Topic & Text Assignments
Textbooks: David Nye. Technology Matters: Questions to Live With. Cambridge: MIT Press (2007).
Edwin Black. IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation. New York: Crown Publishers (2001).
Richard Rhodes.The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon & Schuster (1986).
Week 1 – Can we define “Technology?” HCS: “Fire in America,” from The Ecological Indian, by Shepard Kreich III – Does fire count as a “technology” for early Americans? Why or why not?
Week 2 – Does technology control us? HCS: “The Invention of Housework,” from More Work for Mother, by Ruth Schwartz Cowan – How did the adoption of new household technologies alter the household roles of women and men? Why did men move into wage-labor? How did social perceptions of men’s and women’s labor change?
Week 3 – Is technology predictable? HCS: Challenger and Columbia disasters, Feynman appendix from the Challenger investigative committee report – Was the accident predictable?
Week 4 – How do historians understand technology? HCS: “Sanitary Services and Decision Making in Houston, 1876-1945,” Journal of Urban History 20:3 (1994), pp. 365-406, by Martin Melosi – What factors motivated decisions by engineers and city planners? Were they just technocrats doing a job?
Week 5 – Cultural uniformity, or diversity? HCS: excerpts from Sexual Chemistry: A History of the Contraceptive Pill, by Lara V. Marks
Week 6 – Sustainable abundance, or ecological crisis? HCS: “Acid Mine Drainage and Pittsburgh’s Water Quality,” by Nicholas Casner, from Devastation and Renewal– What technological choices created the problem of acid drainage? How did mine owners justify continued pollution once it had been identified as a problem? Why did downstream users and communities accept acidic water? Who paid the costs of water acidification?
Week 7 – Work: more, or less? Better, or worse? HCS: “Clinical Use of the X-Ray Machine,” from Technology in the Hospital: Transforming Patient Care in the Early Twentieth Century, by Joel Howell – Why would a hospital buy an X-ray machine and then not use it?
Week 8 – Should “the Market” select technologies? HCS: “Entrepreneurs of the Germ,” from The Gospel of Germs, by Nancy Tomes
Week 9 – More security, or escalating dangers? HCS: “Nuclear Weapons, Dystopian Deserts, and Science Fiction Cinema,” from Vulcan 1 (2013), by Jeffrey Womack
Week 10 – Expanding consciousness, or encapsulation? HCS: “The Cathedral of Computation: We’re not living in an algorithmic culture so much as a computational theocracy,” Ian Bogost, The Atlantic (1/15/15): http://bogost.com/writing/the-cathedral-of-computation/.