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Technology and Culture 43.4 (2002) ix
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In This Issue
This issue of Technology and Culture, like the last, is organized around a theme--kitchen technologies in this case, Dutch water technologies in July 2002. It marks the first time T&C has published two theme issues in a row, a turn of events attributable more to serendipity than to careful planning. As we noted in July, most of the considerable editorial work that goes into a special issue falls to the guest editor, in this case Joy Parr. Here, then, in place of the usual summaries we instead take the opportunity to thank Dr. Parr for her valuable labors and direct the reader to her introduction to the three articles in this issue and to the themes they frame.
Parr characterizes these articles as "meditations on how commercially driven design and mass-produced technologies settled into the kitchens of the United States in the twentieth century." Two essays in this issue complement that theme. Susan Strasser's "Making Consumption Conspicuous: Transgressive Topics Go Mainstream" surveys recent contributions to the burgeoning literature on the history of consumption and consumerism, an area of scholarly inquiry that, as Strasser writes, "is of fundamental interest to historians of technology because it pertains to the social relations in which technological artifacts are embedded," and one that links the history of technology to many other historical fields. And Robert Friedel's comment, "Food for Thought," which closes this issue, reflects on the fact that viewing the kitchen from the perspective of the history of technology in turn illuminates historians' conceptions of technological creativity in new ways.
Finally, the attack on the World Trade Center and its aftermath remain a focus of attention for historians of technology as for others. In this issue, Julie Wosk reviews three photo exhibits organized around images of the World Trade Center and 11 September, and Amy Slaton reviews Simon Cole's Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification, a book that has acquired new resonance in the past year.
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