Technology & the West: A Historical Anthology from Technology and culture

The articles selected for these two anthologies, designed for classroom use and for the general reader, demonstrate excellence in scholarship. Technology and the West reprints eighteen articles from this journal, Technology and American History fifteen. The selections demonstrate that scholars working in the history of technology have been capable of great breadth, insight, and clear analysis as the field expanded over the past several decades. The subjects range from preindustrial technologies to the nature of technological development in “postindustrial society.” The anthologies will be especially welcome to teachers wishing to assign scholarly essays on different subjects in different time periods, essays that show excellence in research and critical analysis. The editors have provided introductions that explain the importance of understanding technology in its social and historical context and not as an independent force that determines human behavior and social organization. Moreover, they chose to begin Technology and the West with an edited version of Melvin Kranzberg’s 1985 presidential address to the Society for the History of Technology. That address offered general propositions for understanding the history of technology, and the editors use it to help readers understand the significance of the other essays in the volume.

There are some differences between the two volumes, arising from their subject matter. Technology and the West is evenly balanced between articles on preindustrial and industrial technology. In it we learn about subjects such as air pollution in medieval London and the thermal pollution that results from nuclear power. Technology and American History, covering a shorter time span, is almost entirely about industrial technology. It begins with an essay by Norman B. Wilkinson explaining the importance of American borrowing of European technology, which shows the importance of transatlantic transfer in technology as well as in law, religion, political philosophies, and other areas. The book concludes with an article by Richard F. Hirsh and Adam H. Serchuk on recent developments in the electric utility industry. There is one article common to both volumes: Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s piece on the industrial revolution in the home, which has done so much to enlarge our knowledge of the impact of technological change on people’s lives.

The editors selected articles according to time period; nevertheless, many of the selections were prizewinners of one sort or another. As is almost always the case with anthologies, these volumes have little conceptual unity. To be sure, the editors explain carefully that what unites the articles is the realization that technology must be understood in its social and historical context. Their summaries of the essays selected help the reader understand this important general point. Beyond this, however, thematic development is left for the reader (or, presumably, the teacher who has assigned the volumes to a class). Thus, other than to say that the general point about context is convincing, it is impossible for me to critique the historical themes proposed and developed, for such are absent. In the absence of any extended thesis or thematic development, it seems unlikely that the volumes will have much appeal for the general reader.

The books seem ideally suited for classroom adoption in courses on the history of technology, either in western civilization or in United States history. Informed teachers will, however, need to exercise some care in their use. In Technology and the West, the editors offer a limited definition of technology (“the ability to manipulate or control nature,” p. 23) appropriate for understanding early civilizations, but they offer nothing similar in Technology and American History. The Kranzberg presidential essay will require careful use, for it was written for an audience...