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  • In This Issue

The nature of skill has been a persistent theme in the history of technology because, as William Storey puts it, "skill exists at the intersection of the human and the material." Yet historians must perforce rely on other people's descriptions of skill, which may be biased in different ways, and this creates a methodological problem. In "Guns, Race, and Skill in Nineteenth-Century Southern Africa," Storey explores that methodological challenge, and the ideological nature of descriptions of skill, by tracing two related stories. The first involves the adaptation of firearms and the skills need to use them to local circumstances, and "contradicts cherished myths about colonial frontiersmen in southern Africa being natural marksmen, as well as less pleasant myths about the technological incompetence of Africans." The second, which Storey approaches through discourse analysis, concerns "changing settler representations of firearms and shooting skills." The two narratives, Storey argues, are inextricably linked. "When it comes to skill, the pairing of the material and the discursive proves inescapable."

Radio broadcasting was an important concern for China's Nationalist Party after it seized power in the 1920s. The Nationalists clashed with the United States over radio policy in succeeding years, and, as Michael Krysko argues in "Forbidden Frequencies: Sino-American Relations and Chinese Broadcasting during the Interwar Era," that antagonism illuminates broader questions of Sino-American relations and technology transfer. American attitudes reflected economic and political inequities of the Open Door era and revealed "culturally biased assumptions about Western technology's potential in a non-Western society." The Nationalists sought to develop policies "with an eye toward curtailing imperialism while building an economically and politically vibrant Chinese state." Krysko probes the effects of their conflict, and suggests that the story has a particular resonance now, "as some of the same myopic assumptions that informed American attitudes toward Chinese radio remain evident in assessments of the Internet's international potential."

"There have been many works published on food irradiation in the United States, but no scholarly histories," observes James Spiller in "Radiant Cuisine: The Commercial Fate of Food Irradiation in the United States," and with this article Spiller seeks to fill that gap. As a policy issue, food irradiation forges a connection between individuals and the high-tech abstraction of the nuclear industry. Public discourse on the question has been enduringly framed by early boosters, who portrayed irradiated foods "as a nourishing fulfillment of the promise of the atomic age," and later critics, who "condemn[ed] them as prosaic examples of the dangers posed by nuclear technology." The stakes of the debate are high, notes Spiller: should irradiation acquire momentum, "irradiated foods will not only become common fare, they will likely cast a positive glow on the larger nuclear industry."

In 1950, shortly after finishing The Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Wiener and two colleagues from MIT, Giorgio de Santillana and Karl Deutsch, drafted an article describing a plan to redesign American cities so as to make them less vulnerable to atomic attack. The article was never published, but Robert Kargon and Arthur Molella discovered the manuscript in the MIT Archives, and in "The City as Communications Net: Norbert Wiener, the Atomic Bomb, and Urban Dispersal" they detail its genesis and development. Though it is an anomaly among Wiener's writings, in it they see "evidence . . . of broader moral concerns coming out of the war" as well as "a window on the reactions of both contemporary urban planners and scientists to the implications of the atomic bomb."

The dynamics of technology transfer vary from one instance to another, as does the scale of events—from local to regional to national. Detailed accounts of aspects of the process of transfer can deepen our understanding of its dynamics, even in fields that have already been extensively researched. In "Tredegar, Newcastle, Baltimore: The Swivel Truck [End Page i] as Paradigm of Technology Transfer," David Gwyn offers just such a detailed study, from the early nineteenth century, concerning the wheeled subframes found on both locomotives and cars. Gwyn argues that in the case of the swivel truck, "the movement of ideas between national or supranational groups needs to be understood in terms of their...

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