Technology in its social context
Along with the proliferation of encyclopedic but often internalist works on the history of technology, the postwar era also saw the appearance of works that sought to place technological changes in their social contexts.
One of the earliest of this new generation of historians who contributed to the trend to contextualize technology was Louis C. Hunter, whose book Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technological History (1949) blended, as the subtitle indicates, the economic history of steamboat transportation with the technological history of boats and navigation.[242]Another and often cited work taking this new approach was Lynn White Jr.'s Medieval Technology and Social Change, published in 1962.[243] White (1907-87) was a medieval historian who taught at Princeton, Stanford, and the University of California at Los Angeles and was for a time the president of Mills College in Oakland, California. In this book, he demonstrated that early medieval Europe, far from being the “Dark Ages” so often described by cultural historians, was actually an age of intense technological change, producing such innovations as the windmill and water mill, the horse collar and stirrup, and the three-field system of agriculture, among others. In a very famous article entitled “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” and published in Science in 1967, White traced the origin of Western technological success to the Middle Ages and to the religious beliefs that medieval Europeans derived from their reading of the Bible, especially their domineering attitude toward the natural world, considering nature to be a stockpile of resources provided by God for human use.[244]
Hunter and White were followed by several historians who were not as bold in finding connections between technology and society, but more subtle in tracing these links, especially in modern American and European society.
Outstanding among the members of the generation that followed Lynn White, Jr. was Thomas P. Hughes, one of the co-founders of the Society for the History of Technology and for many years a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Hughes is best known for his magisterial work Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930, in which he compares the growth of electrical networks in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany.[245] In so doing, he moved the field from innovative ideas, designs, and machines to complex networks and systems. A systems theorist, he also introduced the concepts of technological momentum and the social construction of technology (about which more below). Hughes is also known for more wide-angle views of technology, as in his American Genesis (1989) and The Human-Built World (2004).[246]Another historian who advanced the field by contextualizing innovation was Merritt Roe Smith, a professor of history at MIT and past president of the Society for the History of Technology. When his book Harper's Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change appeared in 1977, it was hailed as a breakthrough in the field, for it situated the evolution of the Harper's Ferry Armory (1794-1861) in the context of American society and politics and emphasized the cultural conditions in which the technology of arms manufacture took place.[247] To honor his work, Smith was awarded the Leonardo da Vinci Prize by SHOT as well as the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize by the Organization of American Historians, a recognition of the legitimacy of the history of technology by generalist historians.
In recent years, SHOT and the field of technological history have broadened their perspective in several directions. One of the most striking is the new interest in the role of women in technology, not only as creators but also as consumers of technology. Ruth Schwartz Cowan exemplifies this trend.
After teaching for many years at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, she moved to the University of Pennsylvania in 2002. Like Merritt Roe Smith, she is a past president of SHOT and a recipient of its Leonardo da Vinci Prize. Her most famous contribution to the history of technology is More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (1983), which traces the unexpected increase in women's household chores that resulted from “advances” in domestic appliances and other household technologies.[248]Nor must we forget histories that are not specifically technological, but cover topics and periods in which technological innovations are so important that no general socio-economic history can avoid them. A classic case is the history of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain and the European continent. Among the many works that deal with this important theme, we can mention only two: T. S. Ashton’s classic The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830 first published in 1948 and reprinted several times since,[249] and David Landes’ magisterial Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Economic Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present.[250] Both books, by well- known economic historians, take technology very seriously and devote considerable space to the innovations that made the Industrial Revolution so dramatic a turning point in Western history.