This special issue of American Quarterly asks powerful and poignant questions about technology and its effects on our bodies, minds, families, economies, armies, and academies. Technology is an entry point for American studies scholars to find new and creative ways to think through social and cultural problems. The essays in this collection ......
A century and a half before the modern information technology revolution, machinists in the eastern United States created the nation's first high technology industries. In iron foundries and steam-engine works, locomotive works, machine and tool shops, textile-machinery firms, and firearms manufacturers, these resourceful workers pioneered the ......
Low-Visibility Operations in American Aviation 1918-1958
When darkness falls, storms rage, fog settles, or lights fail, pilots are forced to make ''instrument landings,'' relying on technology and training to guide them through typically the most dangerous part of any flight. In this original study, Erik M. Conway recounts one of the most important stories in aviation history: the evolution of aircraft ......
Granville T. Woods, Lewis H. Latimer, and Shelby J. Davidson
According to the stereotype, late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century inventors, quintessential loners and supposed geniuses, worked in splendid isolation and then unveiled their discoveries to a marveling world. Most successful inventors of this era, however, developed their ideas within the framework of industrial organizations that supported ......
''The cotton gin animates the American imagination in unique ways. It evokes no images of antique machinery or fluffy fiber but rather scenes of victimized slaves and battlefield dead. It provokes the suspicion that had Eli Whitney never invented the gin, United States history would have been somehow different. Yet cotton gins existed for ......
In The Enchantments of Technology, Lee Worth Bailey erases the conventional distinction between myth and machine in order to explore the passionate foundations concealed in technological culture and address its complex ethical, moral and social implications. Bailey argues that technological society does not simply disenchant the world with its ......
The Story of Creative Engineering, Architecture, and Design
The continually increasing technological sophistication has led from the simple wheel, designed to make transportation of goods and people easier, all the way to space travel - with a multitude of intervening steps. This title traces these steps along the path to our modern technological sophistication.
Now available for the first time in America, I, Cyborg is the story of Kevin Warwick, the cybernetic pioneer advancing science by upgrading his own body. Warwick, the world's leading expert in cybernetics, explains how he has deliberately crossed over a perilous threshhold to take the first practical steps toward becoming a cyborg--part human, ......
While horror films and science fiction have repeatedly warned of robots running amok, Kevin Warwick takes the threats out of the realm of fiction and into the real world, truly giving us something to worry about.Meeting skeptics head on, Warwick goes beyond his penetrating attacks on their assumptions and prejudices about what should be considered ......
