A Retrospective View of Science, Technology, and Material Culture in Early American History

Abstract

H TISTORY has many mansions indeed, as well as suburbs and shantytowns, trailer parks and condominiums, and early American history has its share of most of them.' In this essay I want to bring into view the peculiar story of few of these edifices, selected because they are the ones within which I have lived and labored. They are the history of science, the history of technology, and the history of material culture. The needs and attitudes of society call upon the historian for constantly changing selection and concentration of his efforts. That is the reason nothing seems to change often and more quickly than the immutable past, and every change has meaning.2 History cannot attain settled state because, as the collective memory, it serves society. For society, history is a dialogue in the present with the past about the future. 3 Early American history was our first history, appearing long before the end of the colonial period. With the progress of time, it yielded center stage to more recent histories and to those deemed to have more current meaning. Even though early American history embraced the origins of American civilization and the beginnings of the nation, promising younger scholars came to see the dialogue with later eras as more significant. Still, by the time of the Second World War, some of the most respected American historians studied that period, among them Samuel Eliot Morison, Charles M. Andrews, and Thomas J. Wertenbaker. The Institute of Early American History and Culture was founded to encourage the development of the field at time when it seemed to need strengthening. A group of distinguished early Americanists who served in