New Perspectives on Technology and American Culture ed. by Bruce Sinclair

Abstract

968 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE land and viewed employment in the mills as a temporary station in an odyssey that would bring them to landholding status in Italy. The French Canadians moved in family units and typically set down per­ manent roots in the textile centers of New England. A second essay, by J. A. Jowitt, compares workers in Bradford, the center of England’s worsted industry, with those of Lawrence, the leading producer of worsted in the United States. This book makes perhaps its most important contribution by pro­ viding a reminder of how useful international comparison can be to students of industrialization. As Alan Dawley points out in an insight­ ful commentary on the labor history papers, “industrialization” seems a particularly ripe topic for the comparative approach because the concept includes many phenomena that occurred in numerous set­ tings. The basic similarities allow for meaningful comparisons that reveal cultural factors and allow us to distill the essence ofthe universal process we call industrialization. Deft practitioners of the comparative method will steer a course between crude reductionism that homog­ enizes the experiences of all nations and banal assertions that every­ thing is different in each setting. For the most part, the essays presented at Lowell fulfill the promise Dawley sees in the comparative method. At the same time, they highlight an aspect of industrialization that practitioners of the comparative method will need to keep in mind: industrialization was a process of international scope. While historians may with some benefit assume that industrialization was a single phe­ nomenon that played itself out with slight but significant variations in different locales, they cannot ultimately lose sight of the interna­ tional dimensions of the process. Historians of technology will need to show particular sensitivity in this regard. All of the techniques discussed here—from waterwheels and textile machines to urban plans and credit mechanisms—were known on both sides of the Atlantic. The authors of these comparative studies found themselves asking why certain cultures selected particular technologies from a common, international pool. A full portrait of industrialization in any particular setting must take into account the international character oftechnology. Steven W. Usselman Dr. Usselman is assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. New Perspectives on Technology and American Culture. Edited by Bruce Sinclair. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1986. Pp. ix + 81; notes. $5.00 (paper). This volume contains five essays, all of which were originally pre­ sented at a symposium ofthe same name at the American Philosophical Society. Bruce Sinclair organized the symposium while Andrew W. Mellon Senior Research Fellow at the society and edited the papers for TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 969 publication. The contributors, two historians of technology and three cultural historians, all share an interest in the complex connections of culture and technology. Sinclair’s own essay, “Inventing a Genteel Tradition: MIT Crosses the River,” examines how engineering educators in the late 19th and early 20th centuries struggled to find their own intellectual direction within an academic culture that disdained vocational learning and embraced science only if pursued for its own sake. The context for his study is MIT during the years from 1897 to 1916, when the institute, having outgrown its cramped Boston quarters, debated merger with Harvard but finally chose to build a wholly new and separate campus. Throughout his discussion of these activities, Sin­ clair retains a sharp and sensitive focus on the creation, manipulation, and dynamic effect of symbols and images. His analysis supports his claim that scholars have much to learn by examining the intersection between the internal history of engineering and the external history of how a culture perceives its engineers. Somewhat more narrowly focused is “ ‘What the Senate Is to the American Commonwealth’: A National Academy of Engineers,” by Carroll W. Pursell. Also concerned with an episode in engineering’s struggle to upgrade its professional and social status, Pursell traces the ultimately unsuccessful attempt during World War I of a small number of engineers, catalyzed by bridge engineer J. A. L. Waddell and electrical engineer C. O. Mailloux, to establish a National Acad­ emy of Engineers. While engineers never won the prestige of scientists or...