1072 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE As the essays reveal, historians have spent far more time studying the multifaceted cultural and political causes behind technological devel opment than the social and cultural consequences. Some attention to effects is evident in these essays—Tarr and his collaborators allude to how the telegraph changed business activity; Barrett, to the problems caused by faulty airport location. Little, however, is said ofcultural and social responses, although much could be. How did streetlighting in ac tuality affect nightlife? Did the advent ofprivate- line telegraph services affect business culture as well as business practice? How did life in the elite suburbs designed by Sies’s “professional managerial stratum” com munity developers differ from life in equally elite suburbs not so de signed? Such issues should be of interest to historians of the city as well as those of technology and culture. The almost total lack of interconnection among the essays reflects a larger problem with the growing literature on the history of urban technology as a whole. As yet, no one has written a synthetic history of the development of urban technology in American cities over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. An overarching theoretical framework is needed to identify common patterns of evolution as well as to examine the common social, economic, and cultural effects of different technologies across cities and time. Analysis is also needed to explain the significance of variations in the development of the same technologies in different cities and times. Historians face an enor mous task in forging their disparate pieces of research on diverse kinds of public utilities and other urban technologies into a coherent whole, but at some point they must begin to tackle the task. In light of these problems, I think it is a bit premature to suggest, as Rose does in his introductory essay, that the field has developed to a point where all that is needed is to “fill gaps rather than attempting to articulate or defend research choices” (p. 4). In sum, this very valuable issue of the Journal of Urban History tells us a great deal not only about the history of streetlighting, telegraph services, suburban design, and airport location and design but also about the present state of the field as a part of the history of the American city and the history of technology. Christine Rosen Dr. Rosen teaches at the University of California at Berkeley. De Blériot à Dassault: Histoire de l’industrie aéronautique en France 1900—1950. By Emmanuel Chadeau. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1987. Pp. 552; illustrations, notes, appendixes, bibliogra phy, index. Fr 180.00 (paper). In studies on the history of aviation in Western Europe, Americans have available to them in English much on Great Britain, less on TECHNOLOGY AND CUL TURE Book Reviews 1073 Germany, and very little on France. The dearth of material in English on French aviation reflects the fact that there have been relatively few books on the subject in France, and works on aviation there tend to concentrate, as they do in the United States and elsewhere, on its heroic and military aspects. Emmanuel Chadeau’s substantial and excellent study of the French aviation industry from 1900 to 1950 has done much to fill this large gap of'knowledge about French aviation. Chadeau’s work examines the industry in its national context, showing how it has reflected the strengths and weaknesses of France and how French political developments in particular affected it. He divides his history into three parts, the first a period of the industry’s prosperity and remarkable achievement, from 1900 to 1918, culmi nating in the “golden age” of French aviation just before and during World War I. The second era, from 1917 to 1937, was a time of rationalization, concentration, restructuring, and ultimately of de cline into the political and economic abyss of the mid-1930s; the final period chronicles the course of development through nationalization and World War II to a resurgence in the 1950s. Within his discussion of the entire industry, Chadeau analyzes the rise and fall of various important firms such as Breguet, Gnome and Rhone, Potez, Bloch, Caudron, and Hispano...