A Moment of Synthesis: Recent Textbooks in the History of Technology

Abstract

In the early 1990s the field of American technology and culture reached a moment of synthesis, when scholars felt ready to write general texts and when publishers found the market large enough to warrant their publication. The books under review here serve both as evidence of this achievement and as a survey of approaches to the burgeoning literature of the field.' Let me say at once that all four works are high-quality textbooks, any of which I would have no hesitation in adopting, depending upon the students and the course emphasis. Each draws on a wide range of materials, and I must say that I learned from all of them. Yet my occasional ignorance may itself be an artifact of the field's previously inchoate state. The nearly simultaneous emergence of so many survey texts where none previously existed suggests the establishment of a core discourse with all its implications: agreement on periodization, canonical topics, marginal subjects, common omissions, and a (usually implicit) sense of the relationship of technology and ideology. I will come back to these underlying similarities after surveying the different ways that these authors have constructed their surveys.