Most weekly assignments, other than the books, can be found in one of three places:
- Project Muse (Technology and Culture articles since mid-1998)
- JSTOR (Technology and Culture articles before mid-1998). Note that Technology and Culture is listed under "History of Science & Technology."
- Electronic Reserves (choose "Course Reserve" from the menu).
Some weekly readings can be found below:
1. January 27
Winner, Langdon. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” in The Whale and the Reactor (University of Chicago Press, 1986): 19-39
2. February 3.
Stephen Sledge; Richard Deringer
Palmer, Scott W. “Peasants into Pilots: Soviet Air-Mindedness as an Ideology of Dominance,” Technology and Culture 41 (2000): 1-26.
Audrey Haugan
Roberts, Lissa Louise. “An Arcadian Apparatus: The Introduction of the Steam Engine into the Dutch Landscape.” Technology and Culture 45 (2004): 251-276.
3. February 10. Region
Amanda von Argyriadis
Portuondo, Maria M. “Plantation Factories: Science and Technology in Late-Eighteenth-Century Cuba.” Technology and Culture 44 (2003): 231-257.
Lee Ann Ghajar
Worster, Donald. Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
- "Hoover Dam: A Study in Domination," pp. 64-78, 263-265.
- "Grassland Follies: Agricultural Capitalism on the Plains," pp. 93-105, 265-266.
4. February 17. War
Everyone
Wells, H. G. "The Land Ironclads," 1903 [PDF]
Mike Reborchick; Brian Hunt
Churchill, Robert H. “Gun Ownership in Early America: A Survey of Manuscript Militia Returns,” William and Mary Quarterly (2003). [online at the History Cooperative]
Roger Connor
Knowles, Anne Kelly. “Labor, Race, and Technology in the Confederate Iron Industry,” Technology and Culture 42 (2001): 1-26.
Stephen Sledge
Storey, William Kelleher. “Guns, Race, and Skill in Nineteenth-Century Southern Africa.” Technology and Culture 45 (2004): 687-711.
5. February 24. Law
Roger Connor; Ray Swider
Cantelon, Philip L. “The Origins of Microwave Telephony-Waves of Change.” Technology and Culture 36 (1995): 560-582.
Ronald Alexander; David Waltrop
Lubar, Steven. “The Transformation of Antebellum Patent Law.” Technology and Culture 32 (1991): 932-959.
6. March 3. Invention
Mary Linhart
Haring, Kristen. “The ‘Freer Men’ of Ham Radio: How a Technical Hobby Provided Social and Spatial Distance.” Technology and Culture 44 (2003): 734-761.
Melissa Hill; David Waltrop
Owens, Larry. “Patents, the ‘Frontiers’ of American Invention, and the Monopoly Committee of 1939: Anatomy of a Discourse.” Technology and Culture 32 (1991): 1076-1093.
7. March 10. Production
Mike Reborchick
Alder, Ken. “Innovation and Amnesia: Engineering Rationality and the Fate of Interchangeable Parts Manufacturing in France.” Technology and Culture 38 (1997): 273-311.
Michelle Carr
Lindstrom, Richard. “‘They all believe they are undiscovered Mary Pickfords’: Workers, Photography, and Scientific Management.” Technology and Culture 41, Number 4, October 2000, pp. 725-751
Giny Cheong
Hecht, Gabrielle. “Political Designs: Nuclear Reactors and National Policy in Postwar France,” Technology and Culture 35 (1994): 657-85.
8. March 24. Profession
Jason Sutphin
Brown, John K. “Design Plans, Working Drawings, National Styles: Engineering Practice in Great Britain and the United States, 1775-1945.” Technology and Culture 41 (2000): 195-238.
Thomas Ferrell
Meiksins, Peter. “The ‘Revolt of the Engineers’ Reconsidered.” Technology and Culture, Vol. 29, No. 2. (Apr., 1988), pp. 219-246.
Lee Ann Ghajar
Reynolds, Terry S. “Defining Professional Boundaries: Chemical Engineering in the Early 20th Century.” Technology and Culture 27 (1986): 694-716.
James Safley
Seely, Bruce E. “The Scientific Mystique in Engineering: Highway Research at the Bureau of Public Roads, 1918-1940.” Technology and Culture 25 (1984): 798-831.
9. March 31. Consumption
Everyone
Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. “The Consumption Junction: A Proposal for Research Strategies in the Sociology of Technology,” in Wiebe E. Bijker, et al., eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 261-280.
Mary Linhart
Greenberg, Joshua Mark. “From Betamax to Blockbuster: Mediation in the Consumption Junction” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 2004), chapter 1.
Michelle Carr; Lessia P. Shatalin
Zachmann, Karin. “A Socialist Consumption Junction: Debating the Mechanization of Housework in East Germany, 1956-1957.” Technology and Culture 43 (2002): 73-99.
10. April 7. Labor
Melissa Hill, Jason Sutphin
Borg, Kevin. “The ‘Chauffeur Problem’ in the Early Auto Era: Structuration Theory and the Users of Technology.” Technology and Culture 40 (1999): 797-832
Amanda von Argyriadis
Mohun, Arwen Palmer. “Laundrymen Construct Their World: Gender and the Transformation of a Domestic Task to an Industrial Process.” Technology and Culture 38 (1997): 97-120.
11. April 14. Fantasy
Richard Deringer
Belasco, Warren. “Algae Burgers for a Hungry World? The Rise and Fall of Chlorella Cuisine.” Technology and Culture 38 (1997): 608-634.
James Safley, Giny Cheong
Schatzberg, Eric. “Ideology and Technical Choice: The Decline of the Wooden Airplane in the United States, 1920-1945.” Technology and Culture 35 (1994): 34-69.
12. April 21. Exhibition
Everyone
Read George Basalla , “Museums and Technological Utopianism,” in Ian M.G. Quimby and Polly Anne Earl (eds), Technological Innovation and the Decorative Arts, Winterthur Conference Report,1973 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1974), 355-373 [PDF]
Attend one museum exhibit or historic site with a technology theme, and write up a review in the style of a Technology and Culture exhibit review. (For examples, search the T&C database within Project Muse for "exhibit review.")
13. April 28. Simulation
Ronald Alexander
Downey, Greg. “Virtual Webs, Physical Technologies, and Hidden Workers: The Spaces of Labor in Information Internetworks.” Technology and Culture 42 (2001): 209-235.
Thomas Ferrell; Ray Swider
Lessig, Lawrence. “The Laws of Cyberspace” (1998), http://www.lessig.org/content/articles/works/laws_cyberspace.pdf
14. May 5. Choices
Mary Linhart
Pinch, T. J. “‘Should One Applaud?’ Breaches and Boundaries in the Reception of New Technology in Music.” Technology and Culture 44 (2003): 536-559.
Audrey Haugan
Spiller, James. “Radiant Cuisine: The Commercial Fate of Food Irradiation in the United States.” Technology and Culture 45 (2004): 740-763.
Except where noted otherwise, all original material on this site is copyright © 2005 Zachary M. Schrag. It may be used for non-commercial personal and educational purposes provided it is attributed to Zachary M. Schrag.