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  • Technology and Early American History
  • Bruce E. Seely (bio)
Judith A. McGaw, ed. Early American Technology: Doing and Making Things from the Colonial Era through 1850. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1994. x 482 pp. Figures, appendix, and index. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper)

In 1965, one of a series of conferences sponsored by the Institute of Early American History and Culture on needs and opportunities was held at the Eleutherian Mills-Hagley Library. The subject was technology, and an important book, authored by Brooke Hindle, Technology in Early America (1966), emerged from that meeting. After surveying the field, Hindle argued for development of a social history of technology, stating at the close of the essay that “The ultimate objective is to raise technology to its proper place within the context of early American history. It belongs very close to the center as an expression and a fulfillment of the American Experience.” 1

Thirty years later, one of Hindle’s students has produced a volume that explicitly builds from and extends his argument. In important respects, Judith McGaw’s goals for Early American Technology are similar to Hindle’s, for she, too, takes as her fundamental premise the centrality of technology to understanding American history. Like Hindle, McGaw and her contributors want to show historians of early America why they should pay attention to technology. At the same time, this book is markedly different from Hindle’s and offers ample evidence of on-going changes in the history of technology, especially the adoption of perspectives and approaches used by historians in other fields. Thus Early American Technology shows both where the history of technology has come from and where it is going.

The original essays collected in this volume generally emerged from a year-long effort, the Transformation of Philadelphia Project, funded by the NEH in 1989–1990. Eight of the eleven essays are case studies examining aspects of the technological experience of those living in the mid-Atlantic region during the colonial and early Republic periods. This common geographic focus holds the work together, although the span of time covered (ca. 1600–1850) stretches the fabric a little.

Also holding the book together is Hindle’s work. Robert Post’s marvelous [End Page 593] opening essay explores the connection as he examines the concerns of Hindle and his colleagues as they shaped a new field of scholarly inquiry. Post discusses their contributions, highlighting emphasis they placed upon American enthusiasm for technology, in the process reviewing a chapter in the history of the history of technology. The link to Hindle is made even more explicit by McGaw’s decision to reprint Hindle’s original essay, “The Exhilaration of Early American Technology,” and his bibliography. And in keeping with Hindle’s approach, Nina Lerman has compiled a carefully annotated bibliography of books published from 1966 to 1991, only slightly modifying Hindle’s categories of thirty years ago.

Yet as firmly as this volume rests on Hindle’s legacy, the remaining essays demonstrate how substantially the history of technology has changed since 1965. The first, by Susan E. Klepp, makes this clear with its focus on gender issues, one of the newer thematic subjects in the field. To be sure, women and technology have been explored by individual scholars for some twenty years at least, but wider acceptance of this approach is more recent. 2 Still, Klepp’s examination of methods of controlling pregnancy before 1800 is hardly typical of historians of technology and suggests how radical the changes are. Technology is defined very broadly here. Klepp disputes traditional assumptions that women in this period could not control conception. Using a wide range of sources, she finds, in fact, a number of techniques for limiting conception and inducing abortion. She also follows the changing roles of women and men as family planning won acceptance, suggesting this development reversed gender roles and led to a contest over control of reproductive decisions between male physicians and women. The result is a better understanding of this subject in the colonial period.

Sarah F. McMahon also tackles gender issues in her examination of food...

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