A history of steamboats and railroads in the United States prior to the Civil War. In the first half of the nineteenth century, transportation in the United States underwent an extraordinary transformation. Steamboats and railroads turned long-distance travel from an arduous undertaking into a regularized commodity: travel became something that ......
Viewing Norfolk Southern Railway covers the history of this railroad, beginning with the South Carolina Canal & Rail Road Company, which in 1830 operated the first regularly scheduled passenger train in the United States. Among the many railroads that became part of Norfolk Southern was the Pennsylvania Railroad, whose completion of the Horseshoe ......
Redefines modern lyric poetry at the intersection of literary and media studies. In The Lyre Book, Matthew Kilbane urges literary scholars to consider lyric not as a genre or a reading practice but as a media condition: the generative tension between writing and sound. In addition to clarifying issues central to the study of modern ......
A sweeping history of how writing has preserved cultural practices, traditions, and knowledge throughout human history. In How Writing Made Us Human, 3000 BCE to Now, Walter Stephens condenses the massive history of the written word into an accessible, engaging narrative. The history of writing is not merely a record of technical ......
A Biography of Global Health Science and Its Objects
"This book tracks the life history of insecticide-treated nets to explain how and why this technology became a cornerstone of global malaria control in the twenty first century"--
The 1970s Energy Crisis and the Making of Modern America
How the 1970s energy crisis facilitated a neoliberal shift in US political culture.
In Energizing Neoliberalism, Caleb Wellum offers a provocative account of how the 1970s energy crisis helped to recreate postwar America. Rather than think of the crisis as the obvious outcome of the decades "oil shocks," ......
This book examines public discourse on the production and dissemination of scientific and technological knowledge in Mao-era China. With three case studies on agricultural mechanization, steel production, and veterinary medicine, the authors argue that the party-state pursued a pragmatist model of modernization.
Medicine, Minds, and Machines in Twentieth-Century America
A fascinating history of the first attempts to computerize medical diagnosis. Beginning in the 1950s, interdisciplinary teams of physicians, engineers, mathematicians, and philosophers began to explore the possible application of a new digital technology to one of the most central, and vexed, tasks of medicine: diagnosis. In Digitizing ......
Explores the role of technology in the larger political and economic fabric of Southeast Asia. In Technology in Southeast Asian History, Suzanne Moon explores the profound entanglement of technology with Southeast Asian politics, social life, economics, and culture over its long history. Moon offers a unique framework for understanding the ......