Introduction to the History of Technology

Readings

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