HSTS 514 Technology and Change
Graduate Seminar, Winter 2005
Seminar Meeting: 1:00 - 1:50 PM, 301 Milam
Reading: All in Stephen
H. Cutcliffe and Terry S. Reynolds, eds., Technology & American
History: A Historical Anthology from Technology & Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
Background list of additional readings [click here].
Week 1: Introduction.
Read: "Introduction" and "Technology in American Context," Cutcliffe and Reynolds, pp. 1-26
Week 2: Technology in America: early Nineteenth Century
Read: "'Drive that Branch': Samuel Slater, the Power Loom, and the Writing of America's Textile History," James L. Conrad, Jr., pp. 45-72
Week 3: Relations
Between Technology and the State
Read: "Bursting Boilers and the Federal Power," John G. Burke, pp. 105-128
Week 4: Technological
Ideals
Read: "Who Turned the Mechanical Ideal into Mechanical Reality?" , Robert B. Gordon, pp. 129-164
Week 5: Late Nineteenth
Century Commercial Technology
Read: "Technology and the Market: George Eastman and the Origins of Mass Amateur Photography," Reese V. Jenkins, 197-216
Week 6: Early Twentieth
Century Commercial Technology
Read: "Custom Design, Engineering Guarantees, and Unpatentable Data: The Air Conditioning Industry, 1900-1916," Gail Cooper, pp. 239-270
Week 7: The Social
and Cultural Impacts of Technology
Read: "'Touch Someone': The Telephone Industry Discovers Sociability," Claude S. Fischer, pp. 271-300
Week 8: Technology
and the Early Green Revolution
Read: "Farmers Deskilled: Hybrid Corn and Farmers' Work," Deborah Fitzgerald, pp. 301-320
Week 9: Mid-Twentieth Century Technology
Read one of the following:
"The 'Industrial Revolution' in the Home: Household Technology and Social Change in the Twentieth Century," Ruth Schwartz Cowan, pp. 321-344
"Research, Engineering, and Science in American Engineering Colleges," Bruce Seely, pp. 345-388
Week 10: Technology
in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century
Read one of the following:
"Technology in the Seamless Web: 'Success' and 'Failure' in the History of the Electron Microscope," Gregory C. Kunkle, pp. 389-412
"Momentum Shifts in the American Electric Utility System: Catastrophic Change--Or No Change at All?", Hirsh / Serchuk, pp. 413-
last updated: 8 January 2005