Calendar of Meetings:
1/14: Organization and Introduction
Reading: James Burke, Connections.
Recommended:
AS@UVA
Yellow Pages: Science
and Technology
George Basalla, The Evolution of Technology.
Ferdinand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism.
Stephen H. Cutliffe and Terry S. Reynolds, Technology and American History.
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies.
Paul T. Durbin, ed., A Guide to the Culture of Science, Technology,
and Medicine.
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things.
Charles Singer, et al, A History of Technology.
Technology
Timeline
Edward Tenner, Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended
Consequences.
Trevor Williams, The History of Invention.
Hans Zinser, Rats, Lice and History.
Suggested:
Susan Smylan, Discovering
Science and Technology Through American History.
Hot Air: A Journal of Improbable Research.
Popular
Mechanics: Time Machine
Bad Ideas
NOTE: Select articles for scanning; articles due to be posted 2/20.
1/19: In the Beginning: Technology in Early America.
Reading:
James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten : The Archeology of Early American
Life.
Mumford, pp. xi-150.
Brooke Hindle, A
Retrospective View of Science, Technology, and Material Culture in Early
American Culture.
Recommended:
Daniel Boorstin, An American Frame of Mind, Educating the Community,
New World Medicine, and The Limits of American Science from
The Americans: The Colonial Experience. (R)
William Boelhower, Inventing
America: A Model of Cartographic Semiosis.
David Freeman Hawke, Everyday Life in Early America.
Joseph and Francis Gies, Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel: Technology
and Invention in the Middle Ages.
Brooke Hindle, ed., Material Culture of the Wooden Age.
, Technology in Early America.
Judith A. McGraw, ed., Early American Technology.
Carroll W. Pursell, Jr., Technology in America: A History of Individuals
and Ideas.
Suggested:
Bernard Cohen, 18th Century Origins of the Concept of Scientific Revolution.
Peter Drucker, The
First Technological Revolution and Its Lessons.
John Goodfellow, Technology
and the Production of Meaning.
Francis and Joseph Gies, Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel: Technology
and Invention in the Middle Ages.
Julie L. Horan, The Porcelain God: A Social History of the Toilet.
Steven Lubar, Questions
to Ask About Technology.
Elizabeth Semancik, Albion's
Seed Grows in the Cumberland Gap.
Eric Sloane, A Museum of Early American Tools.
1/26: The Lost World of Franklin and Jefferson
Reading:
Benjamin Franklin, The
Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.
Thomas Jefferson, Notes
on the State of Virginia.
Focus: Queries I-VI, XIX-XX.
Gary Wills, A Scientific Paper from Inventing America: Jefferson's
Declaration of Independence. (R)
Recommended:
Douglas Anderson, The Radical Enlightenments of Benjamin Franklin.
John James Audobon, Birds.
Daniel Boorstin, The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson.
Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur, Letter
X: Of Snakes and the Hummingbird and Letter
XI: A Visit to John Bartram from Letters from an American Farmer.
Benjamin Franklin: Glimpses
of the Man.
Colonial Williamsburg
The Franklin Institute
Mystic
Seaport
The Winterthur Museum
Alexander Wilson
Gary Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence.
Suggested:
Jaishree K. Odin, Technologies
of Writing.
The Philadelphia
Waterworks
2/2: The Machine in the Garden
Reading:
Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
Focus: Economy, Where I Lived and What I Lived For, Reading, Sounds,
The Village, Spring, Conclusion.
Leo Marx, The Machine from The Machine in the Garden, pp.
145-226. (R)
Mumford, pp. 151-211.
Pursell, The Machine in America, pp. 87-127. (R)
Alan Trachtenberg,
Mechanization
Takes Command from The Incorporation of America.(R)
Recommended:
Klaus Benesch, Romantic
Cyborgs: Technology, Authorship, and the Politics of Reproduction in Nineteenth-Century
American Literature
Daniel Boorstin, The Versatiles, The Businessman, The Booster Press, Palaces
of the Public, The
Balloon-Frame House, The Booster College, A Half Known Country, and Packaging
a Continent in The Americans: the National Experience. (R)
Daniel Chandler, Technology
in Fiction. (timeline)
David Freeman Hawke, Nuts and Bolts of the Past: A History of American
Technology, 1776-1860.
The
Centennial Exhibition, Philadelphia 1876
The Crystal Palace Exhibition, 1851
Yvonne French, The Great Exhibition, 1851.
David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime.
Suggested:
Baltimore & Ohio Museum
Covered
Bridges
Adam Smith, Wealth
of Nations.
Steam Trains
Reading:
Theodore Dreiser, Sister
Carrie.
I
Have Seen the Future
A Theatre
of Machines
The World's Columbian
Exposition
Recommended:
Henry Adams, Chicago,
and The Dynamo
and the Virgin
McCrea Adams, Advertising
Characters: The Pantheon of American Consumerism.
Daniel Boorstin, The Versatiles, The Businessman, The Booster Press,
Palaces of the Public, The Balloon-Frame House, The Booster College, a
Half Known Country, and Packaging a Continent in The Americans:
The National Experience. (R)
Walter Benjamin, The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
Tine Bruland, Industrial
Conflict as a Source of Technical Innovation: Three Cases.
Chicago Architecture
Chicago Trams and
Trolleys
A.H. Clark, The Clipper Ship Era.
Victor S. Clark, A History of Manufactures in the United States.
John Coolidge, Mill and Mansion: A Study of Architecture and Society
in Lowell, Mass., 1820-1865.
Michael Gorman, Alexander
Graham Bell's Path to the Telephone.
Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous
History.
Joseph and Francis Gies, The Ingenious Yankees.
H.J. Habakkuk, American and British Technology in the Nineteenth Century.
The Hagley Museum
Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological
Enthusiasms.
Louis C. Hunter, Steamboats in the Western Areas.
Industrial and Fine Arts of the World as Shown at the Philadelphia...Exhibition.
(R)
The Iron Road:
The Intercontinental Railroad.
Edwin Layton, Mirror
Image Twins: The Communities of Science and Technology in 19th-century
America.
Magee's Illustrated Guide of Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition 1876.
New York Transit
Museum
Miles Orvell, The Real Thing.
Politics in
the Gilded Age
George
Pullman (Discovery)
Jacob Riis, How
the Other Half Lives.
John E. Sawyer, The
Social Basis of the American System of Manufactures.
Herwin Schaefer, Nineteenth Century Modern.
Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines.
Frederick W. Taylor, from Principles of Scientific Management.
Trolleys
Mark Twain, A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
Thorstien Veblen, Conspicuous Consumption from The
Theory of the Leisure Class.
The Yellow Kid
Suggested:
Edward Bellamy,
Looking Backward from 2000 to 1887.
Dee Brown, Year of the Century: 1876.
Carson,
Pirie, Scott (Chicago Department Store)
Coney Island
The Elevator
Explore Chicago
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Napoleon from Representative Men.
Lewis Mumford, Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and
Civlization.
David Noble, America by Design.
2/16: Thoroughly Modern
Reading:
Dashiel Hammet, The
Dain Curse.
Mumford, 212-435.
Richard Guy Wright,
The Machine Age in America. (R)
Recommended:
American Art in the
Age of Technology
Daniel Boorstin, Consumption Communities, Statistical Communities, Leveling
Times and Places, Mass-Producing the Moment, The Thinner Life of Things,
The Search for Novelty in The Americans: The Democratic Experience.
(R)
David Glertner, 1939: The Lost World of the Fair.
Helen A. Harrison, ed., The Dawn of a New Day: The New York World's
Fair 1939/40.
John Kouwenhoven, America by Design.
James Weber Lynn, A Century of Progress Exposition: Chicago 1933.
(R)
Media History Project
Miles Orvell, The
Artist Looks at the Machine: Whitman, Sheeler and American Modernism.
Model T Fan Club
New York's World Fair (1939-49)
Official
Guide Book of the Fair, 1933
Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village
Kohn Kouwenhoven, America by Design.
Alan Trachtenberg, Brooklyn Bridge as Symbol and Myth. (R)
Suggested:
Norman BelGeddes, Magic Motorways.
Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times
John Kouwenhoven, Stone,
Steel, and Jazz and What
is Vernacular? from Made in America.
James J. Flink, The Automobile Age.
Martin Greif, Depression Modern: The Thirties Style in America.
Henry Green, The Uncertainty of Everyday Life, 1915-1945,
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.
Pamela Walker Laird, "The
Car Without a Single Weakness": Early Automobile Advertising.
N.Y.
Subway
The
Telephone
Warren Sussman, ed., Culture and Commitment
Rudi Volti, A
Century of Automobility.
H.G. Wells, 1984
The Wright
Stuff
NOTE: Scanned articles posted to homepages and to /~UG99 by 2/20
Reading:
Thomas Pyncheon, The Crying of Lot 49.
Stephen J. Fjellman, Vinyl Leaves, pp. 85-107, 187-219, 319-391.
(R)
Frederick Jameson, The
Cultural Logic of Late Industrial Capitalism.
Recommended:
Daniel Boorstin, The Image.
Discontinued Disney
John Fiske, Televison Culture.
Ted Friedman, The
World of Coca Cola
Julika Griem, Screening
America: Representations of Television in Contemporary American Literature.
Kenneth Jackson, The
Transportation Revolution and the Erosion of the City from Crabgrass
Frontier.
Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine.
Gaile McGregor, The
Technomyth in Transition: Reading American Popular Culture.
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death.
Mike Wallace, Progress Talk: Museums of Science, Thechnology and Industry
and Industrial Museums and the History of Deindustrialization in
Mickey Mouse History. (R)
Alexander Wilson, Utopian
Dreams.
Suggested:
Diane Barthel, A
Gentleman and a Consumer.
Klaus Benesch, Technology
and American Culture: An Introduction.
Big
Dreams, Small Screens
Jeffry Cass, The
Iconography of a Theme Park.
Umberto Eco, Travels
in Hyperreality.
Critical Arts Ensemble, The
Technology of Uselessness.
William Fisher, Of
Living Machines and Living-Machines.
Peter Gibian, The
Art of Being Off Center: Shopping Center Spaces and Spectacles.
Roland Marchand, The
Parable of the Democracy of Goods.
Remembering the Future: The New York World's Fair from 1939-1964.
Smithsonian
Institute History of Computing
Edward Tenner, Information Age at the National Museum of American History.
Alvin Toffler, Future Shock.
, The Third Wave.
Andrew Wernick, Vehicles
for Myth: The Shifting Image of the Modern Car.
Alexander Wilson, Utopian
Dreams.
Reading:
The Resource Center for Cyberculture
Studies
Daniel Chandler, Media and
Communications Studies Site
History of Communication Media
Media Institutions and Politics
Technology and Communications.
David Gelertner, Digital
Culture.
Howard Rheingold, The
Virtual Community.
Recommended:
Ashley Dunn, Cybertimes
Internet
1996 World Exposition
Jane Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck.
Nicholas Negroponte, Being
Digital.
Jaishree K. Odin, Computers
and Cultural Transformation.
, Technological Capitalism.
Wayne Rasch, Jr., Politics on the Internet:Wiring the Political Process.
Don Tapscott, The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril on the Internet.
TechnoCulture
Suggested:
The Alien Hive.
Woody Allen, Sleepers
Blade Runner
Noam Chomsky HomePage
Critical Art Ensemble, The
Technology of Uselessness.
Ctheory: Theory, Technology, and Culture.
University of
Iowa Digital Media
Todd Blayone and Matthew Kirschenbaum, Voices
from the Interface.
Colin Brooke, The
Fate of Rhetoric in an Electronic Age.
Culturation
Mark Dery, Escape
Velocity.
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Jonathan Epstein and Patrick Lichty, Cybertheory
of the Image.
Joshua Fruhlinger, Escape
to Cyberia: Subcultures as Agents of Change.
Kenneth Gergen, Technology
and the Self: From the Essential to the Sublime.
William Gibson, Neuromancer.
Andrew Gillespie and Kevin Roberts, Geographical
Inequalities: The Spatial Bias of the New ... Technologies.
Dan Hill, The Privatization
of Public (Cyber)Space.
Neil Howe, et al, 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?
David Lyon, From
Big Brother to Electronic Panopticon.
Mad Max
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy.
, The Medium is the Message.
, Understanding Media.
William Mitchell, City
of Bits.
Kevin Roberts and Frank Webster, Cybernetic
Capitalism: Information, Technology, and Everyday Life.
Howard Rheingold, Tools for
Thought.
Alan Shapiro, Captain Kirk Was
Never the Original.
Speed (E-Zine)
Don Tapscott, Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation.
Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Terminator and Terminator II
NOTE: Project prospectus due 3/7: one page summary, descriptive bibliography and target for book review.
3/16: Workshop I: Site Design and Objectives
NOTE: Book review due 3/20.
3/23: No Class
3/30: Workshop II: Project Design I
4/6: Workshop III: Project Design II
4/13: Workshop IV: Project Drafts I
4/20: Workshop V: Project Drafts II
4/27: Workshop VI: Trouble Shooting
5/1-5/8: Final Examinations
NOTE: Projects due 5/9/98