Technology and American Society Paperback – 2 November 2004
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For undergraduate courses in History of American Technology; Science, Technology and Society; Sociology of Technology.
In a single volume, this text combines the history of invention and the interactions of technology with social, economic, cultural, and military change throughout the course of American history. It illustrates the gradual shift from the era of individual artisan inventors to emergence of science-based corporate technology, and links the origins and development of American innovation to the global transformation of industry, agriculture, and transportation.
- ISBN-100131896431
- ISBN-13978-0131896437
- Edition2
- Publication date2 November 2004
- LanguageEnglish
- Print length384 pages
Product description
From the Back Cover
With a new final chapter covering recent electronic and technological advances, the second edition of Technology and American Society extends coverage of innovations in industry, home, office, agriculture, transport, constructions, and services into the twenty-first century. Offering a global perspective on the development of American technology, the text is structured around a historical narrative detailing major technological transformations over the last three centuries. With coverage devoted to both dramatic breakthroughs and incremental innovations, Technology and American Society analyzes the cause-and-effect relationship of change and its role in the constant drive for improvement and modernization.
About the Author
Gary Cross is Distinguished Professor of Modern History at Pennsylvania State University, and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin in 1977 (Ph.D.). He has published ten books and twenty-three scholarly articles concerning the modern history of social, economic, and technological change in America, Britain, and France. Among his books are A Quest for Time: The Reduction of Work in Britain and France; Time and Money: The Making of Consumer Culture; Kids' Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood; An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America; and The Cute and The Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children's Culture. These books feature the social and cultural impact of technological and economic change. Since 1981, he has taught an undergraduate course on the history of technology in America. His wife, Maru, and two children, Elena and Alex, have more or less cheerfully accompanied him on trips to numerous museums and heritage sites that feature technology.
Rick Szostak is Professor and Associate Dean of Arts at the University of Alberta, where he has taught since receiving his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1985. He is the author of eight books and more than twenty scholarly articles in the fields of the history of technology, economics, and interdisciplinary theory and practice. His books include The Role of Transportation in the Industrial Revolution, which showed how eighteenth-century transport improvements encouraged both the rise of the factory and a dramatic increase in the rate of technological innovation, and Technological Innovation and the Great Depression, which argued that much of that calamity could be attributed to the lack of new product innovation in the decade after 1925, combined with an abundance of labor-saving technology. He has authored articles on technological subjects for the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, Scribner's Dictionary of American History, and the Gale Encyclopedia of the Great Depression. As associate dean, he spearheaded the development of a new major in Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Alberta in 2004. In recent research he explores how the linkages among human science disciplines can be strengthened. His inspiration comes from his wife, Anne-Marie, and their children, Mireille, Julien, and Theodore.
Product details
- Language : English
- Paperback : 384 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0131896431
- ISBN-13 : 978-0131896437
- Customer reviews:
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Top reviews from other countries
The first thing that agitates me to the core is that this book is written like a middle school or high school history book, and the formatting reflects this, too. I think most readers will open the book and instantly see what I mean. Now, I must mitigate that statement by saying that some people might find this quality attractive, because those books (exempli gratia, middle school and high school textbooks) are written to maximize organization and to induce comfort through familiarity. My more substantive agitation with the text is that it is not sufficiently philosophical and lacks some amount of depth in perspective of actual science. The former issue, I think, stems from the fact that there is a naiveté, when it comes overlooking the role of philosophy of science in understanding the history of science and technology. Of course, the book might be geared toward someone who has nil in the way of philosophy, so it is hard for me to critical press this point. On the second issue, that of lacking scientific perspective, again, the book's motivation is undoubtedly geared toward a crowd that lacks knowledge of science.
What the book does well is supply the sociological contributing factors to the considerations of American history of science and technology. The insights regarding economic consideration, for instance, make the book valuable in ways that an history of science motivated by philosophy might not. All in all, the book is accessible to anyone, well organized, well written, and most ideas of stated as plainly as is possible.
I would recommend this book to someone who doesn't need a survey of American history of science and technology to go into actualities as much as nicely package, approximately correct information. For those looking for a work of HPS (History and Philosophy of Science) scholarship should pass over this one, unless he or she is seeking additional sociological context and considerations, for which this book might serve such a purpose. The book doesn't exhaustively present things like social and political forces on the development of technology, but it does an okay job, especially for someone getting their first survey in the subject matter.
Since this book doesn't yet have a see-inside function, I am including a table of contents:
Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Working the Land in Preindustrial Europe and America
Chapter 2: Craftsman in the Shop: European Traditions and American Changes in the Eighteenth Century
Chapter 3: Women and Work Before the Factory
Chapter 4: Origins of Industrialization
Chapter 5: The Birth of the Factory
Chapter 6: Iron, Steam, and Rails
Chapter 7: Machines and Their Mass Production
Chapter 8: Machines on the Farm and in the Forest, 1800-1950
Chapter 9: Americans Confront the Mechanical World, 1780-1900
Chapter 10: The Second Industrial Revolution
Chapter 11: Technology and the Modern Corporation
Chapter 12: Technology and War, 1770-1918
Chapter 13: The Impact of Technology on Women's Work
Chapter 14: The New Factory
Chapter 15: Innovation, the Great Depression, and the Automobile, 1918-40
Chapter 16: Mechanizing Sight and Sound
Chapter 17: Technology and the Origins of Mass Culture
Chapter 18: Airplanes and Atoms in Peace and War
Chapter 19: The Postwar Advance of Technology
Chapter 20: Our Computer Age
Chapter 21: Modern Americans in a Technological World