An Agenda for SHOT

Abstract

Presidential Address AN AGENDA FOR SHOT BRUCE SINCLAIR Normally, the outgoing president of SHOT presents an address at the society’s annual meeting. According to that tradition, I should be telling you about the meaning of my scholarship. There’s nothing wrong with that; I’d like the chance to figure it out too. But this year it seems a good time for a different sort of presidential address. I think our society is at an important stage in its evolution and I’d like to talk with you about that. I want to tell you about some projects that have been going on—a sort of progress report. I want as well to suggest what I think the society ought to be doing, and I want to indicate some guidelines that might help us to determine our agenda as it is framed from time to time in the years to come. You may recall that Roe Smith and I struck a bargain two years ago when I came in as president and he as vice-president. We agreed on a platform that we both felt was important for the society, imagining also that working together on it over the four years of our combined terms of office would allow for substantial progress toward those goals. Thus, in the March 1987 SHOT newsletter we committed ourselves to action on two fronts: on one hand we wanted the society to produce a wide range of teaching materials that would stimulate the study of the history of technology; on the other hand, we wanted to see SHOT play a more explicit international role within our field, reaching out to national organizations in other countries and using its strength to help to create organizations in countries where there were none. So, among other plans, we are redefining the role of corre­ sponding members and exploring the possibility of a SHOT branch in Japan, and we have agreed to hold SHOT’S first overseas meeting in 1992. But we have spent a good deal more time over the past two Dr. Sinclair is Melvin Kranzberg Professor of the History of Technology at Georgia Institute of Technology. He delivered this presidential address at the Society for the History of Technology meeting in Wilmington, Delaware, on October 22, 1988.©1989 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/89/3003-0006S01.00 596 An Agenda for SHOT 597 years on the development of teaching materials for the history of technology, and that is what I want to turn to now. Last year a committee composed of Susan Douglas, Pam Lurito, Judy McGaw, Michael Smith, Greg Good, Roger Simon, Alex Roland, Roe, and me met three times—in Philadelphia, courtesy of the National Science Foundation and the American Philosophical Society; at the annual meeting in Raleigh; and then, thanks to Ed Pershey, in Lowell in December 1987. With each meeting we came nearer to a project that could be described in a request for funding. And what Susan Douglas started with a draft proposition, Susan Smulyan, Roger, Alex, Russell Fries, and I finished with a proposal to the NSF. In the event, that proposal got revised, too, but last July—with Susan Smulyan, Gail Fowler Mohanty, and Larry Gross as principal investi­ gators and a budget of something over $300,000—it was resubmitted to the foundation. This is a SHOT proposal depending on the talents and time of members for its creation and implementation but administered by the society in the interest of its role in the promotion of the study of our subject. I hope it is only the first. Our aim in this project is to integrate the teaching of the history of technology into the teaching of American history. More junior high and high school students take American history than any other course. History courses, then, are the best possible place to teach them the ways in which technology has been central to the American experience. Our hope is that they will learn not only about technology itself but also about the factors that shaped the technologies we got. The essence of our proposal is to create for...