The Historian of Technology and Her True Country

This address, presented in Lisbon at the Fiftieth Annual Meeting of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), reflects upon questions of nationalism and technology that have persistently informed scholarship in the discipline. Drawing upon the work of Flannery O’Connor, a Southerner writer whose stories and prose addressed themes of region, race, and technological progress at the height of the so-called American Century, the essay contemplates how historians of technology structure stories about the past in ways that respect both universal tendencies and the particulars of specific times and places. In exploring relations between technology and culture, historians have derived especially useful insights from focusing upon the practice of governance, often by deploying techniques from political economy and economic history. Such an approach holds great promise in an age characterized by a new wave of globalization marked by significant innovation in communications and information technology.