PDF-[DOWNLOAD]-The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology

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 Arguing that the tools and processes we use are a part of our lives not simply instruments of our purpose historian Carroll Pursell analyzes technologys impact on the lives of women and men on their work politics and social relationshipsand how in turn people influence technological developmentPursell shows how both the idea of progress and the mechanical means to harness the forces of nature developed and changed as they were brought from the Old World to the New He describes the ways in which American industrial and agricultural technology began to take on a distinctive shape as it adapted and extended the technical base of the industrial revolution He discusses the innovation of an American system of manufactures and the mechanization of agriculture new systems of mining lumbering and farming which helped conquer and define the West and the technologies that shaped the rise of citiesIn the second edition of The Machine in America Pursell brings this classic history up to date with a revised chapter on war technology and new discussions on information technology globalization and the environment. R U Ready?. Morley . Winograd. I 2 CSG Workshop . . January 10, . 2012. Generational Differences are Just as Great as National Cultural Differences but Are Rarely Perceived . Defining A Generation. U.S. Problems leading to people to choose socialism. Americans faced large amounts of unsafe working conditions, as well as unfair pay. . Immigrants also face discrimination as well as having limited rights, and completely unhealthy living conditions. . Introduction . Media history and technology . Topics . About history . Historians and their motives . Social histories and critiques of media . About media technology . Four revolutions in mass media . Curriculum Vitae Personal Data Place of Birth: Los Angeles, California Marital Status: Married, one child Office Address: Pitzer College, 1050 N. Mills, Claremont, CA 91711 Telephone: (909) 626 - This book is the first volume in a cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins.From 1629 to 1775, North America was settled by four great waves of English-speaking immigrants. The first was an exodus of Puritans from the east of England to Massachusetts (1629-1640). The second was the movement of a Royalist elite and indentured servants from the south of England to Virginia (ca. 1649-75). The third was the Friends\' migration,--the Quakers--from the North Midlands and Wales to the Delaware Valley (ca. 1675-1725). The fourth was a great flight from the borderlands of North Britain and northern Ireland to the American backcountry (ca. 1717-75).These four groups differed in many ways--in religion, rank, generation and place of origin. They brought to America different folkways which became the basis of regional cultures in the United States. They spoke distinctive English dialects and built their houses in diverse ways. They had different ideas of family, marriage and gender different practices of child-naming and child-raising different attitudes toward sex, age and death different rituals of worship and magic different forms of work and play different customs of food and dress different traditions of education and literacy different modes of settlement and association. They also had profoundly different ideas of comity, order, power and freedom which derived from British folk-traditions. Albion\'s Seed describes those differences in detail, and discusses the continuing importance of their transference to America.Today most people in the United States (more than 80 percent) have no British ancestors at all. These many other groups, even while preserving their own ethnic cultures, have also assimilated regional folkways which were transplanted from Britain to America. In that sense, nearly all Americans today are Albion\'s Seed, no matter what their ethnic origins may be but they are so in their different regional ways. The concluding section of Albion\'s Seed explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still control attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.Albion\'s Seed also argues that the four British folkways created an expansive cultural pluralism that has proved to the more libertarian than any single culture alone could be. Together they became the determinants of a voluntary society in the United States. 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. Faxed is the first history of the facsimile machine--the most famous recent example of a tool made obsolete by relentless technological innovation. Jonathan Coopersmith recounts the multigenerational, multinational history of that device from its origins to its workplace glory days, in the process revealing how it helped create the accelerated communications, information flow, and vibrant visual culture that characterize our contemporary world.Most people assume that the fax machine originated in the computer and electronics revolution of the late twentieth century, but it was actually invented in 1843. Almost 150 years passed between the fax\'s invention in England and its widespread adoption in tech-savvy Japan, where it still enjoys a surprising popularity. Over and over again, faxing\'s promise to deliver messages instantaneously paled before easier, less expensive modes of communication: first telegraphy, then radio and television, and finally digitalization in the form of email, the World Wide Web, and cell phones. By 2010, faxing had largely disappeared, having fallen victim to the same technological and economic processes that had created it.Based on archival research and interviews spanning two centuries and three continents, Coopersmith\'s book recovers the lost history of a once-ubiquitous technology. Written in accessible language that should appeal to engineers and policymakers as well as historians, Faxed explores themes of technology push and market pull, user-based innovation, and blackboxing (the packaging of complex skills and technologies into packages designed for novices) while revealing the inventions inspired by the fax, how the demand for fax machines eventually caught up with their availability, and why subsequent shifts in user preferences rendered them mostly passe. In this stunning account of the human impact of a single machine, John Ellis argues that the history of technology and military history are part and parcel of social history in general. The Social History of the Machine Gun, now with a new foreword by Edward C. Ezell, provides an original and fascinating interpretation of weaponry, warfare, and society in nineteenth-and twentieth-century Europe and America.From its beginning, the machine gun threatened established assumptions about the nature of war. In spite of its highly effective use in the European colonization of Africa, the machine gun was resisted by military elites, who clung to the old certanties of the battlefield--the glorious change and opportunities for individual heroism. These values were carried into the trenches of World War I and swept away along with a generation of soldiers.After the war, machine guns became commercially availble in America and in many ways became a symbol of the times. Advertisements touted the Thompson submachine gun as the ideal weapon for protecting factory and farm, while tommy guns entered the culture\'s imagination with Machine Gun Kelly and Boonie and Clyde. More significantly, Ellis suggests, the machine gun was the catalyst for the modern arms race. It necessitated a technological response: first the armored tank, then the jet fighter, and, perhaps ultimately, the hydrogen bomb. This brief history of technology in America begins with the colonial period but emphasizes the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The authors break new ground by concentrating on the impact of American society and culture on technology, instead of taking the traditional approach (considering the impact of technology on culture). The organization of the text reflects this perspective by following conventional American history periodization rather than a more limited industry-oriented outline (pre-industrial, industrial, and postindustrial). Part Two employs systems and systemization as a theme. The final section of the text (post-1950) has been completely rewritten to reflect recent scholarship and technological advances. 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. Arguing that the tools and processes we use are a part of our lives, not simply instruments of our purpose, historian Carroll Pursell analyzes technology\'s impact on the lives of women and men, on their work, politics, and social relationships—and how, in turn, people influence technological development.Pursell shows how both the idea of progress and the mechanical means to harness the forces of nature developed and changed as they were brought from the Old World to the New. He describes the ways in which American industrial and agricultural technology began to take on a distinctive shape as it adapted and extended the technical base of the industrial revolution. He discusses the innovation of an American system of manufactures and the mechanization of agriculture new systems of mining, lumbering, and farming, which helped conquer and define the West and the technologies that shaped the rise of cities.In the second edition of The Machine in America, Pursell brings this classic history up to date with a revised chapter on war technology and new discussions on information technology, globalization, and the environment. Today\'s scientists, policymakers, and citizens are all confronted by numerous dilemmas at the nexus of technology and the environment. Every day seems to bring new worries about the dangers posed by carcinogens, superbugs, energy crises, invasive species, genetically modified organisms, groundwater contamination, failing infrastructure, and other troubling issues.In Technology and the Environment in History, Sara B. Pritchard and Carl A. Zimring adopt an analytical approach to explore current research at the intersection of environmental history and the history of technology--an emerging field known as envirotech. Technology and the Environment in History They discuss the important topics, historical processes, and scholarly concerns that have emerged from recent work in thinking about envirotech. Each chapter focuses on a different urgent topic:- Food and Food Systems: How humans have manipulated organisms and ecosystems to produce nutrients for societies throughout history.- Industrialization: How environmental processes have constrained industrialization and required shifts in the relationships between human and nonhuman nature.- Discards: What we can learn from the multifaceted forms, complex histories, and unexpected possibilities of waste.- Disasters: How disaster, which the authors argue is common in the industrialized world, exposes the fallacy of tidy divisions among nature, technology, and society.- Body: How bodies reveal the porous boundaries among technology, the environment, and the human.- Sensescapes: How environmental and technological change have reshaped humans\' (and potentially nonhumans\') sensory experiences over time.Using five concepts to understand the historical relationships between technology and the environment--porosity, systems, hybridity, biopolitics, and environmental justice--Pritchard and Zimring propose a chronology of key processes, moments, and periodization in the history of technology and the environment. Ultimately, they assert, envirotechnical perspectives help us engage with the surrounding world in ways that are, we hope, more sustainable and just for both humanity and the planet. Aimed at students and scholars new to environmental history, the history of technology, and their nexus, this impressive synthesis looks outward and forward--identifying promising areas in more formative stages of intellectual development and current synergies with related areas that have emerged in the past few years, including environmental anthropology, discard studies, and posthumanism. In this stunning account of the human impact of a single machine, John Ellis argues that the history of technology and military history are part and parcel of social history in general. The Social History of the Machine Gun, now with a new foreword by Edward C. Ezell, provides an original and fascinating interpretation of weaponry, warfare, and society in nineteenth-and twentieth-century Europe and America.From its beginning, the machine gun threatened established assumptions about the nature of war. In spite of its highly effective use in the European colonization of Africa, the machine gun was resisted by military elites, who clung to the old certanties of the battlefield--the glorious change and opportunities for individual heroism. These values were carried into the trenches of World War I and swept away along with a generation of soldiers.After the war, machine guns became commercially availble in America and in many ways became a symbol of the times. Advertisements touted the Thompson submachine gun as the ideal weapon for protecting factory and farm, while tommy guns entered the culture\'s imagination with Machine Gun Kelly and Boonie and Clyde. More significantly, Ellis suggests, the machine gun was the catalyst for the modern arms race. It necessitated a technological response: first the armored tank, then the jet fighter, and, perhaps ultimately, the hydrogen bomb. This brief history of technology in America begins with the colonial period but emphasizes the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The authors break new ground by concentrating on the impact of American society and culture on technology, instead of taking the traditional approach (considering the impact of technology on culture). The organization of the text reflects this perspective by following conventional American history periodization rather than a more limited industry-oriented outline (pre-industrial, industrial, and postindustrial). Part Two employs systems and systemization as a theme. The final section of the text (post-1950) has been completely rewritten to reflect recent scholarship and technological advances. . The Rise and Reform of Industrial Cities . 1880-1917. 2. New inventions made rapid urban growth possible. Elisha . O. tis, inventor of the first passenger elevator. Mass transportation moves underground with the first subways first built in Boston MA in 1897. .