This Issue

Historians of technology have long agreed that the word which names their discipline is hard to define. The word "technology" has proven symbolically potent and highly contested particularly in the United States in the half century since its triumphant emergence from World War II. The war's technological triumphs and its sweet moment of national unity temporarily damped down the nation's normally fractious style. Ever since, nostalgia for a transcendent and salvific force, sometimes called "progress" and sometimes "technology," has maintained a powerful presence in the symbolism and rhetoric of the public forum. Not for nothing is "technology" strategically invoked in advertisements, in Disney's quasi-historical theme park EPCOT, and in political rhetoric and partisan discourse generally. This issue's thematic cluster devoted to studying the historical evolution of the word is more than welcome.

In "Signifying Semantics for a History of Technology," Dr. Ruth Oldenziel introduces this cluster, closely examining Eric Schatzberg's "Technik comes to America: Changing Meanings of Technology before 1930" and Ronald R. Kline's "Cybernetics, Management Science, and Technology Policy: The Emergence of 'Information Technology' as a Keyword, 1948–1985." Oldenziel summarizes the arguments of both authors with admirable clarity on pages 479 through 481; her discussion stands in for our ordinary "In This Issue" summary.

Fortunately for T&C readers, Oldenziel brings more to her introduction than her sketches of Kline and Schatzberg. Building on her highly regarded study of gendered uses of the word technology (Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870–1945 [Amsterdam 1999]), Oldenziel situates Kline and Schatzberg's studies in the context of recent scholarship on the power of language. "If the linguistic turn of the past few decades has taught us anything, it is that words matter because they frame social reality and become hardened in material practices" (p. 483). Dr. Oldenziel calls attention to recent work by Leo Marx and Nina Lerman, and to the import of her own research. She also notes a remarkable historical irony, the spousal divergence between Charles Beard's "progress-oriented, deterministic understanding" of technology and his wife Mary R. Beard's long campaign to challenge the Encyclopedia Britannica's masculine genealogy for the term. In doing so, Oldenziel introduces our readers to "the extraordinary power of America's mid-century buzzword [which] has been shaped by understanding it within its gendered, racial, class, and colonial power struggles" (p. 482).

For a quarter century at least historians of technology have expressed dissatisfaction with overly simple and implicitly linear interpretations of technology transfer. In "Dissemination of Technical Knowledge in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era: New Approaches and Methodological Issues," Liliane Hilaire-Pérez and Catherine Verna present a masterful synthesis of recent scholarship which is revolutionizing earlier understandings of how technologies circulate. "It is useful to remind ourselves that these routes [through which technologies spread] are not linear, but rather manifold and multicentered" (p. 543). Hilaire-Pérez and Verna organize their survey according to three major themes: an expanded understanding of relevant evidence (with the help of lexicography and archeology); attention to cultural cross-breeding (technologies repeatedly appear as hybrids modified in distinct locations); and a reappraisal of relevant geographical frames (in particular, the transnational and the very local). The authors summarize their detailed survey, studded with examples from micro-level studies across a broad range of Medieval and Early Modern technologies (glass, looms, mills, forges, dyestuffs, etc.), in a single concluding sentence: "Distinctive localism always interfered with diffusion." For Technology and Culture readers more familiar with English-language scholarship, Hilaire-Pérez and Verna offer an introduction to European scholarship which should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand how technologies travel and evolve. The footnotes alone would be worth the reading.

Readers will find two exhibit reviews in this issue. Sara E. Wermiel reviews The Charles Sumner School Museum's exhibit of German Architect Adolf Cluss's influential work designing buildings for nineteenth-century Washington, D.C. Gwen Bingle reviews The Deutsches Museum's sometimes disturbing and thoroughly provocative exhibit of prostheses, from ubiquitous eye glasses to the carbon-fiber artificial leg. Exhibit reviews are...