Project MUSE®: Technology and Culture - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Technology and Culture.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1959) through current issueLatest Articles: Technology and CultureTWOProject MUSE®Technology and Culture1097-37290040-165XLatest articles in Technology and Culture. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Cover Essay: About the Series
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988847
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The Cover Essay series explores how images can function not merely as illustrations but as primary sources that reshape how historians of technology conduct research and teach their fields. Across recent contributions, authors have shown how photographs, advertisements, diagrams, and material images reveal hidden labor, contested authority, environmental entanglements, and the limits of textual evidence.This essay extends that conversation by shifting attention from singular images to institutional visual archives and by treating contradiction itself as historical evidence. By tracing the American Petroleum Institute's changing visual strategies across the twentieth century, Stanford-McIntyre demonstrates in this
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallCover Essay: About the Series2026-05-05text/htmlen-USCover Essay: About the Series2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®26902026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Cover Essay: Visualizing Oil's Pubic Image
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988848
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In a black and white image, six workers clad in bell-bottomed jeans and t-shirts walk in a closely spaced line. Some sport moustaches. All carry strings of milk-bottle-shaped geophones, strung along wires. They walk overshadowed by a looming mesa peppered by scrub and small brush trees. (See figure 1.) While the image is not colorized, you can feel the dry heat beating down on their backs as they conduct their work.This image is just one example of thousands produced by the American Petroleum Institute (API) since its inception in 1919 that reflect the industry's changing concerns, priorities, and controversies. Taken in 1977, the image was indicative of API efforts during a key period of transition, when the U.S.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallCover Essay: Visualizing Oil's Pubic Image2026-05-05text/htmlen-USCover Essay: Visualizing Oil's Pubic Image2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®273602026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05A Long History: From Universal Language to Artificial Intelligence
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988849
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The languages we speak, write, and think form the core of our social lives, a privileged medium for the creation of knowledge and for interpersonal communication. Yet while language is often considered a defining trait of the human species, our access to it has always been mediated through a vast repertoire of technical infrastructures, artifacts, and media that allow us to produce, standardize, circulate, and record linguistic expression.1 These mediating forms have a long history, spanning writing systems, printing presses, grammatical rules, telegraphy, coding schemes, telephony, and today's digital infrastructures.The rise of AI language models—since OpenAI's release of ChatGPT in late 2022—has brought renewed
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallA Long History: From Universal Language to Artificial Intelligence2026-05-05text/htmlen-USA Long History: From Universal Language to Artificial Intelligence2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®2074052026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Before Utility: The MingKwai Typewriter as Democratic Alternative
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988850
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Typewriters have long been recognized as politically subversive objects. In states such as the former East Germany and Soviet Union, alphabetic typewriters were restricted—most citizens were either barred from owning them or required to obtain special licenses. In China, Chinese typewriter design similarly encoded political positions, reflecting broader struggles over language, authority, and modernization. Such technological and ideological developments were deeply intertwined with a twentieth-century nation-building process, a period marked by profound political upheaval. With the fall of China's monarchy after the 1911 Revolution (Xinhai Geming 辛亥革命), the nation-state system gradually became the dominant
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallBefore Utility: The MingKwai Typewriter as Democratic Alternative2026-05-05text/htmlen-USBefore Utility: The MingKwai Typewriter as Democratic Alternative2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®1163412026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Computing Kinship: How Genealogy and Religion Shaped Our Digital Infrastructure
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988851
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Families form an important but underarticulated thread in the history of technology. Although feminist technology scholars highlight the significance of family roles in innovation, we sharpen the focus on the relationship between family and technology by arguing that family history practices actively drove technological experimentation, standardization, and infrastructural development within computing history. Occurring alongside hobbyist computer activities and computer industry developments, genealogical computing recast family recordkeeping as a computational problem. In doing so, these innovators changed how we understand our families today.We specifically examine genealogical computing in the 1980s, after the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallComputing Kinship: How Genealogy and Religion Shaped Our Digital Infrastructure2026-05-05text/htmlen-USComputing Kinship: How Genealogy and Religion Shaped Our Digital Infrastructure2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®1025832026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Securitized Etiquette: How Intercoms Reshaped Domestic Interaction in Modern Japan
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988852
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"Pin pon." The sound is recognizable even to a visitor in the unfamiliar setting of Japan. The doorbell has rung, but what now? An anthropologist just beginning my fieldwork in Tokyo, I stood momentarily dumbfounded, unsure of how to appropriately answer the door. What should I say or do? I glanced at the intercom monitor, roused from its usual inactive state. The glowing screen showed a man, clipboard in hand, waiting patiently to administer a survey. To his surprise, I opened the door to my apartment, breaking an unspoken social code. After answering the man's questions, I watched as he moved on to the next unit, hoping to witness the proper mode of interaction. The neighbor's door remained shut, the entire
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallSecuritized Etiquette: How Intercoms Reshaped Domestic Interaction in Modern Japan2026-05-05text/htmlen-USSecuritized Etiquette: How Intercoms Reshaped Domestic Interaction in Modern Japan2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®1371132026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Predictive Numbers: Labor, Data, and Power in the U.S. Oil Industry
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988853
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At an April 1950 dinner party, American geophysicist Lloyd Berkner and a group of European scientists imagined an international effort to foster scientific cooperation and public interest in geophysics, or the physical study of the earth's crust and its movement. This effort would be called the International Geophysical Year, and in 1957, Berkner was elected vice president of the organizing committee.1 Berkner's profession, and his connections within academia, meant that one year later, during the 1958 Geophysical Year festivities, Berkner was appointed to the board of the rising Dallas-based electronics manufacturer, Texas Instruments (TI).2 A first glance, this appointment appears unexpected. However, at that
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallPredictive Numbers: Labor, Data, and Power in the U.S. Oil Industry2026-05-05text/htmlen-USPredictive Numbers: Labor, Data, and Power in the U.S. Oil Industry2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®1196702026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Making Passengers Work: Infrastructural Labor and Exclusion in Mid-Twentieth-Century Stockholm's Public Transit
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988854
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On December 14, 1948, at 6:35 a.m., a crowd, including a Swedish editorialist, stood in Stockholm's main square waiting for tram line 4. When the tram arrived, it was, according to the editorialist's account in a daily newspaper, "far from crowded." Yet the tram departed half full, "without closed doors and more than half of the intended passengers left behind, without warning nor a word from the 'fixed' conductress." In this situation, the passenger struggled to "stay silent." He approached the conductress: "I do not mean to bother unnecessarily, but why can't people come along when there is room?" She replied, "Move down the carriage!"1This injunction, "Move down the carriage!" (fortsätt framåt i vagnen!), became
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallMaking Passengers Work: Infrastructural Labor and Exclusion in Mid-Twentieth-Century Stockholm's Public Transit2026-05-05text/htmlen-USMaking Passengers Work: Infrastructural Labor and Exclusion in Mid-Twentieth-Century Stockholm's Public Transit2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®1524562026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Beyond Diffusion: Maintenance, Craft, and the Rise of Technical Prestige in Colonial Lima
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988855
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Historical studies of early colonial Peru have rarely investigated how technology took root in the first years of Spanish rule. Scholarship has emphasized navigation and mining while paying less attention to the social actors and institutions that imported, manufactured, and distributed scientific instruments in the new capital.1 As historian of science Juan J. Saldaña notes, we still know little about the material dimensions of Spanish America's early scientific practice or scientific knowledge that emerged around the craftsmen and their workshops.2 Building on this observation, this article demonstrates that craftsmen played a fundamental role in introducing practical scientific knowledge through the manufacture
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallBeyond Diffusion: Maintenance, Craft, and the Rise of Technical Prestige in Colonial Lima2026-05-05text/htmlen-USBeyond Diffusion: Maintenance, Craft, and the Rise of Technical Prestige in Colonial Lima2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®866612026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Constructing the State: Materiality, Imaginaries and the Politics of Chilean Electrification, 1939–43
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988856
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The objects that form a hydroelectric power plant are indispensable for producing electricity, but historians of electrification have generally given these objects's socio-technical role far less consideration. We study the role of material entities during the period in which the Chilean state constructed its first three hydroelectric power plants: Pilmaiquén, Abanico, and Sauzal. The Economic Development Agency (Corporación de Fomento de la Producción; CORFO) included these projects in its Immediate Action Plan (Plan de Acción Inmediata) for electrification approved in August 1939. CORFO, a public institution, had been created by the Popular Front's government, a center-left political coalition, to industrialize
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallConstructing the State: Materiality, Imaginaries and the Politics of Chilean Electrification, 1939–432026-05-05text/htmlen-USConstructing the State: Materiality, Imaginaries and the Politics of Chilean Electrification, 1939–432026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®1114832026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Why Concorde Failed: Political Economy and the Limits of Techno-Nationalism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988857
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One could easily assume that the story of Concorde fits into wider historiographical narratives about the technological disillusionment of the late 1960s and 1970s. A remarkable engineering feat and the only supersonic passenger jet to enter regular service, it was beset by protests around noise and the sonic boom, supporting the claim that a new skepticism around technology arrived via environmentalists and the "New Left."1 Or you could place Concorde within arguments about changing attitudes toward "expertise" in the "long 1960s," when disagreements among experts escaped bureaucratic confines, circulated through new social movements, and called the objectivity of science into question.2 There was, after all, the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallWhy Concorde Failed: Political Economy and the Limits of Techno-Nationalism2026-05-05text/htmlen-USWhy Concorde Failed: Political Economy and the Limits of Techno-Nationalism2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®1139172026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Technology in Mediterranean and European Lands, 600–1600 by Pamela O. Long (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988858
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Pamela O. Long has gained international recognition for her work on premodern technology. Technology in Mediterranean and European Lands, 600–1600 is the latest demonstration of her ability to synthesize vast bodies of scholarship while opening new interpretive paths. The book is part of a broader effort to reassess the longue durée of technological development across the Mediterranean, one of the primary zones of intercultural exchange between late antiquity and the early modern period. Long's central thesis is that technological change in this region is best understood not as a sequence of discrete "inventions" radiating outward from isolated cultural centers but as the product of continuous, often collective
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallTechnology in Mediterranean and European Lands, 600–1600 by Pamela O. Long (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USTechnology in Mediterranean and European Lands, 600–1600 by Pamela O. Long (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®107112026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Technology and Performance during the Renaissance: The Musical World of Leonardo da Vinci by Plinio Innocenzi (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988859
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Leonardo da Vinci's musical talent, his interest in music theory, and his design for musical instruments are much-debated topics in Leonardo studies, although often they are surrounded by myths, imprecision, and problematic historical reconstructions. This book is a careful, judicious, and perceptive analysis of Leonardo's engagement with music, which, due to its clarity of exposition, is especially helpful for readers who are not specialists on the subject.Leonardo had a reputation as a talented musician: He was able to play the lira da braccio, a popular Renaissance bowed string instrument, and could even improvise verses with music accompaniment. Plinio Innocenzi provides a useful overview of how Leonardo's
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallTechnology and Performance during the Renaissance: The Musical World of Leonardo da Vinci by Plinio Innocenzi (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USTechnology and Performance during the Renaissance: The Musical World of Leonardo da Vinci by Plinio Innocenzi (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®77312026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Pseudo-Māshā'allāh, On the Astrolabe: A Critical Edition of the Latin Text with English Translation by Ron B. Thomson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988860
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These two volumes are the culmination of Ron B. Thomson's great project to edit the whole of the popular medieval Latin astrolabe treatise attributed to Māshā'allāh (of which the scholarly world has had tantalizing excerpts serially up to now). It completely replaces the earlier edition by Robert Gunther (Chaucer and Messahalla on the Astrolabe, 1929). The text consists of two parts: on the construction (compositio) and on the use (practica) of the astrolabe; these survive in some two hundred manuscripts. Following the lead of the much-lamented Paul Kunitzsch (d. 2020), to whom the volumes are dedicated, Thomson ascribes different origins to the two parts and the prelude. The "Compositio" part consists of four or
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallPseudo-Māshā'allāh, On the Astrolabe: A Critical Edition of the Latin Text with English Translation by Ron B. Thomson (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USPseudo-Māshā'allāh, On the Astrolabe: A Critical Edition of the Latin Text with English Translation by Ron B. Thomson (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®85272026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Making an Industrial Revolution: Skill, Knowledge, Community and Innovation by Gillian Cookson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988861
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The British Industrial Revolution, and with it the storied breakthrough to modern exponential economic growth, remains a source of continued fascination, obviously for economic historians but also, given that it was premised on the development and implementation of new industrial technology, historians of technology. Drawing extensively on her prior work on engineering and metal refining, Gillian Cookson's Making an Industrial Revolution argues compellingly that Britain harbored broad and deep commercially oriented networks of improvement. In Cookson's account, it was these networks that were the primary drivers of innovation, culminating in industrialization.To this end, Cookson adopts a self-described
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallMaking an Industrial Revolution: Skill, Knowledge, Community and Innovation by Gillian Cookson (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USMaking an Industrial Revolution: Skill, Knowledge, Community and Innovation by Gillian Cookson (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®74762026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Historias de ingenieros en América Latina: Entre el Estado y los desafíos productivos, 1870–1980 [Histories of engineers in Latin America: Between the state and production challenges, 1870–1980] ed. by María Cecilia Zuleta and Luz María Uhthoff López (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988862
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In December 1939, the ambassador of Mexico in Argentina, the engineer Félix Palavicini, gave a lecture titled "The Americas under Technocracy" to the Argentinian Center of Engineers. Palavicini was a Mexican topographer who had benefited from the promotion of science during the cosmopolitan dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, participated in the nationalist Mexican Revolution that toppled the dictatorship, and was close to U.S. companies during the construction of the postrevolutionary welfare state. The speech by this complex character underscored the technological advances of the twentieth century but stressed that they had failed to translate into a "progress of culture" and posed challenges for technical Latin
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallHistorias de ingenieros en América Latina: Entre el Estado y los desafíos productivos, 1870–1980 [Histories of engineers in Latin America: Between the state and production challenges, 1870–1980] ed. by María Cecilia Zuleta and Luz María Uhthoff López (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USHistorias de ingenieros en América Latina: Entre el Estado y los desafíos productivos, 1870–1980 [Histories of engineers in Latin America: Between the state and production challenges, 1870–1980] ed. by María Cecilia Zuleta and Luz María Uhthoff López (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®89022026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Huellas, Ashiato, Paulkhuna: La impronta asiática en la ciencia y la tecnología en Venezuela durante el siglo XX [Footprints, Ashiato, Paulkhuna: The Asian influence on science and technology in Venezuela during the twentieth century] by José G. Álvarez-Cornett (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988863
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Although the contribution of foreign immigrants to Venezuelan science and technology has not yet been fully analyzed, it has been important in absolute and relative terms, especially for the beginnings of many disciplines. Regardless of national origin, the foreign scientists who stayed for a while or permanently in Venezuela contributed to institutional renewal and knowledge development. José G. Álvarez-Cornett's book is an introduction to the contribution of Asian immigrants to the construction of science, technology, and medicine in Venezuela in the second half of the twentieth century. It summarily refers to the traces left by some seventy Asian scientists and engineers—including those from Japan (twenty-seven
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallHuellas, Ashiato, Paulkhuna: La impronta asiática en la ciencia y la tecnología en Venezuela durante el siglo XX [Footprints, Ashiato, Paulkhuna: The Asian influence on science and technology in Venezuela during the twentieth century] by José G. Álvarez-Cornett (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USHuellas, Ashiato, Paulkhuna: La impronta asiática en la ciencia y la tecnología en Venezuela durante el siglo XX [Footprints, Ashiato, Paulkhuna: The Asian influence on science and technology in Venezuela during the twentieth century] by José G. Álvarez-Cornett (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®86022026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Founders of the Future: The Science and Industry of Spanish Modernization by Óscar Iván Useche (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988864
<p></p>
Founders of the Future offers a sophisticated examination of the cultural negotiations surrounding technological change and industrial modernization in late nineteenth-century Spain. It shows how the material, scientific, and operational dimensions of industry reshaped cultural representations while generating new symbolic and cognitive referents through which intellectuals engaged social change.What makes Spain a particularly revealing case? Óscar Iván Useche advances a central premise: The consolidation of science and technology for industrial development was especially contentious in the Spanish context. Defined by traditional values and entrenched social hierarchies, the transformative capacity of industry was
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallFounders of the Future: The Science and Industry of Spanish Modernization by Óscar Iván Useche (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USFounders of the Future: The Science and Industry of Spanish Modernization by Óscar Iván Useche (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®91752026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Les traits de l'invention: Production et usages du dessin d'objet technique en Angleterre au tournant du XIXe siècle [The features of invention: Production and uses of technical drawing in England at the turn of the nineteenth century] by Yohann Guffroy (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988865
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Over the last decade, French scholarly interest in technical drawing has increased. One year after Baudry and Nègre's Dessiner la technique (2024), Yohann Guffroy has devoted a book to technical drawings representing inventions. The subtitle of the book outlines Guffroy's approach, which seeks to bring the history of production and use into conjunction.Historians such as Gérard Emptoz and Jérôme Baudry have shown how institutions whose purpose was to encourage invention, such as the brevets d'invention (1791) and the Conservatoire des arts et métiers (1794), contributed to the formation of a homogeneous technical language and thereby to the standardization of techniques. Guffroy extends and enriches these
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallLes traits de l'invention: Production et usages du dessin d'objet technique en Angleterre au tournant du XIXe siècle [The features of invention: Production and uses of technical drawing in England at the turn of the nineteenth century] by Yohann Guffroy (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USLes traits de l'invention: Production et usages du dessin d'objet technique en Angleterre au tournant du XIXe siècle [The features of invention: Production and uses of technical drawing in England at the turn of the nineteenth century] by Yohann Guffroy (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®84172026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05In Search of Technological Excellence: Education and Engineering in Post-War Britain by John Heywood (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988866
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In this book, John Heywood provides a major overview of the history of engineering education in England since 1945. Continuing his interest since the 1970s in understanding engineering and its transformations, which has resulted in numerous publications, the author offers a well-documented history, focusing on key moments and players. His starting point is the important Percy Commission, which carried out its work in 1945, but he takes care to place the debates and proposals that emerged from it in a longer historical context starting in the eighteenth century (ch. 1).The central question can be summarized as follows: How should engineers be trained to meet the needs of industry in England since 1945? Far from
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallIn Search of Technological Excellence: Education and Engineering in Post-War Britain by John Heywood (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USIn Search of Technological Excellence: Education and Engineering in Post-War Britain by John Heywood (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®75012026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Driving Productivity: Automation, Labor, and Industrial Development in the United States and Germany by Anthony J. Knowles, and: The Human and the Machine in Literature and Culture: Cultures of Automation ed. by Kate Foster and Molly Crozier (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988867
<p></p>
Anthony J. Knowles's Driving Productivity is a comparative history of the U.S. and German automobile industries from their origins in the early twentieth century to the present. But while the auto industry serves as a case study, the ultimate purpose of the book is to answer a rather profound question: How immovably are industrial-capitalist states actually locked-in to the logic of capital accumulation at the expense of other values, political or humane?The question is important and not asked often enough, certainly not as exhaustively or systematically as Knowles does in this book. Driving Productivity divides the history of the two automobile industries into five periods: their rise at the turn of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallDriving Productivity: Automation, Labor, and Industrial Development in the United States and Germany by Anthony J. Knowles, and: The Human and the Machine in Literature and Culture: Cultures of Automation ed. by Kate Foster and Molly Crozier (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USDriving Productivity: Automation, Labor, and Industrial Development in the United States and Germany by Anthony J. Knowles, and: The Human and the Machine in Literature and Culture: Cultures of Automation ed. by Kate Foster and Molly Crozier (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®143352026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Cultivating Machines: The Use and Maintenance of Technology in Midwestern Agriculture, 1845–1900 by James Rick (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988868
<p></p>
Cultivating Machines concludes with a familiar scenario from the end of the nineteenth century: Farmers respond to falling grain prices by purchasing machinery that will help them boost production and cling to their livelihoods but also push them further in debt. These complicated machines are not only constructed by a shrinking number of firms but increasingly difficult to maintain without experts and proprietary parts. To arrive at this moment, James Rick begins his history of agricultural and domestic mechanization in the 1840s, a period when farming people laid the "mechanical groundwork" for what Deborah Fitzgerald identifies in Every Farm a Factory (2003) as the industrial logic of twentieth-century
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallCultivating Machines: The Use and Maintenance of Technology in Midwestern Agriculture, 1845–1900 by James Rick (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USCultivating Machines: The Use and Maintenance of Technology in Midwestern Agriculture, 1845–1900 by James Rick (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®81782026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Sand, Snow, and Stardust: How US Military Engineers Conquered Extreme Environments by Gretchen Heefner (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988869
<p></p>
For outside observers and nonspecialists, the sheer size and power of the U.S. military is mindboggling and difficult to comprehend. People are the backbone of the nation's armed forces, but the United States boasts a highly advanced military that draws on a massive budget and a seemingly ever-growing pool of resources. The emergence of the United States as a global military colossus took shape over the decades of the twentieth century, supported by a deep political and public will for strengthening national security at home and abroad. But engineers (and engineering) played a vital role, too. Defining "environment" in operational terms, civilian experts and their defense sponsors championed the construction of an
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallSand, Snow, and Stardust: How US Military Engineers Conquered Extreme Environments by Gretchen Heefner (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USSand, Snow, and Stardust: How US Military Engineers Conquered Extreme Environments by Gretchen Heefner (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®86232026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Playhouses and Privilege: The Architecture of Elite Childhood by Abigail A. Van Slyck (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988870
<p></p>
While the historic estates of royal families, Gilded Age mansions, and homes of Hollywood stars have long captured the public imagination, the significant architectural investment in specialized play spaces on these grounds has received little critical attention. Playhouses and Privilege examines the phenomenon of playhouses built for the children of elite families from the 1850s to the 1930s, focusing on the values and concerns these structures reflected and sought to impart. Across seven meticulously researched chapters, Abigail A. Van Slyck introduces a range of case studies and analyzes the dynastic, social, affective, and economic ends that playhouses were deployed to advance. These elaborate
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallPlayhouses and Privilege: The Architecture of Elite Childhood by Abigail A. Van Slyck (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USPlayhouses and Privilege: The Architecture of Elite Childhood by Abigail A. Van Slyck (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®81112026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Development Design: Hotels and Politics in the Hispanic Caribbean by Erica Morawski (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988871
<p></p>
Given the extensive scholarship on tourism in the Caribbean, it is surprising that hotels have not received much attention. Hotels are fascinating: They are central to an infrastructure of travel, and to borrow from media studies scholar Brian Larkin, their histories contain both "politics" and "poetics." In the Caribbean especially, tourism is a major source of revenue and embedded in political and capitalist networks. At the same time, it is almost mandatory for tourism to present and propose the contradictory fantasies through which voyagers imagine the Caribbean: exotic but safe, modern but tied to local tradition, a place to disappear to and to be seen, effortless and spectacular, clean and in nature (but no
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallDevelopment Design: Hotels and Politics in the Hispanic Caribbean by Erica Morawski (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USDevelopment Design: Hotels and Politics in the Hispanic Caribbean by Erica Morawski (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®74522026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05The Last Mixtape: Physical Media and Nostalgic Cycles by Seth Long (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988872
<p></p>
They say you never really get over your first love. Although the adage usually applies to romantic affairs, it may also tell a technological truth about our time.Seth Long fell for cassettes, and The Last Mixtape is his love letter to a dying medium. He denies this, of course, rightly emphasizing how the book is fueled by critiques of industry and theories of technology rather than nostalgia or melancholia. But the denial also seems half-hearted. When the author reminisces about new wave mixes and first kiss discs, the other half of his heart is on his sleeve. "A mixtape," he says, "is a custom compilation of songs, duplicated mechanically from multiple sources onto a physical storage medium, delivered to an
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallThe Last Mixtape: Physical Media and Nostalgic Cycles by Seth Long (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USThe Last Mixtape: Physical Media and Nostalgic Cycles by Seth Long (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®75072026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Czechoslovakia at the World's Fairs: Behind the Façade by Marta Filipová (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988873
<p></p>
In October, the world's exhibition Expo 2025 in Osaka came to a close. The Czech Republic and Slovakia—the states that emerged in 1993 through the dissolution of Czechoslovakia—were both represented at the exhibition.Marta Filipová's book makes us realize that this tradition reaches back more than a century, to the moment when a new state—Czechoslovakia—emerged in postwar Europe. Through her research, Filipová, as suggested by the book's title, allows us to look "behind the façade" of the Czechoslovak pavilions at the world's fairs. She explains who, when, and how they contributed to the creation of the Czechoslovak exhibition model, elements of which, as we see in the example of Expo Osaka, survive in Czech and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallCzechoslovakia at the World's Fairs: Behind the Façade by Marta Filipová (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USCzechoslovakia at the World's Fairs: Behind the Façade by Marta Filipová (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®80662026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Designing the American Century: The Public Landscapes of Clarke and Rapuano, 1915–1965 by Thomas J. Campanella (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988874
<p></p>
Thomas J. Campanella places landscape architects Gilmore Clarke (1892–1982) and Michael Rapuano (1904–75) at the center of public space in the American Northeast for much of the twentieth century. The book is a thorough account of the management and administration of major public projects like parks, squares, civic centers, and waterfronts. Campanella shows that the label "landscape architect" fails to capture the breadth of the pair's expertise: They were designers, civil engineers, and city planners. Designing the American Century is a vivid example of the "rendering technical" process played out in the United States (Tania Murray Li, The Will to Improve, 2007). Clarke and Rapuano were well-connected players in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallDesigning the American Century: The Public Landscapes of Clarke and Rapuano, 1915–1965 by Thomas J. Campanella (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USDesigning the American Century: The Public Landscapes of Clarke and Rapuano, 1915–1965 by Thomas J. Campanella (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®80132026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05The Elements of Construction: N. Clifford Ricker, Architecture, and the University of Illinois ed. by Marci S. Uihlein (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988875
<p></p>
The title of this book refers to a textbook, its author, and his program. It doesn't reflect the book's significant contribution to understanding the enormous changes that took place throughout the United States in construction technology, city building, and professional education from ca. 1860 to 1910.N. Clifford Ricker (1843–1924), an extraordinary polymath, learned woodworking and construction in his native Maine, then moved to Illinois after the Civil War. In January 1870, two-and-a-half years after the university was founded under the Morrill Act, Ricker enrolled in Illinois's architecture program. He worked briefly as an architect in postfire Chicago but returned to Champaign following the Panic of 1873.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallThe Elements of Construction: N. Clifford Ricker, Architecture, and the University of Illinois ed. by Marci S. Uihlein (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USThe Elements of Construction: N. Clifford Ricker, Architecture, and the University of Illinois ed. by Marci S. Uihlein (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®86022026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05The Architecture of the Wire: Infrastructures of Telecommunication by Carlotta Darò (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988876
<p></p>
In recent years, studies on the history of infrastructure in the contemporary era have undergone considerable renewal. New works have shed light on individual events and sectors. General reflections have also been added, primarily aiming to reinterpret the political, economic, social, and cultural significance of infrastructure networks at territorial and urban levels. These contributions have come not only from historians but also from scholars in other disciplines, resulting in a fruitful interweaving of viewpoints and methodologies. Overall, from a historiographical perspective, the context is now well established and there is no shortage of high-quality publications. The study of telecommunications networks
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallThe Architecture of the Wire: Infrastructures of Telecommunication by Carlotta Darò (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USThe Architecture of the Wire: Infrastructures of Telecommunication by Carlotta Darò (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®71122026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Architecture, Empire and Trade: The United Africa Company by Iain Jackson et al. (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988877
<p></p>
Who ran modern empires? Historians trying to answer this question often look to missionaries, generals, colonial officials, Indigenous leaders, intermediaries, and the millions of people forced to live under colonial rule. The richly illustrated new book Architecture, Empire and Trade answers this question with a novel source: the United Africa Company and its buildings.This book stems from a collaborative project by Iain Jackson, Ewan Harrison, Michele Tenzon, Rixt Woudstra, and Claire Turnstall, who had seemingly unfettered access to the archives of the United Africa Company (UAC), one of the largest businesses in colonial and postcolonial anglophone West Africa. The authors use the UAC's vast archive to argue
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallArchitecture, Empire and Trade: The United Africa Company by Iain Jackson et al. (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USArchitecture, Empire and Trade: The United Africa Company by Iain Jackson et al. (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®82702026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Malaria on the Move: Rural Communities and Public Health in Zimbabwe, 1890–2015 by Kundai Manamere (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988878
<p></p>
Malaria on the Move, by Kundai Manamere, presents a historical analysis of malaria in both colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe, beyond the confines of predominantly biomedical interpretations that have long dominated scholarship on the medical and technological history of Africa. Instead, the book situates malaria within a broader socioeconomic and political-historical framework, addressing enduring criticisms of colonial and postcolonial disease narratives that have largely privileged biomedical and technological perspectives while ignoring other historical determinants of health.Using a combination of primary archival sources, oral interviews, and published secondary literature, Manamere explores the management
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallMalaria on the Move: Rural Communities and Public Health in Zimbabwe, 1890–2015 by Kundai Manamere (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USMalaria on the Move: Rural Communities and Public Health in Zimbabwe, 1890–2015 by Kundai Manamere (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®89532026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05The Product of Medicine: How Efficiency Made American Health Care by Caitjan Gainty (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988879
<p></p>
By Caitjan Gainty's own admission, "medical efficiency has never been a hot topic for historians of medicine" (p. 5). Yet she makes a strong case that notions of efficiency played a key role in modern medical practice. The Product of Medicine examines early twentieth-century transformations including the standardization of medical technology, hospital order and process, clinical recordkeeping, and health promotion. While many histories focus on the incredible role of efficiency in the American workplace, few have centered efficiency in medical history. Gainty convincingly argues that we must reconsider its impact on medical practice.In a text rich with detail, this narrative of the past echoes loudly within the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallThe Product of Medicine: How Efficiency Made American Health Care by Caitjan Gainty (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USThe Product of Medicine: How Efficiency Made American Health Care by Caitjan Gainty (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®81852026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Picturing Aura: A Visual Biography by Jeremy Stolow (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988880
<p></p>
In the opening pages of Picturing Aura, Jeremy Stolow asks, "What is an aura? And what does it mean to picture one?" (p. 2). To answer these questions, he compiles a rich archive of images and traces picturing aura as a practice from antiquity to the present.Stolow compellingly argues that picturing aura is rooted in a long history of devotional seeing from the mediums, healers, and mystics in antiquity who describe visions of bodies bathed in light (ch. 3) to the radiant extensions of the body in the shape of a circle, sunburst, or cloud found in the iconography of figures as diverse as the Egyptian sun god Re-Harakhty and the emanated Buddha (ch. 4). While acknowledging this long history, Stolow identifies a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallPicturing Aura: A Visual Biography by Jeremy Stolow (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USPicturing Aura: A Visual Biography by Jeremy Stolow (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®73462026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05La ronde des bêtes: Le moteur animal et la fabrique de la modernité [The circle of beasts: The animal engine and the factory of modernity] by François Jarrige (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988881
<p></p>
Long analyzed in terms of the technological breakthrough that guided Western growth, the Industrial Revolution is now understood as a long period of transition during which wood and water continued to play a decisive role, sometimes reinforced precisely by the increasing use of fossil fuels. By comparing this narrative with the history of human-animal relations, historian of work and technology François Jarrige's latest book offers a fair and fascinating shift in perspective to capture in detail the richness of this period of experimentation with the different forms of energy available, in a constant search for the most efficient and profitable sources of movement.La ronde des bêtes is based on a long-term
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallLa ronde des bêtes: Le moteur animal et la fabrique de la modernité [The circle of beasts: The animal engine and the factory of modernity] by François Jarrige (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USLa ronde des bêtes: Le moteur animal et la fabrique de la modernité [The circle of beasts: The animal engine and the factory of modernity] by François Jarrige (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®77872026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Coal in Modern Britain: A Social and Cultural History from 1830 to the Second World War by Charles-François Mathis (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988882
<p></p>
This book, a translation of La civilisation du charbon (2021), is concerned with the "singular mental universe" that coal induced "in England from the 1830s to the 1940s" (p. 64). Charles-François Mathis maintains that coal had a centrality in British culture that has no parallel in any other national imaginary: "Engine of industry, fuel of the home and source of national supremacy" (p. 3), coal was omnipresent in the Victorian experience. As a cipher for modernity, it had a tangibility that rival energy sources, like gas or electricity, could not match. Coal produced a landscape shrouded in dust, smuts, and smoke, as Mathis sets out in a bravura opening chapter. Britain's was a uniquely carboniferous
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallCoal in Modern Britain: A Social and Cultural History from 1830 to the Second World War by Charles-François Mathis (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USCoal in Modern Britain: A Social and Cultural History from 1830 to the Second World War by Charles-François Mathis (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®77682026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Burning Swamps: Peat and the Forgotten Margins of Russia's Fossil Economy by Katja Bruisch (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988883
<p></p>
Burning Swamps is a meticulous analysis of Russian imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet environmental and economic development through the lens of peat extraction. The book is woven together by several thematic threads that contribute to our understanding of Russian and Soviet economic policy, the development of extractive economies, human-nature relations, the social lives of labor, and spatial transformation. Drawing on extensive archival materials and published primary sources such as periodicals and supported by the author's empirical observations, the study emerges as a solid and reliable academic study.The book is a timely contribution to the expanding literature on the history of natural resources within
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallBurning Swamps: Peat and the Forgotten Margins of Russia's Fossil Economy by Katja Bruisch (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USBurning Swamps: Peat and the Forgotten Margins of Russia's Fossil Economy by Katja Bruisch (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®92062026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Fuel and Power: Energy, Trade, and Russian Foreign Relations from Lenin to Putin by Jeronim Perović (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988884
<p></p>
Jeronim Perović argues that energy has been key to Russia's rise as a global power, but it tends to be overlooked in mainstream histories of the country (p. 5). Russia is a classic example of the resource curse: Earnings from oil and gas exports were a substitute and not stimulus for modernizing reforms. The book draws on a comprehensive range of primary and secondary sources, including Russian and German archives. It covers a broad swathe of history, though the coverage of the post-1991 period is something of an afterthought.Coal was key in the first decades of Soviet rule, and the disruption of World War II caused oil production to fall by a third (p. 67). In the 1950s, Moscow came to see oil—and later gas—as
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallFuel and Power: Energy, Trade, and Russian Foreign Relations from Lenin to Putin by Jeronim Perović (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USFuel and Power: Energy, Trade, and Russian Foreign Relations from Lenin to Putin by Jeronim Perović (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®79232026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Mountain Battery: The Alps, Water, and Power in the Fossil Fuel Age by Marc Landry (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988885
<p></p>
Until recently, both energy historians and environmental and energy policy debates have framed hydropower as an "antidote" to climate-damaging fossil fuels: If we could change the energy supply of our national economies to electricity and increase the production capacities of hydropower and all other renewable energy sources, we would be able to effect a sustainable energy transition and green growth. This narrative has lost much of its persuasive power since Jean-Baptiste Fressoz published his book More and More and More (2025). Similarly, though in a less explicit way, Marc Landry challenges development models structured around energy sources by presenting alpine hydropower as an integral aspect of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallMountain Battery: The Alps, Water, and Power in the Fossil Fuel Age by Marc Landry (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USMountain Battery: The Alps, Water, and Power in the Fossil Fuel Age by Marc Landry (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®80432026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05The Nuclear-Water Nexus ed. by Per Högselius and Siegfried Evens (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988886
<p></p>
Ever wondered why nuclear reactors are always located near massive bodies of water, whether seas, rivers, or big lakes? After reading this book, you would not ponder this question anymore. Harnessing natural flows of water is at the heart of the management of producing nuclear energy, as The Nuclear-Water Nexus effectively makes clear. The introduction of the volume edited by Per Högselius and Siegfried Evens immediately opens with some staggering numbers: Fifty cubic meters (13,000 gallons) of water are "consumed" each second by a nuclear fission reactor in order to operate efficiently and safely. This water is foremost used for cooling to prevent a reactor from overheating but also is needed for refining uranium
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallThe Nuclear-Water Nexus ed. by Per Högselius and Siegfried Evens (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USThe Nuclear-Water Nexus ed. by Per Högselius and Siegfried Evens (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®82932026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Contaminated Country: Nuclear Colonialism and Aboriginal Resistance in Australia by Jessica Urwin, and: Resisting the Nuclear: Art and Activism across the Pacific ed. by Elyssa Faison and Alison Fields (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988887
<p></p>
It's September 1992 in London: A delegation of Maralinga Tjarutja spokesmen has arrived from the central deserts of so-called Australia. The delegation, Archie Barton, Barka Bryant, and Mervyn Day, have traveled to Whitehall to request compensation for the contamination of their Country by the British in nuclear tests at Maralinga, during which atomic bombs with yields up to twenty-seven kilotons were exploded without the consent or forewarning of Traditional Owners.This is their second visit to London in two years, and the men have again come bearing gifts. In their first visit, the delegation had presented junior defense minister Lord Cranborne with woomeras, spear-throwing devices, in reference to the crudely
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallContaminated Country: Nuclear Colonialism and Aboriginal Resistance in Australia by Jessica Urwin, and: Resisting the Nuclear: Art and Activism across the Pacific ed. by Elyssa Faison and Alison Fields (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USContaminated Country: Nuclear Colonialism and Aboriginal Resistance in Australia by Jessica Urwin, and: Resisting the Nuclear: Art and Activism across the Pacific ed. by Elyssa Faison and Alison Fields (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®138312026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Hydropower Nation: Dams, Energy, and Political Changes in Twentieth-Century China by Xiangli Ding (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988888
<p></p>
China is a global leader in hydropower, home to nearly 30 percent of the planet's installed hydroelectric capacity, and Chinese firms lead ongoing dam construction domestically and abroad. Despite this, hydropower has been somewhat overlooked by historians: A burgeoning literature on energy in modern China and a similarly vigorous body of work on China's rivers have rarely been in conversation (recent exceptions include Arunabh Ghosh's "The Significance of Small Things," 2025, and Ying Jia Tan's Recharging China in War and Revolution, 1882–1955, 2021). Xiangli Ding does much to fill this lacuna in Hydropower Nation. In this clearly written, tightly organized, and deeply researched study, Ding sets out to chart the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallHydropower Nation: Dams, Energy, and Political Changes in Twentieth-Century China by Xiangli Ding (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USHydropower Nation: Dams, Energy, and Political Changes in Twentieth-Century China by Xiangli Ding (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®81892026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States by Sandeep Vaheesan (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988889
<p></p>
For many Americans, it is past time to fully embrace a goal of achieving net-zero carbon by 2050. In Democracy in Power, author Sandeep Vaheesan suggests that the challenge is one of policy, not technology, and that the history of electrification in the United States offers tales of both optimism and caution for how to proceed. He offers a proposal: a reformulation of the government's role in the power business that could frame a faster and more just transition to the decarbonized future at stake.Vaheesan argues that while investor interests dominated electrification in the United States, the public sector has historically sustained a significant role in ownership, operation, and regulation of the power system.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallDemocracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States by Sandeep Vaheesan (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USDemocracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States by Sandeep Vaheesan (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®80832026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Wegwerfprodukt Auto: Automobilentsorgung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und Österreich, 1960–2000 [The car as a disposable product: Car disposal in the Federal Republic of Germany and Austria, 1960–2000] by Anna-Maria Winkler (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988890
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Alternative paths of automobility have hardly been addressed by historical scholars, such as the history of the parking lot or the waste disposal of automobiles. This is striking because, during the life cycle of a car, it is far more likely to see one parked than driving. Moreover, the production of cars is resource-consuming: Iron and steel are welded to car bodies. Automobiles need batteries, oil for lubrication, catalysts, and electronic switches. The great variety of materials and devices embedded in the automobile poses great difficulties for its disassembly.Anna-Maria Winkler's convincing study addresses this perspective and asks how Germany and Austria organized the waste management of automobiles between
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallWegwerfprodukt Auto: Automobilentsorgung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und Österreich, 1960–2000 [The car as a disposable product: Car disposal in the Federal Republic of Germany and Austria, 1960–2000] by Anna-Maria Winkler (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USWegwerfprodukt Auto: Automobilentsorgung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und Österreich, 1960–2000 [The car as a disposable product: Car disposal in the Federal Republic of Germany and Austria, 1960–2000] by Anna-Maria Winkler (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®84822026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Reclaiming the Road: Mobility Justice beyond Complete Streets by David L. Prytherch (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988891
<p></p>
"Mobility justice," like many terms, lives both in academia and in the world of practice. Its scholarly territories are geography, urban planning, and mobilities, and it has been taken up in transportation planning in U.S. cities. This book aims to narrate how mobility justice intersects with multimodal planning, but it fails to mention the existence of mobility justice planners. With this omission, David L. Prytherch treads rather heavily on some toes (including mine).In 2017, Carolyn Szczepanski, Naomi Doerner, Sahra Sulaiman, Do Lee, Sarah McCullough, and I published "Untokening 1.0: Principles of Mobility Justice" to the website untokening.org. This set of ten statements identified action areas for racial and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallReclaiming the Road: Mobility Justice beyond Complete Streets by David L. Prytherch (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USReclaiming the Road: Mobility Justice beyond Complete Streets by David L. Prytherch (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®85382026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Im Morgengrauen der Digitalisierung: Die IG Metall und die Zweite Industrialisierung (1950−1970) [At the dawn of digitalization: IG Metall and the Second Industrialization (1950–1970)] by Ralf Roth (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988892
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In this book, Ralf Roth has written a history of the role of digitalization in transforming the world of work in Germany. He aims to explain why trade unions, workers, and employees have been so successful in shaping the first stage of the digital working world. He also explores the knowledge transfer from U.S. trade unions to IG Metall (the largest industrial union) in West Germany, arguing that they drew on the U.S. digitalization experience to prepare for the process in Germany.Roth begins by describing technology transfers from the United States to West Germany and discussing three milestones: First, a conference held by IBM Germany with representatives from the German heavy industry in 1951, which he claims
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallIm Morgengrauen der Digitalisierung: Die IG Metall und die Zweite Industrialisierung (1950−1970) [At the dawn of digitalization: IG Metall and the Second Industrialization (1950–1970)] by Ralf Roth (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USIm Morgengrauen der Digitalisierung: Die IG Metall und die Zweite Industrialisierung (1950−1970) [At the dawn of digitalization: IG Metall and the Second Industrialization (1950–1970)] by Ralf Roth (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®81962026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Common Circuits: Hacking Alternative Technological Futures by Luis Felipe R. Murillo (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988893
<p></p>
In the introduction to his new book, anthropologist Luis Felipe R. Murillo clarifies why the public perception of "hacking" is ambiguous. In popular imaginaries, the author explains, hacking oscillates between criminal activity and virtuous practices of community building (p. 165). However, it is beneath the surface of these public discourses—that is, in the micro-histories of computing—that one finds a common thread. Throughout the years, hackers and tinkerers have stubbornly fostered the commons as a principle to create community with, for, and through computing, concludes Murillo.In Common Circuits, Murillo goes beyond public perceptions to examine how hackers and tinkerers articulate alternative forms of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallCommon Circuits: Hacking Alternative Technological Futures by Luis Felipe R. Murillo (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USCommon Circuits: Hacking Alternative Technological Futures by Luis Felipe R. Murillo (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®79552026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Everyone Breaks These Laws: How Copyrights Made the Online World by Gerardo Con Díaz (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988894
<p></p>
Any history of technology could also be written as a history of the self, and Gerardo Con Díaz's new book embraces that possibility, both in its content and its method. Moving back and forth through lawsuits, Everyone Breaks These Laws is an engaging work that not only traces practices, scuffles, and implications of digital copyright but also demonstrates how digital media has already changed our ways of writing, citing, and thinking about the law.This book is remarkable because it goes beyond the court documents and press releases cited in the links in the notes. While much has been written over the last two decades about the impact of digital technology and copyright, the broader significance of Con Díaz's book
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallEveryone Breaks These Laws: How Copyrights Made the Online World by Gerardo Con Díaz (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USEveryone Breaks These Laws: How Copyrights Made the Online World by Gerardo Con Díaz (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®80552026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05A User's Guide to the Age of Tech by Grant Wythoff (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988895
<p></p>
This review was written using word processing software on a desktop computer, and after it was written it was sent to an editor by email. As historians of technology know, each of the technologies mentioned in the previous sentence has its own complex history, and the tasks described involve entanglements with webs of mineral extraction, physical infrastructure, and much else. Furthermore, many other unnamed technologies and systems are also involved. To try to truly think through all the technologies required for even a seemingly straightforward task can be an overwhelming exercise, and yet much can be gleaned from our everyday interactions with the technologies we take for granted. Such gleaning is at the core
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallA User's Guide to the Age of Tech by Grant Wythoff (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USA User's Guide to the Age of Tech by Grant Wythoff (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®73982026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Stop the Machines: The Rise of Anti-Technology Extremism by Mauro Lubrano (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988896
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Historicizing anti-technology extremism's multifaceted and transversal ideological currents, Mauro Lubrano's definitional project argues for the importance of history's contextualization of present extremism amid wide lineages of technological critique. Doing so, Lubrano argues, is key for a broader project of addressing (potential) future trajectories of political violence.Starting from Robert Buchanan's assertion in The Power of the Machine (1992) of the inevitability of technological change, Lubrano offers readers a sweeping overview of critical reactions to technology beginning with the Luddites in the First Industrial Revolution. From a periodized and ambitious scope, Lubrano's history is necessarily
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallStop the Machines: The Rise of Anti-Technology Extremism by Mauro Lubrano (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USStop the Machines: The Rise of Anti-Technology Extremism by Mauro Lubrano (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®85742026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Why War? by Richard Overy (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988897
<p></p>
Richard Overy is widely regarded for his scholarship on World War II, particularly for Why the Allies Won (1995). However, his new book marks a clear shift. Instead of analyzing particular conflicts, Overy examines in Why War? the broad intellectual history of explanations for organized violence. He surveys how various disciplines have attempted to account for why humans fight in groups and why war has persisted.Overy's central thesis is that no single explanation can fully account for the endurance of warfare. Instead of reductionist explanations, Overy argues that a combination of biological, psychological, anthropological, ecological, economic, ideological, political, and additional factors contributes to the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallWhy War? by Richard Overy (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USWhy War? by Richard Overy (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®63792026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Erratum
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989881
<p></p>
In Nil Disco, “Losing the Salmon: Technology, Science, and Ecological Decline on the Rhine,” Technology and Culture 67, no. 1 (2026): 11–40, several clarifications have been added. Firstly, as mentioned in the abstract and on page 12, the suggestion that the Dutch parliament “cobbled together” the failed salmon treaty of 1869–70 or the successful one of 1886 is misleading. The Dutch parliament was only tasked with ratifying the texts of these treaties that had been negotiated elsewhere by the Rhine riparian governments. The caption of figure 1, “Industrial Fishing,” has been changed. Paragraphs on page 21 and page 34 have been rewritten for clarity.The location of an archive in the bibliography of Elizabeth
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/194/image/coversmallErratum2026-05-05text/htmlen-USErratum2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®23882026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05