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

Abstract

Review Essay A MOMENT OF SYNTHESIS: RECENT TEXTBOOKS IN THE HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY DAVID E. NYE 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.1 Let me say at once that all four works are high-quality textbooks, any ofwhich I would have no hesi­ tation 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 itselfbe an artifact of the field’s previously inchoate state. The nearly simultaneous emergence of so many survey texts where none previ­ ously 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. Dr. Nye is professor of American history at Odense University, Denmark. His Elec­ trifying America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990) won the Dexter Prize in 1993. His recent work includes American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), ConsumingPower: A Social History ofAmerican Energies (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), and Narratives and Spaces: Technology and the Construction ofAmerican Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). ’Books reviewed in this essay: Alan I. Marcus and Howard P. Segal, Technology in America: A Brief History (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989); Carroll W. Pursell, The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hop­ kins University Press, 1995); Ruth Schwartz Cowan, A Social History ofAmerican Tech­ nology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Gary S. Cross and Rick Szostak, Technology and American Society: A History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1995).© 1998 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/98/3902-0005S02.00 292 Recent Textbooks in the History of Technology 293 Alan Marcus’s and Howard Segal’s Technology in America: A Brief History preceded the others by six years or more, and their new com­ petitors have tried to do things differently. How? To take the most obvious first, where Marcus and Segal use eight chapters, both Carroll Pursell’s The Machine in America: A SocialHistory ofTechnology and Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s A SocialHistory ofAmerican Technology provide thirteen, geared to the academic semester. Gary Cross and Rick Szostak, in Technology and American Society: A History, differentiate their topics even more, with twenty short chapters. The three newer works also are more historical and a little less concerned with formal politics. Marcus and Segal move from 1607 to 1870 in 129 pages and devote the remaining 220 pages to just over a century. In contrast, their competition shifts the center of gravity to the nineteenth cen­ tury and gives a bit more attention to the colonial period. The revi­ sions that Marcus and Segal plan for a new edition (available at the end of 1998) apparently will not lessen this difference.2 They intend to expand only slightly on earlier periods, while focusing revisions on the twentieth century, as they add new material on “the technical side of technology,” government funding of large-scale projects, technology in medicine, genetic engineering, and electronics in the home. Since readers are presumably familiar with their book, I will not review it extensively here, especially with a new edition on the way. The text is clearly written and judiciously selective. It not only balances social and technological history but also places that history in a political context. For example, the colonial period is framed by a discussion of British mercantile policy, and the Constitution is presented as a “commercial document” dealing with trade, tariffs, a common currency, patent protection, and the fostering of a com­ mon commercial culture. In contrast, none ofthe three newer works devotes a...