Introduction to the History of Technology

Readings

Lec #	TOPICS	READINGS
1	Introduction: History and the Idea of Technology	Marx, Leo. “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept.” Social Research 64, no. 3: 965-988.
2	Geography and Systems I: Manufacturing and Distribution	Chandler, Alfred. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1993. ISBN: 9780674940529. Yates, Joanne. Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. ISBN: 9780801837579. Beniger, James. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. ISBN: 9780674169869. Piore, M. J., and C. F. Sabel. The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1990. ISBN: 9780465075614.
3	Geography and Systems II: Landscape and Technology	Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992. ISBN: 9780393308730. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Idea in America. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN: 9780195133516. Nye, David. Electrifying America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. ISBN: 9780262640305. ———. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. ISBN: 9780262640343.
4	Manufacturing	Hounshell, David. From the American System to Mass Production. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. ISBN: 0685106381. Smith, M. R. Harper’s Ferry Armory and the New Technology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980. ISBN: 9780801491818. Hughes, Agatha, and Thomas Hughes, eds. Systems, Experts and Computers: The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering, World War II and After. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. ISBN: 9780262082853. Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. ISBN: 9780631221401. Fagan, M. D., ed. A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System. Murray Hill, NJ: Bell Telephone Laboratories, 1975. Brooks, John. Telephone: The First Hundred Years. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1976. ISBN: 9780060105402.
5	Human and Machine I: War Machines	Mindell, David A. War, Technology, and Experience Aboard the USS ‘Monitor’. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. ISBN: 9780801862502. Smith, Merritt Roe, ed. Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. ISBN: 9780262691185. Pick, Daniel. War Machine: The Rationalization of Slaughter in the Modern Age. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. ISBN: 9780300067194. Van Creveld, Martin. Command in War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. ISBN: 9780674144415. McNeill, William. The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since AD 1000. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. ISBN: 9780226561585. MacKenzie, Donald. Inventing Accuracy: An Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. ISBN: 9780262631471. Fussel, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN: 9780195133325.
6	Human and Machine II: Modernist Cybernetics	Rabinbach, A. The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992. ISBN: 9780520078277. Kern, Stephen, ed. The Culture of Space and Time. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. ISBN: 9780674021693. Mindell, David. Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing Before Cybernetics. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. ISBN: 9780801880575. Mazlish, Bruce. The Fourth Discontinuity: The Co-Evolution of Humans and Machines. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. ISBN: 9780300065121.
7	Biography	Crouch, Tom. The Bishop’s Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003. ISBN: 03930695X. Berg, A. Scott. Lindbergh. New York, NY: Penguin Group, 1999. ISBN: 9780425170410. Hansen, J. R. First Man: A Biography of Neal Armstrong. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2006. ISBN: 9780743257510. Fritzsche, Peter. A Nation of Flyers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.
8	Modernist Visions	Hughes, Thomas P. American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004. ISBN: 9780226359274. Wohl, Robert. A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908-1918. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. ISBN: 9780300068870. ———. The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination , 1920-1950. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. ISBN: 9780300106923. Eksteins, Modris. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. ISBN: 9780395937587.
9	Human and Machine IV: Gender, Sex and the Body	Weitekamp, Margaret. Right Stuff Wrong Sex: America’s First Women in Space Program. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. ISBN: 9780801883941. Herzig, R. “Gender and Technology.” In A Companion to American Technology. Edited by Carroll Pursell. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2005. ISBN: 9780631228448. Schwartz-Cowan, Ruth. More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1985. ISBN: 9780465047321. Oldenziel, Ruth. Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870-1945. Amsterdam, NLD: Amsterdam University Press, 2004. ISBN: 9789053563816. Omelia, Johanna, and Michael Waldock. Come Fly With Us!: A Global History of the Airline Hostess. Tigard, OR: Collectors Press, Inc., 2006. ISBN: 9781933112060.
10	Technology and Representation I	Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechnical Reproduction.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Translated by Harry Zohn. Edited by Hannah Arendt. New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1969. ISBN: 9780805202410. Thompson, Emily. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004, chapters 1, 3, 4, and 5. ISBN: 9780262701068. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotexte/Smart Art, 1983. ISBN: 9780936756028.
11	Technology and Representation II: Computing	Waldrop, Mitch. Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal. New York, NY: Penguin Group, 2002. ISBN: 9780142001356. Mindell, David. Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing Before Cybernetics. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. ISBN: 9780801880575. Ceruzzi, Paul. A History of Modern Computing. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. ISBN: 9780262532037. Edwards, Paul. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. ISBN: 9780262550284. Black, Edwin. IBM and the Holocaust. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co, 2001. ISBN: 9780316857710.
12	In-class Film Viewing: Architecture of Doom	Architecture of Doom
13	Wrap-up Discussion