New Directions for the History of Aviation

Introduction

The books under consideration here might justifiably be termed products of the “New Aerospace History.” This was a term coined by my colleague at the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Roger Launius, to characterize what he believed was a “significant transformation that has been taking place in the field since the 1980s. Specifically, the New Aerospace History is intrinsically committed to relating the subject to larger issues of society, politics, and culture, taking a more sophisticated view of the science, technology, and individual projects than historians previously held. In the past, many writers on aerospace history held a fascination with the machinery, which has been largely anthropomorphized and often seen as ‘magical.’” ¹

Launius goes on to suggest a typology for the history of space exploration. Aerospace history should neither be celebratory nor should it be used “to attack the whole enterprise.” Among the legitimate inquiries that historians of space exploration should make are those that relate to the origins of the space age; civil-military relations in space; national sovereignty in space exploration; the politics of space exploration; space flight and its technological legacy; the human imperative in space exploration; space and popular culture. Indeed, all of these typological components could be applied directly to the study of what might be termed “aero” history (the initial component of the term “aero-space history), or what is known simply as the history of aviation. ²

Aerospace history, in many respects a branch of the history of technology, has thus become caught up in a larger movement of historical studies about technology. One of these was the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT), first posited by Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas Hughes, and Trevor Pinch in The Social Construction of Technological Systems (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1989; Anniversary Ed., 2012). The original conception of SCOTS included the study of Large-Scale Technological Systems (LTS) and Actor-Network Theory (ANT), prevalent in what has become known as Science and Technology Studies (STS).

These endeavors sought to move away from what is termed “technological determinism,” or, in its most simplistic terms, the idea that technology has a progressive inevitability that is beyond human agency. The editors believed that “whether questioning the fixed boundary between humans and nonhumans, or paying attention to the nontechnical aspects when studying the history of technical systems—all three approaches embraced the methodological principle of paying attention to how the borders between the social and the technical were drawn by actors, rather than assuming that these borders are pre-given and static. This also brings out the common element of a constructivist perspective. Rather than taking an essentialist view of technologies and their contexts, we all agreed that describing the activities of actors— whether in the form of relevant social groups (SCOT), systems builders (LTS), or actants (ANT)— was more interesting than a promethean history of technology that emphasized how heroic inventors and engineers stole great ideas about technology from the gods and gave them to mere mortals.” ³

Another prevalent direction for aerospace history has been cultural history in its multiplicity of meanings. In their introduction to The Cultural Turn in U.S. History: Past, Present and Future, the editors, James W. Cook and Lawrence B. Glickman, put forth a number of propositions for a history of the cultural history of the United States. Among the most relevant for our purposes here is “Proposition Three: More recent varieties of U.S. cultural history have regularly encompassed a wide range of ‘culture concepts.’”

These “culture concepts” are six in number: (1) Culture Defined as Artistic Expression; (2) Culture Defined as the Larger Matrix of Commercial Institutions and Structures in Which Artistic Forms are Produced; (3...