures, to social status, and to gender (to cite a few examples) are all matters of remarkable scholarly endeavor.
Some of the most renowned scholars in the field will contribute to this joint series between the AHA and the Society for the History of Technology. Each pamphlet will explore technology in a specific topical context, including historiographical issues and a bibliography. With two to three dozen pamphlets planned on all areas from East Asia to the United States and the ancient through the modern worlds, this new series will be an invaluable addition for any secondary or postsecondary teacher.
Technology and Utopia
Segal examines the historical connection between technology and utopia, and shows how this connection is not just a contemporary western concept, but one that stretches back several centuries.
Howard P. Segal is Professor of History at the University of Maine, where he has taught since 1986. From 1996–2005 he was Bird Term Professor of History. He has been Director of the Technology and Society Project since 1988. Segal received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University. His books include Technological Utopianism in American Culture (1985; 2d ed. 2005); Future Imperfect: The Mixed Blessings of Technology in America (1994); Recasting the Machine Age: Henry Ford’s Village Industries (2005); and, with Alan Marcus, Technology in America: A Brief History (1989; 2d ed. 1999). His articles and essays have appeared both in academic journals and in more general publications like the New York Times, New Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The American Scholar, and Virginia Quarterly Review. He is regular reviewer of books about technology for Nature (London).
2006. 128 pages
ISBN 0-87229-147-2
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Transportation Technology and Imperialism in the
Ottoman Empire, 1800–1923
Technology transfer provides an ideal mode of address to the primary theme in the historiography of technology: that change is contingent on the political, cultural, and social settings in which technologies operate. Peter Mentzel uses this theme to examine transportation technology of the late Ottoman Empire, and the sociological and cultural effects of European technology transfer—specifically steamship and railroads—introduced in the mid-nineteenth century.
Peter Mentzel is Associate Professor of History at Utah State University. He has published extensively on the nineteenth and early twentieth century social and political history of the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire, and was guest editor of a special issue of Nationalities Papers on Muslim Minorities in the Balkans (vol. 28, no.1, March 2000). His most recent publications focus on the societal ramifications of the transfer of railroad technology into the Ottoman Empire. His grants have included a Fulbright Research Fellowship to Turkey (1998–99) and a grant from the American Research Institute in Turkey (1999)
2006. 112 pages
ISBN 0-87229-146-4
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Technology and Society in the Medieval Centuries: Byzantium, Islam, and the West, 500–1300
Technology is embedded in culture, in society, and in the physical environment. Long applies this premise to the history of technology in the years 500--1300, comparing the rich political, religious, and economic ways in which individuals and communities in Byzantium, Islam, and western Europe sought to manipulate their environment during the medieval centuries.
Pamela O. Long is an independent historian who has published extensively on medieval and late medieval/Renaissance cultural history, history of science, and technology. Her publications include Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), and one of the previous booklets in the AHA/SHOT series—Technology, Society, and Culture in Late Medieval/Renaissance Europe, 1300–1600.
2003. 142 pages
ISBN 0-87229-132-4
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$12 nonmembers
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Technology, Transport, and Travel in American History
Technology, Transport, and Travel in American History is Post's fascinating study of how cultural, economic, and political influences affected technological changes in travel and how these changes, in turn, affected American culture at large.
Robert C. Post is curator emeritus at the National Museum of American History. A former president of the Society for the History of Technology, he was editor-in-chief of Technology and Culture from 1981 through 1995, and is now its book review editor. His publications include High Performance: The Culture and Technology of Drag Racing, 1950–2000 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
2003. 107 pages
ISBN 0-87229-131-6
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Technology Transfer and East Asian Economic Transformation
An informative examination of how the adoption of foreign technologies transformed the economic and cultural landscape of East Asia since the late 19th century.
Rudi Volti is professor of sociology at Pitzer College and a member of the Science, Technology, and Society program of the Claremont Colleges. His publications include Technology, Politics, and Society in China; Society and Technological Change; The Engineer in History (with John Rae); and The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Society.
2002. 66 pages
ISBN 0-87229-127-8
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Technology and Society in Ming China, 1368–1644
Historians of Chinese technology have tended to pay little attention to the Ming dynasty, characterizing it as a "stagnant" period unmarked by significant inventions of the kind that in Europe gave rise to the industrial revolution and the modern world. Yet the Ming was a period of extraordinary social, cultural, and economic vitality and change, and it would be curious if technology had played no part in these changes. This pamphlet approaches the material world of the Ming from a more anthropological perspective than has been conventional among historians of China, emphasizing the role of technologies in social order and identity.
Francesca Bray is a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She is the author of The Rice Economies: Technology and Development in Asian Societies (University of California Press, 1994), and Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (University of California Press, 1997).
2000. 89 pages.
ISBN 0-87229-119-7
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Technology, Society, and Culture in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe, 1300–1600
This work presents an overview of technology as intrinsic to the culture of late medieval and Renaissance Europe. It includes discussion of agriculture, textiles such as wool, crafts such as ceramics and leatherwork, painting, architecture, mining and metallurgy, printing, military technology, and clocks. It discusses the details of both traditional and innovative technological processes. It also treats the relationships of technology to labor, class, gender, and other aspects of society. It points to significant historiographic issues and includes a bibliography.
Pamela O. Long is a historian of technology who has taught at Barnard College, St. Mary's College of Maryland, and Johns Hopkins University. She has published extensively on late medieval and Renaissance technical authorship. She is the author of Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), and one of the previous booklets in the AHA/SHOT series—Technology and Society in the Medieval Centuries: Byzantium, Islam, and the West, 500–1300.
2000. 76 pages.
ISBN 0-87229-120-0
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The Military-Industrial Complex
This booklet provides a thorough analysis of a set of relationships central to American history in the latter 20th century, which entered popular discourse in a phrase used by Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address of 1961—the military-industrial complex. Roland begins with an overview of U.S. industry and the military between World War I and the 1990s. He then focuses on five transformations: civil-military relations, relations between industry and the state, among government agencies, between scientific-technical communities and the state, and between technology and society. The booklet concludes with a bibliographic essay that addresses the salient literature and identifies areas of controversy among historians.
Alex Roland is professor of history at Duke University, where he teaches military history and the history of technology. He is a past president of the Society for the History of Technology. His books include Underwater Warfare in the Age of Sail (1978); Model Research: The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (1985); and, with Richard Preston and Sidney Wise, Men in Arms: A History of Warfare and Its Interrelationships with Western Society (5th ed., 1991).
2000.
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Technology and Communication in American History
Last Updated: November 29, 2007 12:27 PM