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.
