“A Large Canvas”: Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll W. Pursell Jr., eds., Technology in Western Civilization

Abstract

The two-volume survey of the history of technology, Technology in Western Civilization , edited by Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll W. Pursell Jr., is reviewed 42 years after its publication by Oxford University Press. The reviewer concludes that the book helped establish the academic field of the history of technology, along with the founding of the Society for the History of Technology and its journal, Technology and Culture , in 1958–1959. Melvin Kranzberg was instrumental in this endeavor, and his views have shaped the discipline of the history of technology to the present day. For this book, Kranzberg and Pursell’s editorial direction established an approach to the history of technology that broke from the deterministic, linear notion of technology’s “impact” on society. The seventy contributors, besides the two editors, provide not only a survey that holds up well, but also a 1960s-era snapshot of a positivistic view of technology, which one seldom finds in later decades.