Technical Innovation in American History

Technical Innovation in American History PDF Author: Rosanne Welch
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
ISBN: 1610690931
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Volume 1. Colonial America to 1865 -- volume 2. Reconstruction through World War II -- volume 3. The Cold War to the present.

Technical Innovation in American History

Technical Innovation in American History PDF Author: Rosanne Welch
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
ISBN: 1610690931
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Volume 1. Colonial America to 1865 -- volume 2. Reconstruction through World War II -- volume 3. The Cold War to the present.

Early American Technology

Early American Technology PDF Author: Judith A. McGaw
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807839981
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 495

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Book Description
This collection of original essays documents technology's centrality to the history of early America. Unlike much previous scholarship, this volume emphasizes the quotidian rather than the exceptional: the farm household seeking to preserve food or acquire tools, the surveyor balancing economic and technical considerations while laying out a turnpike, the woman of child-bearing age employing herbal contraceptives, and the neighbors of a polluted urban stream debating issues of property, odor, and health. These cases and others drawn from brewing, mining, farming, and woodworking enable the authors to address recent historiographic concerns, including the environmental aspects of technological change and the gendered nature of technical knowledge. Brooke Hindle's classic 1966 essay on early American technology is also reprinted, and his view of the field is reassessed. A bibliographical essay and summary of Hindle's bibliographic findings conclude the volume. The contributors are Judith A. McGaw, Robert C. Post, Susan E. Klepp, Michal McMahon, Patrick W. O'Bannon, Sarah F. McMahon, Donald C. Jackson, Robert B. Gordon, Carolyn C. Cooper, and Nina E. Lerman.

The Machine in America

The Machine in America PDF Author: Carroll Pursell
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801885787
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
From the medieval farm implements used by the first colonists to the invisible links of the Internet, the history of technology in America is a history of society as well. This title analyzes technology's impact on the lives of women and men. It also discusses the innovation of an American system of manufactures.

America as Second Creation

America as Second Creation PDF Author: David E. Nye
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262263947
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
An exploration of the dialogue that emerged after 1776 between different visions of what it meant to use new technologies to transform the land. After 1776, the former American colonies began to reimagine themselves as a unified, self-created community. Technologies had an important role in the resulting national narratives, and a few technologies assumed particular prominence. Among these were the axe, the mill, the canal, the railroad, and the irrigation dam. In this book David Nye explores the stories that clustered around these technologies. In doing so, he rediscovers an American story of origins, with America conceived as a second creation built in harmony with God's first creation. While mainstream Americans constructed technological foundation stories to explain their place in the New World, however, marginalized groups told other stories of destruction and loss. Native Americans protested the loss of their forests, fishermen resisted the construction of dams, and early environmentalists feared the exhaustionof resources. A water mill could be viewed as the kernel of a new community or as a new way to exploit labor. If passengers comprehended railways as part of a larger narrative about American expansion and progress, many farmers attacked railroad land grants. To explore these contradictions, Nye devotes alternating chapters to narratives of second creation and to narratives of those who rejected it.Nye draws on popular literature, speeches, advertisements, paintings, and many other media to create a history of American foundation stories. He shows how these stories were revised periodically, as social and economic conditions changed, without ever erasing the earlier stories entirely. The image of the isolated frontier family carving a homestead out of the wilderness with an axe persists to this day, alongside later images and narratives. In the book's conclusion, Nye considers the relation between these earlier stories and such later American developments as the conservation movement, narratives of environmental recovery, and the idealization of wilderness.

Technology and American Society

Technology and American Society PDF Author: Gary Cross
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351249096
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 477

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Book Description
Providing a global perspective on the development of American technology, Technology and American Society offers a historical narrative detailing major technological transformations over the last three centuries. With coverage devoted to both dramatic breakthroughs and incremental innovations, authors Gary Cross and Rick Szostak analyze the cause-and-effect relationship of technological change and its role in the constant drive for improvement and modernization. This fully-updated 3rd edition extends coverage of industry, home, office, agriculture, transport, constructions, and services into the twenty-first century, concluding with a new chapter on recent electronic and technological advances. Technology and American Society remains the ideal introduction to the myriad interactions of technological advancement with social, economic, cultural, and military change throughout the course of American history.

Twelve Inventions which Changed America

Twelve Inventions which Changed America PDF Author: Gerhard Falk
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0761860800
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
This book describes twelve inventions that transformed the United States from a rural and small-town community to an industrial country of unprecedented power. These inventions demonstrate that no one person is ever responsible for technological advances and that the culture produces a number of people who work together to create each new invention. The book also shows the influences of technology on society and examines the beliefs and attitudes of those who partake in technological advances. The book is both a sociological analysis and a history of technology in the United States in the past two hundred years.

Technology in the Industrial Revolution

Technology in the Industrial Revolution PDF Author: Barbara Hahn
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107186803
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Places the British Industrial Revolution in global context, providing a fresh perspective on the relationship between technology and society.

Technology and the African-American Experience

Technology and the African-American Experience PDF Author: Bruce Sinclair
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262195041
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
The intersection of race and technology: blackcreativity and the economic and social functions of the myth ofdisengenuity.

A Social History of American Technology

A Social History of American Technology PDF Author: Ruth Schwartz Cowan
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195387261
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
A Social History of American Technology, Second Edition, tells the story of American technology from the tools used by its earliest inhabitants to the technological systems--cars and computers, aircraft and antibiotics--that we are familiar with today. Ruth Schwartz Cowan and Matthew H. Hersch demonstrate how technological change has always been closely related to social and economic development, and examine the important mutual relationships between social history and technological change. They explain how the unique characteristics of American cultures and American geography have affected the technologies that have been invented, manufactured, and used throughout the years--and also the reverse: how those technologies have affected the daily lives, the unique cultures, and the environments of all Americans.

Technology

Technology PDF Author: Eric Schatzberg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022658397X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
In modern life, technology is everywhere. Yet as a concept, technology is a mess. In popular discourse, technology is little more than the latest digital innovations. Scholars do little better, offering up competing definitions that include everything from steelmaking to singing. In Technology: Critical History of a Concept, Eric Schatzberg explains why technology is so difficult to define by examining its three thousand year history, one shaped by persistent tensions between scholars and technical practitioners. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, scholars have tended to hold technicians in low esteem, defining technical practices as mere means toward ends defined by others. Technicians, in contrast, have repeatedly pushed back against this characterization, insisting on the dignity, creativity, and cultural worth of their work. ​The tension between scholars and technicians continued from Aristotle through Francis Bacon and into the nineteenth century. It was only in the twentieth century that modern meanings of technology arose: technology as the industrial arts, technology as applied science, and technology as technique. Schatzberg traces these three meanings to the present day, when discourse about technology has become pervasive, but confusion among the three principal meanings of technology remains common. He shows that only through a humanistic concept of technology can we understand the complex human choices embedded in our modern world.