TECHNOLOGYAND CULTURE Book Reviews 879 for husbands and fathers to build the necessary additions to the house. But since nearly all the buyers were veterans in the same age group, these newer models exhibited a limited response to concerns offamilies whose children would soon be approaching adolescence. The intensely gendered domesticity of togetherness embedded in the design of the house reinforced the preciousness of the idealized nuclear family whose very existence within the home would serve to combat the external threats of the Cold War. This book has a major structural flaw. Too much of Kelly’s supporting evidence is contained within the surfeit ofendnotes. Ninety-two pages of notes support 172 pages of text. For example, Kelly reveals in an endnote (p. 229, n. 22) the startling fact that the U.S. Treasury Department funded an episode of “Father Knows Best” in which the Andersons’ hometown falls under Communist rule. Kelly fails to make explicit the obvious connection between this government effort to reinforce middle-class values as a bulwark against Communism and government support of postwar suburban housing developments. In another endnote (p. 240, n. 21), Kelly states, “It is the underlying thesis of this book that the redefinition in class which resulted from the housing policies of the FHA and the GI Bill is among the most important contributions of the Roosevelt/Truman years.” A statement such as this demands to be part of the text. While drawing on the familiar literature of postwar social history, Kelly offers a fresh approach to the suburban entity that focuses on the continuity ofAmerican ideological themes. Kelly reconstructs a cultural context from such diverse sources as basal readers (remember Alice and Jerry?), movies, radio, novels, television, government documents, neigh borhood newspapers, oral histories, and the 1956 Women’s Congress on Housing. By looking at the houses as material artifacts within this context, Kelly examines and articulates just exactly what Levittown meant to those who designed, built, funded, and criticized it, and, most important, to those who lived there. While technology is not the focus of this study, historians of technology will profit from an approach that not only seeks to understand the social context but can extricate cultural meaning from design and artifactual evidence. Molly W. Berger Ms. Berger is a Ph.D. candidate at Case Western Reserve University, writing a techno logical and cultural history of 19th- and early 20th-century American hotels. Regulated Enterprises: Natural Gas Pipelines and Northeastern Markets, 19381954 . By ChristopherJ. Castaneda. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993. Pp. xiv+203; tables, notes, index. $30.00. From when I was little I remember riding at night between Houston and Lake Charles, Louisiana, on old “Bloody (U.S.) 90.” In many places 880 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGYAND CULTURE it was bright as day from the gas flares in the oil fields alongside the highway. Fifteen years later, by the time the first sections of I-10 were opened, the flares were mosdy gone: what had been a dangerous nuisance, good only to light up the night or to make carbon black in plants that billowed towering clouds of black smoke into a crystalline blue Texas sky, by then was heating houses in Boston and firing boilers in Philadelphia. Long-distance natural gas pipelines perfecdy exemplify Nathan Rosenberg’s thesis that technological progress transforms, in deed redefines, “natural” resources. What Rosenberg’s hopeful eco nomic thesis does not do is tell exacdy how that transformation takes place—in fashionable language, how historical actors make that new world. This book doesjust that. It is a meticulously researched account of how groups of entrepreneurs, working within an also-evolving regulatory environment, built, bought, financed, and created the net work of long-distance pipelines and business relationships that still supply Gulf Coast and mid-continent natural gas to the Northeast. Christopher Castaneda’s thesis is simple and direct: Between the Natural Gas Act of 1938 and the travesty of the 1954 Phillips decision, the Federal Power Commission (FPC), in the pluralistic process by which it awarded the “certificate of public convenience and necessity” prerequisite to interstate transport of natural gas, effectively guided underlying market forces (potential supply of natural gas in the...