TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 1051 culture and identity in the antebellum period, Zboray demonstrates the ways in which the social history of technology can illuminate broad debates within social and cultural history. Catherine E. Kelly Dr. Kelly teaches American history at Case Western Reserve University. Her book, Between Town and Country: New England Women and the Creation of a Provincial Middle Class, is under contract to Cornell University Press. Information and Secrecy: Vannevar Bush, Ultra, and the Other Memex. By Colin Burke. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1994. Pp· xxvi + 466; illustrations, notes, index. $49.50. Two individuals are ghostly spirits animating this interesting and informative monograph: Vannevar Bush and Rear Admiral Stanford Caldwell Hooper. Bush is up front in the text, liberally based on his personal papers and many official records. Hooper is far less promi nent and less well covered, at least explicitly. Readers may not at first realize that this is largely a navy story, but one secondarily touching on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), some private corporations, and a scatter of federal bodies. We need more on Hooper to provide the setting for the intricacies of the navy structures and functions—for example, the Bureau of Ships as both essential and an impediment. Hooper is well known among specialists for his role in promoting naval communications. Bush’s role as a computer pioneer is amply documented. He recently attracted further attention for his Memex proposal, seen as a precursor of hypertext (see James M. Nyce and Paul Kahn, eds., From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine [San Diego, Calif., 1991]). A brief, provocative treatment attempts with mixed success to deal with post-1945 attempts influ enced by Bush to attain an automated library as a step to the visionary Memex. The two men crossed paths, as it were, before World War II in the navy’s attempts to come up with devices, either electromechanical or electronic, to break the German and Japanese codes. Bush proposed combining aspects of his differential analyzer (perhaps converted to electronic form) with microfilm as a spinoff of his concern with the provision of technological aids to learning. It was a short stop to attempting to adapt such systems to cryptoanalysis. Colin Burke in cludes brief treatments of other nations’ activities. The volume is a series of narratives of development. Very little research, either basic or applied, is discussed or even involved. From time to time, the very knowledgeable and sophisticated author has a fling at policy issues, but cursorily and with modest success. From time to time, we have references to other developments, rarely in detail, giving a concrete sense of emerging expertise. What is given 1052 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE on the development of the systems and devices in question is very good, and one wants more. The footnotes are a treasure trove of archival leads and bibliographical nuggets, occasionally with in sightful commentary. The projects trying to achieve Bush’s goals in cryptoanalysis and in the automated library never succeeded. Individuals inside and out side the navy realized that a completely electronic code-breaking de vice was called for. Microfilm proved a troublesome medium. Only near the end of the war and shortly afterward with the emergence of early computers did the first modest steps occur in the United States toward high-tech solutions of the decoding problem. These matters are still veiled in layers of official secrecy, and Burke deserves much credit for his efforts to remove some of the veils from the early parts of the story. The pressure to come up with solutions quickly because of wartime needs often resulted in the use of older technologies, not the most advanced possibilities. Burke is very good at showing how punch cards and other familiar devices of that day were adapted to particu lar tasks. Outside of a modest role for MIT, this is not a story in which the universities loom large, nor do high-tech portions of indus try. The National Bureau of Standards also had a modest role. More important are a few navy installations like the Washington Navy Yard. There are accounts of improvements in sorting and...