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Engineering Manhood: Race and the Antebellum Virginia Military Institute

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Jonson Miller
2020
Published by: Lever Press
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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summary
It is not an accident that American engineering is so disproportionately male and white; it took and takes work to create and sustain this situation. Engineering Manhood: Race and the Antebellum Virginia Military Institute examines the process by which engineers of the antebellum Virginia Military Institute cultivated whiteness, manhood, and other intersecting identities as essential to an engineering professional identity. VMI opened in 1839 to provide one of the earliest and most thorough engineering educations available in antebellum America. The officers of the school saw engineering work as intimately linked to being a particular type of person, one that excluded women or black men. This particular white manhood they crafted drew upon a growing middle-class culture. These precedents impacted engineering education broadly in this country and we continue to see their legacy today.

Table of Contents

open access

Cover

Title Page

pp. i

Copyright

pp. ii

Contents

pp. iii

Member Institution Acknowledgments

pp. iv

Introduction

pp. 1-23

1. VMI: Challenging the Northern Story of Antebellum Engineering

pp. 24-39

2. Education and White Manhood in the Struggle for Political Power

pp. 40-83

3. Creating the "West Point of the South"

pp. 84-109

4. Engineering Knowledge and the Struggle for Authority in Higher Education

pp. 110-152

5. Engineering as a Profession of Service to the Progress of Virginia

pp. 153-178

6. The Necessary White Manhood of Engineering

pp. 179-211

7. Secession: Realigning Identity and Power

pp. 212-230

Notes

pp. 231-263

Bibliography

pp. 264-277

Acknowledgments

pp. 278-279
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