In This Issue

Chandra Mukerji opens this issue with a reflection on engineering and politics and power that moves deftly between seventeenth-century France and the contemporary United States to probe "the sources and limits of power, and . . . its complex relationship to sovereignty, morality, and engineering." The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon of 11 September 2001 brought terrorism to the forefront of politics and made visible the political significance of engineering. But why "would the destruction of a single building threaten or even pose questions of legitimacy of a regime?" That it was intended and is perceived as such a threat seems clear enough, but putting the question so plainly makes one pause. "The implicit cultural association of modern power with technological sophistication," writes Mukerji, "is palpable but not clear." Scholars in science and technology studies have argued before that hybrids and built environments could be tools of power, but, Mukerji observes, the significance of these analyses became newly evident on 9/11. "The engineered basis of modern state power snapped into view as it seemed to dissolve."

In "A Modernization of 'Peerless Homogeneity': The Creation of Russian Smokeless Gunpowder," Michael Gordin notes that studies of technical choice in military modernization tend to take a unitary view of both technological determinism and the concept of modernization. D. I. Mendeleev's development of a Russian variant of smokeless gunpowder in the 1890s, however, offers a contrasting picture; in late-imperial Russia several different modernizations confronted each other, and in Russian military circles the value of technical change was a matter of genuine debate. The eventual rejection of Mendeleev's pyrocollodion, Gordin argues, thus serves as an episode in the history of technological determinism as a category.

Asphalt was first used to pave streets in U.S. cities in the 1860s, but, as I. B. Holley shows in "Blacktop: How Asphalt Paving Came to the Urban United States," it took decades to master the new material. Early applications were largely unsuccessful: asphalt's chemical composition was ill-understood, and new methods as well as new machinery had to be developed before it could be applied with success. Gradually, chemists improved their understanding of the material and contractors gained experience with it, and by the early twentieth century it was the most common paving material in use in the United States. The rise of national contracting firms, the invention of rail-mounted mixing plants and suitable tank cars—all played crucial roles in this development. But, Holley suggests, "what stands out . . . is the necessity of bridging the gap between pure and applied science, between theory and practice. Running through the whole story of the mastery of asphalt as a paving material is the essential role of expertise, political no less than scientific and technical."

In the mid-twentieth century, Kristen Haring contends, amateur radio fulfilled important social functions in the lives of men devoted to this hobby. In "The 'Freer Men' of Ham Radio: How a Technical Hobby Provided Social and Spatial Distance," Haring analyzes hobbyists' rhetoric about family life and household space to document how men operating ham radios in mid-twentieth century America altered the social geography of middle-class homes. During a postwar period of sexual identity anxiety, when women controlled domestic environments, ham radio strengthened men's claims on masculinity and privacy. Amateur radio operators developed a distinct technical identity, based in personal identity and material culture, that allowed them to simultaneously achieve social and spatial distance.

The Hagley Museum and Library in Delaware has been a center for research in the history of technology since the 1960s. Yet even scholars who have done extensive research at the library may be unaware of the breadth and diversity of its archival holdings. Glen Asner's "Researching the History of Technology at the Hagley Museum and Library" introduces recent additions to the library's holdings and notes opportunities for further research in older archival collections. Asner uses both established and emerging themes in the history of technology—the environment, internationalization, safety, users, and gender&#8212...