Society For The History Of Technology Research Articles

The Craft of Premodern European History of Technology: Past and Future Practice

This essay discusses the history of technology for premodern Europe in terms of historiography and contemporary practices. It treats the origins of the history of technology in the Annales School as developed by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. It focuses on the early years of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), including early participants such as Lynn White jr., Melvin Kranzberg, Lewis Mumford, and Abbot Payson Usher. It treats contemporary work in the history of premodern technology across a number of fields including hydrology, mining, textiles, and building construction and emphasizes the importance of primary source research, local history, and traditional technologies as opposed to the traditional focus on invention. Finally, it discusses the future of the field and the importance of developing relationships with other disciplines, such as archaeology and material culture studies.

Remembering the Space Age: Proceedings of the 50th Anniversary Conference (review)

Reviewed by: Remembering the Space Age: Proceedings of the 50th Anniversary Conference Nina Wormbs (bio) Remembering the Space Age: Proceedings of the 50th Anniversary Conference. Edited by Steven J. Dick. Washington, D.C.: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2008. Pp. xiii+465. $54. The arrival of this volume strikes me as timely because of the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the Moon landing. Thinking further, however, I realize that it would have been timely any year, because we are constantly remembering the space age. This does not mean that Steven Dick's book is without surprises. On the contrary. It shows how memory, in all its different forms, is created, reinterpreted, questioned, lived, and used over time and for different purposes. Some perspectives and conclusions are more familiar than others. Dick divides the book into two main parts, with nine and eight longer chapters respectively. In the first part, "National and Global Dimensions of the Space Age," space exploration is put into the larger frame of human history. The second, "Remembrance and Cultural Representation of the Space Age," addresses questions of interpretation and the meaning of space exploration. The book ends with four shorter essays, collected under the heading "Reflections on the Space Age." Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the U.S. perspective dominates, as John Krige notes in his essay about the European program. True, Slava Gerovitch and Cathleen S. Lewis treat the Russian/Soviet endeavor and Asif A. Siddiqi seeks to lift the discussion to a comparative level by treating space flight in the national imagination. This is commendable, as are the questions raised by James R. Hansen on China's space activities (though Hansen's is more of a literature overview). In addressing NASA's attempts to study the impact of the space program, Jonathan Coopersmith concludes that the effort was not without interesting results, but that it was a failure in relation to its ambition—for example, the ambition to use historical analogy, which if implemented would have raised questions about the unwillingness of historians to take part in a larger policy discussion. The second part of the book includes some of the richest essays. Emily S. Rosenberg's on the space age in American culture is eloquent and rewarding. In her analysis, carried out in the four dimensions of the cold war, the media, [End Page 750] technocracy, and the arts, she reveals something close to a meaning of the space age. One sees this also in the essay by Roger Launius. Although placed last in the book's second part, Launius's discussion of the master narrative and the conflicting subnarratives of American space flight is really central in the volume. Even though a non-U.S. reader like myself may have a hard time distinguishing the fundamental differences between critiques from the political left and right, the "feel-good triumph for the nation and its people" (p. 357) enabled by the master narrative of success, and the joining of forces that its counternarrative of conspiracy allows, deepens our understanding of the different meanings and uses of history. Rosenberg and Launius both omit reference to Lisa Parks's 2005 Cultures in Orbit: Satellite and the Televisual, but in general I found the references valuable even while wishing there had been a collective list at the end. Conference proceedings challenge a reviewer because a smorgasbord renders it impossible to do justice to all contributions. Still, anyone with an interest in the space age can find something to chew on in this volume. Though I do not agree with Dick's assertion in the introduction that it is filled with provocative thoughts, perhaps this is due to our different expectations and hopes about how the space age should and could be remembered. Nina Wormbs Dr. Wormbs is associate professor at the Division of History of Science and Technology, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. Copyright © 2010 The Society for the History of Technology

Social Change and the Evolution of Ceramic Production and Distribution in a Maya Community (review)

Reviewed by: Social Change and the Evolution of Ceramic Production and Distribution in a Maya Community Chandra D. Bhimull (bio) Social Change and the Evolution of Ceramic Production and Distribution in a Maya Community. By Dean E. Arnold. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2008. Pp. xxxii+351. $65. The concept of change is central to Dean Arnold's book. On the one hand, this is not new. For decades, historically minded anthropologists have wrestled with how to identify and evaluate dynamic processes. On the other hand, Arnold's book differs because it uses a narrow scope and a microscale to analyze transformation. Written by a specialist of ceramic ethnoarchaeology, its focus is on nearly forty years of pottery production and circulation among members of a Maya community in Ticul, Yucatán. Arnold argues that social, political, and economic changes materialize in pottery. Adopting anthropology's unique holistic perspective, he identifies and combines at least five paradigms that scholars have used to interpret change. As a result, readers weave through analytical frames such as specialization and evolving complexity, evolutionary processes, technological choice, cognitive anthropology, and engagement theory. In thirty-two years, Arnold took ten trips to Yucatán. From the vantage point that extended fieldwork afforded, he observed and participated in the [End Page 770] daily lives of potters. He watched as the demand for pots changed, altering patterns of consumption accordingly. He observed how weather, water, and other natural things shaped desire, and he saw how the advent of tourism and mechanized technology altered it. "The development of municipal piped water in the 1960s" shattered "consumer demand for water-carrying and storage vessels" (p. 124). How industrialization impacts indigenous ways interests Arnold. References to ritual provide insight into the important but shifting roles that potters and their products play in demarcated space and time. For instance, various kinds of clay containers are used for ceremonies transacted on the Day of the Dead. Traditionally, members of the community purchased items such as bowls for food and burners for candles and incense. However, as Arnold notes, increased access to metal pots has "led to the replacement of clay cooking vessels with metal ones" (p. 124). Alongside industrialization, Arnold glimpses globalization. A sharp opponent of synchronic studies, he defines globalization as a historical process. In doing so, he dismantles distinctions such as the globalized present and the non-globalized past, stating pointedly that "cultural evolution in the present is accelerating at a rapid pace, collapsing centuries of cultural evolution into the span of a scholar's lifetime" (p. 20). Arnold's analysis of globalization is peripheral, but it is difficult to read and not realize that international forces are influencing contemporary village life in Ticul. To what extent are these external influences new? What counts as change? These questions haunt this book. Arnold is meticulous in his efforts. He is attentive to details such as fabrication and firing technologies, forming techniques and turntables, and clay and temper procurement. Serious consideration of such factors risks diverting awareness away from the impact of long-term, large-scale transformation: conquest, colonization, independence, and revolution. Investigating historical events in tandem with current forms of social change could further disintegrate the artificial divides we carve into time; it could push us to wonder how people identify change for themselves. Pottery is an important part of everyday life in Ticul. There are pots for plants, food, flowers, incense, music, coins, ashes, and souvenirs. They surface in stories. They are sold in markets. This book motivates us to be mindful of the mutable material processes that make pots possible. [End Page 771] Chandra D. Bhimull Dr. Bhimull is assistant professor of anthropology and African-American studies at Colby College in Maine. Copyright © 2010 The Society for the History of Technology

Looking Into the Mirror of Time: Reflections on the Life and Work of Edwin T. Layton Jr., 1928-2009

Looking Into the Mirror of Time:Reflections on the Life and Work of Edwin T. Layton Jr., 1928-2009 Eda Kranakis (bio) Looking into the mirror of time, back to the fall of 1975, the first reflection I see in my mind's eye is the image of Ed Layton's guardian angel—Albrecht Dürer's Melencolia—looking down from his office wall at the University of Minnesota. That autumn he was a newly appointed professor at the university, and I was a new Ph.D. student intent on studying the history of technology. It seems long ago, and it seems like yesterday. Ed explained to me that the angel depicted the essence of the historian's life: the quest for knowledge combined with the inevitable loneliness of scholarly work. Looking back from thirty-five years, I see that Dürer's print also captures some of the deepest characteristics of Ed Layton as a scholar. On one level, this Northern Renaissance masterpiece expresses the great humanistic spirit that pervaded his life and teaching. On another level, the angel's paraphernalia—from mathematical shapes to measuring instruments and [End Page 543] workmen's tools—convey his love of technology, science, and mathematics, which directed the corpus of his scholarly work. And on still another level, the image's Neoplatonic, allegorical character reflects Ed's philosophical side, his unrelenting desire to discover the deeper, simpler truths and structures beneath the complex surface of historical events. Ed was as much philosopher as historian, which partly explains the enduring impact of his contributions to the history of technology. Ed Layton was not only a great humanist and brilliant scholar and teacher; he was also a leader of the Society for the History of Technology's institutional and intellectual development, serving on all the major prize committees, on the executive council, and finally as vice president and president between 1983 and 1986. For more than two decades he was an advisory editor for Technology and Culture or a key member of the SHOT editorial committee. In 1971 he received the society's Dexter Prize for The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession, cited as "a model of research and synthesis in the social history of technology," and nineteen years later he was awarded the Leonardo da Vinci Medal. Through his intellectual contributions, Ed influenced our understanding of technological knowledge, the interaction of science and technology, issues related to engineering design, ethics, and ideology, and the nature and history of engineering professionalization. Yet the scope of his interests ranged much further. Indeed, few have matched the depth and breadth of his knowledge of human culture and society from ancient times to the present. In his last year of life, despite declining health, he was still reading voraciously in subjects as diverse as ancient and medieval music, cosmic physics, poetry, film, astronomy, and naval history. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Edwin Thomas Layton Jr. rose above a childhood that left him with a sense of abandonment. His father and namesake was an Annapolis-trained naval officer who became the head of intelligence for the U.S. Pacific Fleet, reaching the rank of rear admiral, and who gained fame posthumously from his book And I Was There (1985), which recounted events leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Ed had only limited personal interaction with his father, however. Layton senior was sent overseas when his son was less than one year old, and his parents soon divorced, both of them eventually remarrying and founding new families. At the age of seven, when his mother remarried, Ed was left without explanation to be raised by his grandmother. His mother remained emotionally aloof, and, though he tried several times throughout his life to establish a personal relationship with his father, he was rebuffed. Still, Ed always took a keen interest in naval affairs. He joined the U.S. Navy Reserve while still a teenager, leaving only when he got his first full-time teaching position, and later presented talks on naval intelligence relating to his father's career. Ed's psyche also bore the imprint of growing up during the Great...

The Industrial Revolution (review)

Reviewed by: The Industrial Revolution Edmund N. Todd (bio) The Industrial Revolution. By Lee T. Wyatt III. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2009. Pp. xix+263. $45. Lee T. Wyatt provides an introduction to the Industrial Revolution as part of a Greenwood Press series devoted to significant issues between 1500 and 1900 and meant for high school or lower-level college students. He surveys the agricultural revolution in Great Britain, the years leading up to its Industrial Revolution, and the British Industrial Revolution itself, before turning to changes in the United States and on the European continent. He then discusses industrial changes outside of the West. And he appends biographies of significant figures, contemporary sources, photographs, and an annotated bibliography. The Industrial Revolution included a variety of changes in agriculture, finance, transportation, urbanization, and government, all of which Wyatt surveys as well as discussing population growth, educational innovations, and cultural developments. Those areas that shared Britain's openness to change industrialized faster than did other areas. Fragmented, the German states impeded industrial development until the Zollverein (tariff union) removed impediments to trade. Of the non-Western states, Russia and Japan both industrialized, but Japan more successfully. Although Wyatt has relied for source material on websites and older literature, he also draws on contemporary journals and reports to provide useful detail. For instance, he notes that British cotton manufacturers had to overcome the law that all shrouds be made from wool. He identifies the number of Chinese workers building railroads in the United States and notes the desirability to employers of their work ethic and cleanliness, even [End Page 251] as their pay, $28 a month, was less than that of Irishmen. He compares the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, which had six million visitors, around one-third of Britain's population, with the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, with 9.8 million visitors, about 20 percent of the U.S. population. In 1851, Britain was clearly the leading industrial power, but by 1876 the United States was gaining strength and the high level of visitation to the Centennial is evidence of the nation's increasingly efficient transportation system. The biographical sketches are informative short essays that add significantly to the narrative. But Wyatt seems unfamiliar with the history of technology as a field of inquiry, asserting, for example, that milling machinery, which "drilled holes in the key components of guns" early in the Civil War, spread to other industries by the end of the war (p. 105). Even though he is a retired army colonel and former history faculty member at West Point, Wyatt has Eli Whitney developing interchangeable parts, rather than the United States Ordnance Department. He presents Thomas A. Edison as the inventor of the "incandescent light bulb (1879)," rather than a system for generating, distributing, and consuming electricity to compete with gas. He writes that the "first power stations appeared in Great Britain in the early 1880s" but soon spread elsewhere and helped create such other industries as "electric lighting" (p. 134). His discussion of "mass society" (pp. 135–41) does not demonstrate a homogenization of Western society, which one might expect from the term and its history, but provides an opportunity to discuss significant social and cultural changes that occurred with industrialization and urban development. Those interested in using this book in courses introducing the Industrial Revolution may like it because of its clear writing and nice examples, and even for its mistakes. The website also holds promise of providing many primary documents that would be useful in courses. Edmund N. Todd Ed Todd teaches the history of science and technology at the University of New Haven and writes about large technological systems. Copyright © 2010 The Society for the History of Technology

Edited Clean Version: Technology and the Culture of Control

Reviewed by: Edited Clean Version: Technology and the Culture of Control Paul Swann (bio) Edited Clean Version: Technology and the Culture of Control. By Raiford Guins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Pp. xxv+242. $22.50. Raiford Guins's Edited Clean Version examines the Foucauldian prospect of digital censorship without a personified, centralized group of censors. We are used to thinking of censors as those in authority, holding covert or open power over us, controlling access to media and/or media content—but what if we are our own censors? What if domestic safety extends to controlling what our family plays, what it watches and hears? The computer screen has become the new front door, carefully guarded by protective parents. Our media culture can increasingly be managed by hardware and software default settings. A parent can control which television programming to make available to her family, or subscribe to a service to edit or re-version material on the basis of content. Profanity, blasphemy, graphic sex, and violence can all be excised at the touch of a computer setting. Video-game authors, professional associations, and big-box retailers—none of them appointed by us—also participate in this super-panopticon process, deciding which items they will carry or demanding changes in content that often trickle down to smaller outlets. For some, the ability to self-censor digital content gives a comforting but perhaps illusory sense that we determine what our children watch, play, or hear. Hardware and software systems enabling users to control access to digital media constitute a new kind of censorship. This transference of governmentality from the official and public to the individual and the private is a central part of this book's thesis. But as Guins discusses, have we really entered an era of self-regulation, where we have become "experts on our-selves"? [End Page 1053] Perhaps the sense of control of content is just that—a sense. Default settings do not transform us from media users into coproducers of meaning since our media choices and default settings have already been predetermined for us. The most interesting part of this discussion is the analysis of versioning, where multiple versions of what was the same initial text circulate and compete for our attention. Christian and family values–type bodies like CleanFlicks offer sanitized versions of motion pictures that compete with those already sanctioned by the film industry's own self-regulatory body, the Motion Picture Association. The chapter on David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, illustrating how a heavily reedited 83-minute version of this film is radically different from the full, "official" 94-minute version, is particularly telling. Ironically, editing makes the film's violence at times even more violent and much more unmotivated than in the original. Digital touch-up technology allows a new level of virtually seamless versioning. Guins asks us to imagine a time when all texts are similarly contingent, and there is no possibility of a definitive text. This is already happening, whether it is blocking software that controls access to certain websites or is connected to keywords that control access to certain television programs, or versioning. Will the powers that be—or we self-censors—be able to keep up with technology? Online access makes the issues governing content and access control all the more pressing. How, for example, does online content delivery undercut the policies of Blockbuster, long notorious for its unwillingness to deal in NC-17 material? Or might new online behemoths like Amazon.com and Netflix now find themselves in the censorship business? This insightful exercise in censorial studies examines the elision between the watched and the watchers, the censors and the censored. Guins concludes that the cleaning and sanitizing process is quite ambiguous, controlling behavior as much as content, and much less straightforward than a simple rating or a default setting implies. Paul Swann Dr. Swann is professor of film and media arts at Temple University in Philadelphia and Fulbright professor at Eszterhazy Karoly College in Eger, Hungary. Copyright © 2010 The Society for the History of Technology

Materialising Identity: The Co-construction of the Gotthard Railway and Swiss National Identity (review)

Reviewed by: Materialising Identity: The Co-construction of the Gotthard Railway and Swiss National Identity Kilian T. Elsasser (bio) Materialising Identity: The Co-construction of the Gotthard Railway and Swiss National Identity. By Judith Schueler. Amsterdam: Aksant, 2008. Pp. 197. €24.90. Judith Schueler’s Materialising Identity is based on the work of Gabrielle Hecht (The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II [1998]), which relates the building of the nuclear power capacity of France to the concept of national identity in France. What Schueler does is relate the building and running of the Gotthard Railway with the changing perception of Swiss national identity. She does not concentrate on political, philosophical, literary, and material culture sources, as is the case with two standard studies of the railway line: Guy Marchal’s Schweizer Gebrauchsgeschichte (2006) and the Swiss National Museum in Zurich’s edited Die Erfindung der Schweiz 1848–1998 (1998). Instead, she analyzes technical and popular literature in circulation since the building of the railway in the 1870s. The railway’s major technical challenge was its fifteen-kilometer tunnel. Franz Rzika, the most famous tunnel engineer of the 1870s, stated that Louis Favre, the head of the tunneling company, should have chosen the Austrian instead of the Belgium method. Favre did not reply in nationalistic terms but simply argued that he had chosen according to the necessities of geology. The line was opened in 1882, with the Kingdom of Italy, the German Empire, and Switzerland having participated in the finance and construction and much self-congratulation for the completion of a unifying connection between Germany and Italy through Switzerland, which was given the role of rendering service to Europe. The opening ceremonies, which lasted for three days, starting in Lucerne and ending in Milan, were an important platform for the Swiss government to position itself as a mediator within Europe. In Switzerland itself, the line was depicted as a means of unifying the Swiss regions with their different languages and identities. Traffic mainly consisted of industrial goods from Germany to Italy and raw materials back to Germany. But the company also promoted the line as a tourist attraction for wealthy residents of the German and Austrian-Hungarian empires. Tourists could travel through the rugged Alps, view the state-of-the-art engineering, and experience the countryside where Swiss [End Page 939] democracy was “founded” in the thirteenth century. This successful marketing effort transformed the image of Switzerland after 1882 from the Alpine republic to the Gotthard republic. The most interesting aspect of Schueler’s analysis is her examination of the popular literature about the building of the railway and its tunnel that appeared in the 1930s and 1940s; it aimed at showing a reconciliation between modern industrialization and traditional agricultural ways of life. There were stories about how conflicts between tunnel workers and farmers living around the railway line were resolved by depicting both as fighting against the rough nature of mountain areas, only by different means. The book has some weaknesses. It does not address conflict in the 1930s between the socialist party and the Swiss government dominated by liberal and conservative parties, nor the role that popular literature may have played in reconciliation and the integration of the socialists into the government system. Nevertheless, Schueler convincingly shows how the railway line provided a crucial influence in shaping Swiss national identity. With her interdisciplinary approach she effectively connects the history of ideas with the history of technology. She closes a gap. The question that remains open concerns the interrelation and influences between the traditional analysis of the political and philosophical literature and the technological literature. Kilian T. Elsasser Kilian T. Elsasser has a master of arts degree in public history from Northeastern University in Boston. He is a museum consultant, specialist in Swiss railway history, and was a head curator at the Swiss Museum of Transportation. Copyright © 2009 Society for the History of Technology

Chance and Contingency: Putting Mel Kranzberg in Context

Chance and ContingencyPutting Mel Kranzberg in Context Robert C. Post . . . what would happen if Mary Tudor had borne a son, or if Mary of Modena had failed to bear one, or . . . if a storm had not destroyed the Armada. . . . —Charles W. Cole, “The Relativity of History” “The Relativity of History” appeared in the Political Science Quarterly for June 1933, the same year that Charles Beard delivered his presidential address to the American Historical Association, “Written History as an Act of Faith,” and not long after Carl Becker’s equally iconoclastic presidential address, “Every Man His Own Historian.”1 Beard and Becker were among [End Page 839] the preeminent historians of their time, Charles Cole a twenty-seven-year-old assistant professor at Columbia, but no less committed to the emerging school of interpretation called historical relativism. The times they were a-changin’. In 1935 Cole would move on to Amherst College in Massachusetts, where the students who answered roll on his first day in class included a youngster named Melvin Kranzberg. He saw at once that Mel was a prize. Their relationship would evolve from teacher and pupil into friends and colleagues. Mel would be Cole’s assistant at a wartime agency in Washington and would then join his faculty when Cole became Amherst’s president after the war. They would remain close even as Cole became vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation, then ambassador to Chile. In later years Mel would thank Cole many times over for having opened so many doors, for taking “so large a role in shaping my destiny.”2 After Mel, Cole may have influenced nobody else quite so directly, though his vivid exemplification of chance and contingency would endure. More than a half-century later, Peter Novick would take note of his article in the context of “a more general breakdown of agreement on the meaning of the past” that was occurring in the 1930s.3 The larger question concerned the possibility of recounting “the past as it actually was, somewhat as the engineer describes a single machine.” This was the twist that Beard put on Leopold von Ranke’s storied remark about “wie es eigentlich gewesen,” and many historians would have agreed with him that it was simply not possible. Others, still a majority, remained committed to the “noble dream” of objectivity. About the conditional element in history, however, there would have been more accord. Historians would cite “providence” and write of events being “fated,” and yet there was so much evidence for the pervasive role of happenstance. What follows is a case in point. That Charles Cole and Mel Kranzberg both showed up at Amherst, Cole a protégé of Columbia’s immensely learned Carlton J. H. Hayes and Mel the son of an immigrant merchant in Saint Louis—that would have entailed deliberative choices. But both of them at the same time? That was a matter of chance, as was Cole’s decision to do more than usual with the Industrial Revolution in his Economics I course because he could now assign a provocative new book by Lewis Mumford titled Technics and Civilization. And for many years afterward very little of Mel’s life story would seem to have been fated, and certainly not his decision to foster an organization called the Society for the History of Technology. Today, fifty years after its founding, we see SHOT as the cornerstone of [End Page 840] Mel’s legacy, a matter of invention and enterprise: first, putting a new discipline in academic cloaks (invention) and, second, securing its institutional foundations (enterprise). Had he not done this, would there still be a collaborative effort among scholars concerned with technology in historic perspective? Probably there would, although it seems unlikely that the intellectual ambience would be the same, nor the institutional configuration, with SHOT and with another slightly younger society fulfilling a somewhat different role, ICOHTEC.4 Here, I have no intention of trying to address a riddle basic to any and all historical inquiry, inevitability, nor to argue for Mel’s indispensability to this collaborative effort. I have only a modest aim: to set forth the evidence that he might have lived quite...

Global Electrification: Multinational Enterprise and International Finance in the History of Light and Power, 1878–2007 (review)

Reviewed by: Global Electrification: Multinational Enterprise and International Finance in the History of Light and Power, 1878–2007 Christopher Jones (bio) Global Electrification: Multinational Enterprise and International Finance in the History of Light and Power, 1878–2007. By William J. Hausman, Peter Hertner, and Mira Wilkins. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xxiv+487. £48. Global Electrification is an impressively researched history of international finance and multinational companies in the development of the electric utility industry. In particular, the authors are interested in the extent to which utilities were owned and controlled by foreign companies and how these investment patterns shifted over time. With its rich empirical base, this work will be an important resource for those working on the history of international business, global finance, and electrification. A major strength of this work is that it is coauthored, not coedited. Rather than collecting case studies loosely gathered around a theme, the authors worked together to present a single narrative covering a long time period and several parts of the globe. The comprehensive picture that emerges from this collaboration makes this a better book. Multinational finance has played an important role in the development of the electrical utility industry. The authors identify four major periods of global financing between 1878 and 1978, each heavily influenced by global politics and generally resulting in a diminished importance of foreign investment. From 1878 to 1914, international finance helped establish electrical utilities in several parts of the globe, with the main actors being banks and large electrical manufacturers such as General Electric and Westinghouse. The financial landscape shifted between 1914 and 1929, when governments increasingly saw electrification as a national need and took active roles in establishing electrical networks. Holding companies such as American & Foreign Power Company and Sofina replaced banks and manufacturing firms as the main agents of international financing. The period from 1929 to 1945 saw a continued scaling back of foreign investment, largely due to disruptions of the financial system triggered by the Great Depression and then World War II. Even though electrification [End Page 698] was expanded all around the globe, it was largely the result of government investment and domestic capital. From 1945 to 1978, a process the authors term “domestication” led to further decline in the role of international finance. In the context of growing nationalism and decolonization, governments sought to gain control of utilities and oust foreign investors. By 1978, there was virtually no direct foreign investment in the electric light and power industry. Over the last couple of decades there has been a resurgence in foreign investment, largely due to widespread deregulation and privatization. In their conclusion, the authors caution that these new patterns are not inevitable. Wars, financial crises, and nationalist policies have deterred global investments in the past. Whether this resurgence in international financing will continue remains to be seen. One of the greatest strengths of this work is its presentation of large amounts of data. The authors describe the activities of hundreds of manufacturers, banks, utilities, holding companies, and financiers, all of this evidencing the extensive research that went into their book. The emphasis on data seems to come at a cost, however, as important social implications are addressed only briefly. Consider the question of whether foreign-owned utilities provided a different level of service to consumers than utilities financed domestically. If money was raised abroad but the utility was managed locally, did the foreign financing influence the course of electrification? Did international capital flows contribute to the oligopolistic structure of the electrical supply industry, and did this affect access to electricity? Exploration of such matters would have made this work relevant to an even wider range of audiences. Overall, Global Electrification is a significant contribution that will be highly valuable to historians with many specialties, including historians of technology. Christopher Jones Christopher Jones is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. His research is concerned with the development of energy and transportation infrastructure in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. Copyright © 2009 The Society for the History of Technology

The Microscope and the Eye: A History of Reflections, 1740–1870 (review)

Reviewed by: The Microscope and the Eye: A History of Reflections, 1740–1870 Deborah Jean Warner (bio) The Microscope and the Eye: A History of Reflections, 1740–1870. By Jutta Schickore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. ix+317. $40. Wishing to understand how the microscope gained universal trustworthiness and reliability and became “a widely accepted and commonly used tool of biomedical research” (p. 2), Jutta Schickore argues in this ambitious and often difficult book that we must look beyond traditional histories of technology and culture and pay serious attention to what she terms “second order concerns.” To this end she analyzes the arguments concerning the structure and function of the eye, and the means and methods of scientific research, advanced by physicians and natural historians who struggled with microscopical observations that were difficult to interpret and who came to realize that similar instruments could produce quite dissimilar results. Much [End Page 690] of this work occurred before, and in significant ways laid the foundations for, the technological developments that are usually said to have ushered in the era of scientific or modern microscopy in the years around 1830. While this book is written primarily for historians and philosophers of science, there is much here to interest historians of technology. An example is Schickore’s account of the low-powered microscopes used by astronomers, surveyors, and meteorologists, and the ways in which this simple “second order” device came to play “an essential and largely undisputed role” in the “improvement and validation of measuring operations” and become a “tool for instrument making” (p. 68). Another is her account of the growing appreciation of defining power as distinct from brute magnification. Here she discusses the cabbage butterflies, cheese mites, and other such objects that microscopists used to evaluate the optics of particular instruments and communicate the results to one another, and that also served as “second order” tools that challenged instrument makers to produce microscopes with better performance characteristics. Deborah Jean Warner Deborah Warner is curator of physical sciences at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. Copyright © 2009 The Society for the History of Technology

Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi’s Spy-Tech World (review)

Reviewed by: Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi’s Spy-Tech World John Laprise (bio) Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi’s Spy-Tech World. By Kristie Macrakis. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xix+37. $28. Because technological innovation was a primary sphere of conflict between the superpowers during the cold war, the defense, consumer, and industrial technologies of the “other side” were highly prized commodities. Histories of cold war intelligence are uncommon due to their political sensitivity and the general shortage of information. Frequently, historians are compelled to approach their object of inquiry obliquely, as does James Bamford in his histories of the National Security Agency over the past quarter-century and William E. Burroughs in his 1988 history of U.S. photo reconnaissance satellites. Yet others such as preeminent cryptological historian David Kahn [End Page 723] have been able to examine information from the records of the losing side, as is the case in his Hitler’s Spies (1978). Now, Kristie Macrakis has successfully followed this latter pattern in examining East German intelligence by looking at the records of the Stasi, the intelligence arm of the East German government. She makes the case that the Stasi aggressively sought to acquire technology from the West and employ it to solve its own technological problems. Her extensive archival research reveals that the East’s economic and industrial weakness as well as the East German government’s own bureaucratic problems hampered its mission to acquire Western technology and undermined its ability to employ information and technology it did acquire. The first half of the book follows the actions of various Stasi officers as they desperately sought to insinuate themselves into West German industry, and the actions of the Stasi bureaucracy as it sought to manage its intelligence gathering and state security missions. They communicated their intelligence acquisitions back to East Germany through a variety of means, including special inks and microfilm. One of Macrakis’s most striking findings is the breadth of the technologies sought by the Stasi—chemical processes, computer specifications, and telecommunications technologies—and the relative ease with which it acquired sensitive information from the West. While the Stasi proved adept at the acquisition of Western technologies, however, it proved to be largely unable to make use of the acquired information. Microcircuitry design was of limited value because the East lacked the prowess to apply the information to its own industrial processes. The West also limited the East’s industrial effectiveness by means of trade restrictions on high-tech exports, restrictions it continued to tighten even as the cold war drew to a close. Some Stasi officers were left behind as the iron curtain fell, while others were persuaded to cooperate for romantic, economic, or ideological reasons. In the second half of the book, Macrakis provides a fascinating view inside the spy technology of the Stasi: concealed minicameras, invisible ink, radioactive tracking systems. In one chapter she explores the Stasi’s use of olfactory tracking and the creation of “smell jars” containing olfactory samples that allowed specially trained dogs to track down individuals from whom samples had been previously obtained, even after a period of years. Macrakis based her research on numerous interviews with former Stasi officers—some living as private citizens and others who were captured and imprisoned for espionage—and she also made effective use of archival materials. Taken together, these sources have allowed her to paint a rich picture of the Stasi’s quest for Western technologies and its struggles to make use of acquired information. Seduced by Secrets offers a revealing look at the difficult-to-observe history of a modern intelligence agency. It provides scholars with an insightful analysis and a new perspective for thinking [End Page 724] about the relationship of technology and the cold war by demonstrating the rich possibilities available to scholars exploring Eastern Bloc resources. John Laprise John Laprise will be a visiting associate professor at Northwestern University’s Doha, Qatar, campus. His dissertation examines the interrelationship between the adoption of information policy in the White House during the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations. Copyright © 2009 The Society for the History of Technology

“A Large Canvas”: Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll W. Pursell Jr., eds., Technology in Western Civilization

The two-volume survey of the history of technology, Technology in Western Civilization , edited by Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll W. Pursell Jr., is reviewed 42 years after its publication by Oxford University Press. The reviewer concludes that the book helped establish the academic field of the history of technology, along with the founding of the Society for the History of Technology and its journal, Technology and Culture , in 1958–1959. Melvin Kranzberg was instrumental in this endeavor, and his views have shaped the discipline of the history of technology to the present day. For this book, Kranzberg and Pursell’s editorial direction established an approach to the history of technology that broke from the deterministic, linear notion of technology’s “impact” on society. The seventy contributors, besides the two editors, provide not only a survey that holds up well, but also a 1960s-era snapshot of a positivistic view of technology, which one seldom finds in later decades.

Invented Edens: Techno-Cities of the Twentieth Century (review)

Reviewed by: Invented Edens: Techno-Cities of the Twentieth Century Jennifer Light (bio) Invented Edens: Techno-Cities of the Twentieth Century. By Robert H. Kargon and Arthur P. Molella. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008. Pp. viii+190. $24.95. Invented Edens offers an engaging and highly readable account of the history of a phenomenon that Robert Kargon and Arthur Molella describe as “technocities.” Seeking to shed light on cities including Norris, Tennessee; Torviscosa (Italy); Sotsgorod (Soviet Union/Uzbekistan); Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Ciudad Guyana (Venezuela); Le Vaudreuil (France); and Celebration, Florida, they reframe the creation and evolution of several much-studied places as variations on a theme: urban environments “planned and developed in conjunction with large technological or industrial projects [End Page 481] . . . the twentieth-century descendants of the paternalistic company towns of the Industrial Revolution” (pp. 1–2). Yet while the company town is one past urban model that helps to situate the reader’s understanding of the subject at hand, for its major argument the book looks to the garden city. Running throughout the text is the authors’ contention that Ebenezer Howard’s garden city served as a continuing inspiration in this multiplicity of efforts to construct technocities across time and space. Conventionally characterized as a vision of an urban environment that sought to integrate aspects of the natural world as a critical response to the challenges of industrialization, Howard’s work to promote the garden city has attracted ample scholarly attention. What the authors of Invented Edens offer that is new is a reminder to readers that, despite Howard’s nostalgic vision of a pastoral existence that would alleviate the problems of industrial society, science and technology figured prominently in his garden city plans. An early chapter that reexamines Howard’s writings in preliminary draft and final form highlights the central functions of science and technology in the garden city, laying the foundation for the case studies in subsequent chapters. Perhaps most important, the authors remind us of Howard’s preferred self-characterization as an “inventor” rather than “designer” or “planner,” providing fuel to their claims that technocities themselves are “purpose-driven inventions.” Subsequent chapters roam the globe from the United States and Europe to Russia and South America. These materials are organized chronologically rather than by nation, tracking the circulation and interpretations of Howard’s work from the 1920s to the present. The book contains many excellent illustrations of the cities in plan and built form. The sheer number of examples presented is one of the strengths of the book, providing clear support for the authors’ contention about the primacy of science and technology in interpretations and reinterpretations of the garden city ideal. The presentational style that is a key strength occasionally detracts from the book’s description of its cases, because the reader wants to learn more about the variety of urban environments discussed. In particular, far more attention is lavished on the vision and planning stages for these technocities than on the longer-term results of their construction. While the authors observe in the introduction that, to distinguish their study from the voluminous literature on utopian thought, they selected only those places that were built rather than those that were simply dreamed up (with Minnesota Experimental City as the sole exception), some of the opportunity to dig into the implementation phase is missed. Undoubtedly this is related in part to the availability of source materials, but one wonders especially about the experience of the people who lived in these technocities. How did they perceive the role of science and technology? Was it salient in their [End Page 482] everyday experience, or did it fade into the background as it has for so many scholarly interpreters of the garden city and its legacy? Jennifer Light Dr. Light is associate professor at the School of Communication and the Departments of History and Sociology at Northwestern University and director of the Media, Technology, and Society Program. Copyright © 2009 The Society for the History of Technology

Hollywood Science: Movies, Science, and the End of the World (review)

Reviewed by: Hollywood Science: Movies, Science, and the End of the World George Basalla (bio) Hollywood Science: Movies, Science, and the End of the World. By Sidney Perkowitz. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Pp. 272. $24.95. Sidney Perkowitz, a physicist and film buff, is concerned about the way science, technology, and scientists are presented in Hollywood films, notably science-fiction flicks. He reviews over one hundred films and finds that Hollywood’s version of science does not always match up with scientific knowledge and practice. He would like reasonably accurate science-fiction films but he realizes that even “bad” science has its place. It can advance a flagging plot, attract young people to scientific careers, or impress an audience with the wonders of the universe. Perkowitz divides his book into three main parts: “Dangers from Nature,” “Dangers from Ourselves,” and “The Good, the Bad, and the Real.” The concluding chapters offer some final thoughts on the depiction of scientists in sci-fi films and on Hollywood science vs. real science. That said, it is time to look at the chapters on science as it appears in Hollywood films. These chapters are at the heart of the book. “Dangers from Nature” features three chapter-length themes: human encounters with alien beings, devastating collisions between Earth and space objects, and the threat posed by violent forces hidden deep within our planet. Alien encounters begin with one of the author’s favorite films, The Day the Earth Stood Still. After that he looks at Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing, The War of the Worlds, and similar works. What soon becomes apparent in these initial chapters, and in subsequent ones, is that the author devotes a great deal of space to summarizing film plots in numbing detail. Meanwhile, what happened to “real” science, the science distorted by Hollywood filmmakers? It is reserved for the end of the chapters in parts 1 and 2. There Perkowitz presents a chapter’s central scientific theme in a general essay along with references to the film’s use or misuse of science. In [End Page 473] some cases the essays that comment on a highlighted theme are shorter than the plot summaries. All too often these thematic essays descend into canned surveys of the topic under discussion. Chapter 8 includes a rather predictable account of Hollywood’s depiction of the scientist as hero, nerd, or villain. In chapter 9 Perkowitz hands out Golden Eagle awards for the best film presentation of a scientific topic and Golden Turkey awards for the worst. I found this neither amusing nor enlightening. If this book had been published several decades ago it might pass muster. However, literary criticism, film studies, and cultural studies have led to a much more sophisticated treatment of all film genres. Perkowitz’s hunt for science errors does not go deep enough. He covers films from 1902 to 2005 yet he does not critically analyze his material. He does not show us how and why changing cultural, social, and political forces have shaped the way science is seen in film. In closing I want to call attention to the book’s subtitle: Movies, Science, and the End of the World. In his hunt for mistakes in scientific knowledge Perkowitz overlooks the central fact that science-fiction films, as Susan Sontag first noted (p. 3), are not about science. They are about disaster, the end of the world. What is more harmful to the image of science, a handful of errors of fact or a film genre that has repeatedly identified science with apocalyptic events for nearly a century? This is the context, the big picture, of the 119 films Perkowitz searched for signs of scientific missteps. The problem is not to get more scientists involved in making films or to see that scientific consultants in Hollywood have the power to get the story right. We should ask why, even when the scientist is a hero who helps avert disaster, science-fiction films associate science with the end of humankind. George Basalla Dr. Basalla is professor emeritus at the University of Delaware. Copyright © 2009 The Society for the History of Technology

Energy and American Society—Thirteen Myths (review)

Reviewed by: Energy and American Society—Thirteen Myths Jeff Tester (bio) Energy and American Society—Thirteen Myths. Edited by Benjamin K. Sovacool and Marilyn A. Brown. Dordrecht: Springer, 2007. Pp. xiii+371. $79.95. Marilyn Brown and Benjamin Sovacool have done an excellent job of assembling a group of very qualified coauthors to produce this anthology of essays on energy and society in America. Their premise is that for the most part Americans are “energy illiterate,” with most of their understanding based on “myths” rather than truths. Underlying the entire collection is the basic belief that while many Americans may be “aware” of the importance of energy issues because of increasing electricity, gas, or oil prices, they are grossly misinformed or completely ignorant of how our current energy system really works, how invasive it is in almost every area of our lives, and what we can do to effectively mitigate its long-term damaging effects on the health of our environment and on our economic well-being. The book provides numerous examples of how the costs and prices of energy are misaligned with the values that energy delivers to society. The details on how we supply, convert, and use energy are unknown to most people and so will be of interest. However, perhaps even more important, the essays discuss in depth the options for transforming our current system to make it more sustainable—to last longer and eliminate potentially dire environmental and economic consequences for future generations. The authors recommend using “energy sustainability indicators” to select options. While each essay explores a different energy myth, is written by a different author, and is focused on a specific energy issue, option, or topic, the commonality of theme throughout the book more than justifies grouping them in a single volume. Each essay is extremely well-documented, using many examples and providing detailed references in order to justify the arguments presented. Thus, each is well-suited for scholars or instructors interested in understanding the connections (or lack thereof) of a particular energy technology or environmental and resource issue to social, political, and economic values. While there is an understandable tendency for the authors to dispose of a myth quickly, with an arsenal of carefully selected facts and figures, in some instances a more open discussion of the inherent uncertainties and tradeoffs associated with many issues and choices might be welcome. For example, predicting land resources available for sustainable biofuels is not a simple task; it necessitates making many assumptions regarding population, food production tradeoffs, water requirements, soil conditions, and climate changes. In another chapter, by making selective assumptions, the author presents a case study which indicates that increasing energy efficiency would be a preferred option over increasing the number of nuclear plants for reducing our carbon footprint. Energy issues offer a rich landscape of choices, and one can consider these [End Page 504] choices to be either acceptable or unacceptable depending on what one is trying to optimize or improve. For those wanting to explore the depths of energy illiteracy in America with definitive, detailed, and well-documented analysis, this book is a must read. From my own perspective, I really appreciate the range and depth of the topics covered along with the high quality of the writing. However, I could not help but wonder whether some of the very people we hope will read it (especially policymakers) may be driven away by the sheer volume of material presented—more than 350 pages in fifteen chapters. Perhaps one or two of the authors would consider drafting a shorter, more “digestible” version for the broader audience. I believe it would be a compelling best seller. Jeff Tester Dr. Tester is the Croll Professor of Sustainable Energy Systems at Cornell University. Copyright © 2009 The Society for the History of Technology

Rethinking Expertise (review)

Reviewed by: Rethinking Expertise Joy Parr (bio) Rethinking Expertise. By Harry Collins and Robert Evans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. xi+159. $37.50. By parsing the difference between “talking the talk” and “walking the walk”—in their terms, between “interactional” and “contributory” expertise— Harry Collins and Robert Evans aim “to help us make decisions about who counts as an expert and who does not in . . . technological disputes in the public domain” (p. 133). Collins here steps away from his formidable and formative presence as a relativist in the sociology of scientific knowledge in search of firm and defensible boundaries between those who possess trustworthy expertise amid the daunting uncertainties of public policy decision-making and those whose inexpert input will only deepen the mire. He and Evans advance into this liminal territory through a multistaged assault, progressing through excising logical extensions in the manner of philosophers, eschewing the inconvenient but potentially germane complexities posited by those who linger amid the thorny thickets of case studies. Collins’s preferred study site has always been the laboratory, and the lessons learned there about how to test and validate hypotheses persist in the methods deployed here, bristling with self-conscious rigor, the results reported in daunting clutches of neologisms and clusters of Venn diagrams. His earlier work built richly on Michael Polanyi’s concept of tacit knowledge, recently compellingly elaborated in studies by Francisco Varela and Mark Johnson as enactive cognition, as knowing that originates in doing. Accepting that tacit awareness can be honed beyond the lab, here Collins and Evans grant contributory expertise to, for example, Brian Wynne’s shepherds insofar as their local expertise derives from local discriminations sharpened by “walking the walk” over fields embodied by long habituation, and to AIDS activists of ACT UP, who were both willing to crack the books and situated to monitor at close hand how AZT altered the experience of those living with AIDS. But between those who do and observe close to hand, and those who share senses of wonder by talking and reading, they draw a firm line. There may be some backstory here, for their chapter on “interactional expertise and embodiment” carries the over-determined whiff of a rant directed toward Hubert Dreyfus. Insofar as they specify the issue, it is that “Dreyfus concentrates on the individual while we treat the location of expertise as the social group” (p. 78). Insofar as what the social group shares is language, they concede to the readers and talkers only the possibility of “minimal embodiment” (p. 90), and in a series of narrowly circumscribed and vexingly arcane tests on color blindness, perfect pitch, and gravitational waves, they claim to arrive at the brink of isolating “quite subtle differences” between knowing which arises from linguistic socialization and expertise [End Page 507] derived from experience. With a good deal more fluency, Polanyi called this gap “what we know but cannot tell.” More recently, Mark Hansen has theorized this untellable as “experiential excess” (Embodying Technesis: Technology beyond Writing [2000]). That there is a gap between the tacit and the narrower reach of the discursive is undeniable, but to refuse or infinitely defer the existence of some meaningful reflexivity between them, as Collins and Evans do in the end, surely is to discredit the contributions of too many peers who substantively inform our inquiries and usefully inflect their afterlife in the public domain. Joy Parr Dr. Parr is Canada Research Chair in the Department of Geography at the University of Western Ontario. Copyright © 2009 The Society for the History of Technology

The Historian of Technology and Her True Country

This address, presented in Lisbon at the Fiftieth Annual Meeting of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), reflects upon questions of nationalism and technology that have persistently informed scholarship in the discipline. Drawing upon the work of Flannery O’Connor, a Southerner writer whose stories and prose addressed themes of region, race, and technological progress at the height of the so-called American Century, the essay contemplates how historians of technology structure stories about the past in ways that respect both universal tendencies and the particulars of specific times and places. In exploring relations between technology and culture, historians have derived especially useful insights from focusing upon the practice of governance, often by deploying techniques from political economy and economic history. Such an approach holds great promise in an age characterized by a new wave of globalization marked by significant innovation in communications and information technology.

The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (review)

Reviewed by: The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany Edmund N. Todd (bio) The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany. By David Blackbourn. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. Pp. xii+466. $29.95. After reading into the new literature on North America’s western rivers while resident at Stanford University in the early 1990s, David Blackbourn decided to return to material aspects of German history. Here, he investigates the hubris of Germans who sought to dominate nature and create new landscapes. Analyzing projects to drain swamps and control rivers provides Blackbourne with a way of investigating the exercise of power, not least because the poorest and weakest were the losers. In an endless flight forward, engineers and state officials kept promising new solutions to overcome damage caused by older solutions. In the process, they created more disastrous (even if less frequent) floods and eventually significant pollution. In the case of dams, aesthetics provided no injunction against building new ones, only ideas about how to improve nature. During the 1700s, Prussians drained swamps, especially along the Oder. The military played a significant role, as did colonization. In the early part of the 1800s, changes wrought to the Rhine below Basel opened up land for cultivation but also began to precipitate a dead river. Drainage provided new opportunities for opening up territory around Wilhelmshaven to provide Prussia with a port on the North Sea, but “progress” was increasing pollution and environmental degradation. Then dam building carries the story from the 1880s to World War II, as engineers regularized the flow of rivers for industrial and urban purposes, reservoirs were created, and people were displaced. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the Nazi regime developed plans for revising nature in territories to the east. Although these were never carried out fully, Germans who had fled from the east after the war remembered a once-natural landscape that had been worked over as part of long-term efforts to dominate nature. Blackbourn ends his narrative with the rise of environmentalism. Although investigating material culture provides a good focus for reevaluating German history, Blackbourn conceives of technology as a kind of rationalizing force that one can either support or oppose. He fits contending interests into only two categories: winners and losers. His agents displayed either reason or romance, and too much hubris meant too much support. Still, Blackbourn notes that plans for imposing order on nature, and their implementation, were not the same everywhere. Along the Oder, around Wilhelmshaven, and in newly conquered territories during World War II, there was significant latitude. In general, however, German hubris could not gain credibility because German dams did not fail. Merely identifying winners and losers and stressing hubris do not explain different paths of development, as Blackbourn seems to suggest. [End Page 216] Nevertheless, his book should be useful to anyone interested in environmental issues and the ways in which Germans thought about nature as they sought modernization. Edmund N. Todd Dr. Todd writes about large technological systems and teaches the history of science and technology at the University of New Haven. Copyright © 2009 The Society for the History of Technology

The West the Railroads Made (review)

Reviewed by: The West the Railroads Made Michael F. Magliari (bio) The West the Railroads Made. By Carlos A. Schwantes and James P. Ronda. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. Pp. xxii+229. $39.95. This lavishly appointed book showcases the fabulously rich holdings of the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma and the John W. Barriger III National Railroad Library housed within the St. Louis Mercantile Library. As Carlos Schwantes points out in the preface, archivists at both institutions “preside over vast and incredibly valuable collections of railroad ephemera,” collections that provide most of the 228 images featured in The West the RailroadsMade, which originated as a companion piece to an exhibition curated by the authors. Although they do not blaze any new interpretive trails in their five chapter text, Schwantes and James P. Ronda do a fine job of retelling a familiar saga that commemorates the revolutionary impacts of railroad technology on the trans-Mississippi West between 1850 and 1920. Summoning Ralph Waldo Emerson’s vivid metaphor of the railroad as a wondrous “magician’s rod,” they emphasize the dramatic and transformative power of the railroads in driving, and shaping, the American conquest, settlement, and economic development of the frontier West. In particular, they stress the ability of the railroad to “annihilate time and distance” to the point that the transcontinentals were able to divide the entire nation into [End Page 220] time zones and impose standard time on the United States in 1883. Meanwhile, the many material impacts of railroad technology are underscored by the authors’ focus on the swift proliferation throughout the West of new “railroad landscapes” created by the laying of tracks, the boring of tunnels, and the erection of bridges, depots, and roundhouses. Not surprisingly, given the concerns of the Washington State History Museum and the St. Louis Mercantile Library, Schwantes and Ronda devote considerable attention to the railroad’s rapid eclipse of inland navigation as the primary mode of commercial transport. The triumph of the iron horse over the celebrated river steamboat profoundly altered and expanded the transportation geography of the West, favoring newly emerging railroad hubs like Chicago and Seattle over older port cities like Saint Louis and Portland, and providing sharp reminders that technological progress had its victims as well as its beneficiaries. The Great Plains buffalo and the Native American tribes who hunted them did not fare so well in the golden age of railroad expansion. Still, despite the occasional quote from Henry George and other nineteenth-century critics of the railroads, the tone of The West the Railroads Made remains overwhelmingly positive, offering an unabashed paean to the iron horse in its prime. The celebratory notes sounded by the text are amplified by the treasure trove of magnificent illustrations. Attractively arranged on nearly every page of the notes, bibliography, and index as well as the main narrative, the images (nearly half in color) include some 32 maps, 33 photos, and several paintings by well-known western artists such as Karl Bodmer, George Caleb Bingham, and Theodore Kaufmann. Even more striking are the illustrations reproduced from various promotional materials created by the railroads themselves, particularly the Great Northern. Drawn from posters, brochures, catalogs, pamphlets, timetables, and other railroad ephemera, these images demonstrate the tremendous investment made by railroad corporations in advertising their trains and the regions they served. One cannot help but admire the skill of the anonymous artists, and it is regrettable that Schwantes and Ronda do not devote any portion of their story to the people who generated this impressive outpouring of commercial artwork. Despite this unfortunate omission, The West the Railroads Made is a delightful read and a valuable resource that belongs in the personal libraries of railroad aficionados everywhere, scholars and buffs alike. [End Page 221] Michael F. Magliari Dr. Magliari is professor of history at California State University, Chico, where he teaches public history and the history of California and the American West. Copyright © 2009 The Society for the History of Technology

The Global Environment and World Politics (review)

Reviewed by: The Global Environment and World Politics Bruce Doern (bio) The Global Environment and World Politics. By Elizabeth R. DeSombre. New York: Continuum, 2007. Pp. vi+276. $34.95. In this well-written second edition of her book, Elizabeth DeSombre presents a broad but focused analysis of the ways in which global environmental politics and policy interact with and alter the larger system of world politics. While anchored in international relations (IR) theory, the book draws in four aspects that are central to the intersection between these two systems or regimes: international environmental cooperation; the issues of science, uncertainty, and risk; the experience of developing states in global environmental negotiations; and the role of non-state actors. These variables constitute DeSombre’s working framework for examining each of her empirical chapter-length case studies on ozone depletion and global climate change, the politics of whaling, the protection of Amazonian biodiversity, and acid rain in Europe and elsewhere. The audience is not specified, but the book appears to be aimed at students taking a basic course in global environmental issues grounded in international relations, and as a result, it is not theoretically adventurous. DeSombre’s coverage of the four case studies is sound and well-informed, but her overall conclusions and the arguments she advances are relatively straightforward and are also expressed in other basic books in this burgeoning [End Page 1069] field of political and policy analysis. Thus she argues that “environmental politics poses challenges to a lot of traditional thinking about international relations” (p. 5), including the idea of sovereignty, the role of cooperation, and the role of non-state actors, compared to state-centric, security-dominated approaches. But she also cautions the reader not to forget the lessons that traditional IR theory can provide. There is of course nothing inherently wrong or unimportant about these now-familiar lines of argument. But not surprisingly in this kind of basic book—even for the audience it seems aimed at—some aspects of global environmental politics are underplayed when they need not be. The discussion of global environmental cooperation is basically good, but it fails to provide a compact account of stages that environmental protocol-setting goes through or a sense of how many agreements are now in play, and of the growing interconnections in managing them. The analysis of science, uncertainty, and risk covers some of the basics quite well, but it lacks even a brief discussion about the conflicts between the norms of sound science preferred in the international trade regime compared to the broader norms that anchor the environmental regime. The relative roles of normal R&D compared to so-called “related science activities” (science for monitoring and regulatory governance) need some mention as well as the dilemmas now faced increasingly by NGOs regarding where they get their science from. The growing level of complexity of science (trans-science and interdisciplinary science) across the four case studies also needs more explicit discussion. A final dilemma warrants mention. This book is anchored in international relations theory, which tends to focus initially on nation-states. But global environmental governance quintessentially and increasingly involves multilevel governance and multilevel regulation and complex regulatory regimes. In increasingly explicit ways, it requires action by, and diverse kinds of “global” politics involving, subnational jurisdictions (states, provinces), local governments (especially big cities), and specially created spatial institutions that do not obey traditional notions of political boundaries. Even though there are glimpses of this in DeSombre’s case studies, these dimensions need to be elevated as a more explicit element, both by the readers of this book and by the author when the time comes for a third edition. [End Page 1070] Bruce Doern Dr. Doern is a professor in the School of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University in Ottawa and in the Politics Department at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. Copyright © 2008 Society for the History of Technology