David E. Nye

Technologies of landscape : from reaping to recycling

The essays in this volume examine how the tensions between culture and nature is more apparent than real. Even in preindustrial societies, where the dominant technologies are agricultural, it would be impossible to envision a landscape unshaped by human contact. Drawing on evidence from Europe and America, and from the Renaissance to the present day, the contributors to this volume reconceive of the relationship between technology and landscape as a product of cultural interactions. Rather than view landscape only statically as space, they also see it as a process embedded in narrative, or time. Whether one is concerned with the English countryside, the Nazi Autobahn, a naturalists description of the New World, or chemical pollution in contemporary Louisiana, the question of who gives a place its meaning is just as important as who constructs the physical landscape. Is the Grand Canyon a profitless locality, a sublime wonder, or a potential mining site? Is the smoke of an industrial city construed as pollution or as a heartening sign of prosperity? Is the Appalachian Trail a means to revivify the rural economy or a way to escape into a rugged wilderness experience? These are some of the questions addressed in this interdisciplinary collection of original essays.

The invented self : an anti-biography, from documents of Thomas A. Edison

CONTENTS: Introduction The Clothes and Buttons of a Man A Semiotic History The Archive Text The West Orange Edition, 1895 The Menlo Park Edition, 1880 The Public Edisons of 1880 Lights Golden Jubilee Verbal Invention Four Kinds of Meditation The Self as Contradiction Index.

The United States and Alternative Energies since 1980: Technological Fix or Regime Change?:

Awareness of global warming has been widespread for two decades, yet the American political system has been slow to respond. This essay examines, first, political explanations for policy failure, focusing at the federal level and outlining both short-term partisan and structural explanations for the stalemate. The second section surveys previous energy regimes and the transitions between them, and policy failure is explained by the logic of Thomas Hughes’s ‘technological momentum’. The third section moves to an international perspective, using the Kaya Identity and its distinction between energy intensity and carbon intensity to understand in policy terms ‘technological fixes’ vs. low-carbon alternatives. The final section reframes US energy policy failure and asks: (1) Why, between 1980 and 1999, was America’s actual performance in slowing CO2 emissions better than its politics would seem capable of delivering? (2) How and why has the United States since c. 2007 managed to reduce per capita CO2 emissions?

Why Technology Matters

Last year a bright student came to me to talk about her interest in the history of bells and timekeeping in Britain from ca. 1300 until the 18th century. She had some interesting materials about the social history of bells and hoped to write a dissertation on this topic. But when I inquired, she had no answer to a whole series of crucial questions: where the centers of bronze bell manufacture had been; where the ores were smelted; what was their composition (23% tin and 77% copper was best to avoid cracking); how bells were transported, hoisted into position, and tuned; and whether bells became cheaper to make, transport, and install over time (which could help explain why they became more numerous). Her otherwise excellent training had not prepared her to think about such matters, and village bells were just part of the historical landscape. How they got to the bell tower was not part of the story she had planned to tell.

The Wheel: Inventions & Reinventions by Richard W. Bulliet (review)

This clearly written, beautifully illustrated, and well-argued book ought to be read by every historian of technology. Richard Bulliet here broadens and greatly amplifies his The Camel and the Wheel (1975). The Wheel is an ambitious survey of three different kinds of wheel, covering 6,000 years. Wheels fixed on axles that spin together (on railroad cars, for example) cannot make sharp turns, while those that spin independently of one another (as with automobiles) can turn more sharply. The third kind of wheel, the caster, emerged in the eighteenth century; it “rotates on an axle and also pivots in a socket situated above it,” for example in desk chairs (p. 2). To illustrate the properties of these three kinds of wheel, Bulliet begins with how they were adapted to different forms of transportation in recent centuries (pp. 1–36). He then examines the wheel’s origins in the fourth millennium BCe, suggesting what prompted its invention and adoption in some but not all cultures. Dismissing the orthodox view that the wheel was invented in Mesopotamia, he argues for its origin in the copper mines of the Carpathian Mountains, where carts proved useful (pp. 51–70). Wheels then spread to the Black Sea and its adjoining steppes, where the second form of wheel was invented, which improved maneuverability (pp. 71–92). Living in four-wheeled wagons (pulled by oxen) and portable tents became basic to nomadic life and remained common on the steppes until the late eighteenth century. Bulliet finds that the wheel was not adopted by ancient egyptians, who built the pyramids without it. Likewise, wheeled vehicles were rare in Mesopotamia. “The first wheels in europe precede the earliest Sumerian pictograms.” Compared to the Black Sea region, Mesopotamian cultures did not make wheels in the same way, and they did “not use their wheeled vehicles for the same purposes” (pp. 93–112). Suitable wood for wheels was rarely available along the Tigris and euphrates Rivers, though vehicles for

Utopias: A Brief History from Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities by Howard P. Segal (review)

In what case do you like reading so much? What about the type of the utopias a brief history from ancient writings to virtual communities book? The needs to read? Well, everybody has their own reason why should read some books. Mostly, it will relate to their necessity to get knowledge from the book and want to read just to get entertainment. Novels, story book, and other entertaining books become so popular this day. Besides, the scientific books will also be the best reason to choose, especially for the students, teachers, doctors, businessman, and other professions who are fond of reading.

Americanization as Creolized Imaginary: The Statue of Liberty During the Cold War

In 1991 and 1992, a team of six scholars spent a year together at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, researching the phenomenon known in the lingua franca as “Americanization.” The project, which focused on Europe, was the brainchild of historian Rob Kroes, and the result was several individual books and six volumes of essays.1 One of these, American Photographs in Europe, is a collection of essays (edited by myself and Mick Gidley) that focuses on the transatlantic movement of images during the twentieth century.2 This chapter reconsiders this theme. Notably, the scholarly vocabulary has changed since the 1990s: while the term “Americanization” endures, it continues to be redefined, expanded, and contested. This chapter recasts the concept of Americanization as creolization. This is a process in which senders and receivers of cultural messages continually reposition and reinterpret cultural icons to suit their needs. The term “creolization” references how American images were changed and adapted, tinkered with and selectively appropriated—in Europe and elsewhere. This chapter examines this often playful reconception of American images outside the United States during the Cold War period and the forms of creolization these images represent. To exemplify this process, the Statue of Liberty provides a case study of an American icon that acquired many new meanings.

Car Country: An Environmental History by Christopher W. Wells (review)

Christopher Wells�s environmental history of the American adoption of the automobile was more than a decade in the making, and its notes and bibliography fill 115 pages. Deftly written and well-illustrated, Car Country rejects the notions that the automotive landscape emerged either as the byproduct of consumer desire for automobiles or as the result of conspiracies to eviscerate public transit. Each of its four sections covers two decades, starting in 1880, before automobiles, when urban and rural reformers campaigned for better roads (pp. 3�34), driven by the desire to �control nature run amok,� in the form of dirt, disease, mud, and inconvenience. Reformers, later joined by cyclists and motorists, began the physical transformation into what would become �car country� and promulgated assumptions about land use and the centralization of taxation and administration that eroded local control of city streets and highways. Part 2 (pp. 37�104) examines �the dawn of the motor age,� including the redesign of European automobiles for rough American roads, the emergence of mass production, and the Model T. It then traces how moralistic highway reformers were replaced by �engineers and administrators guided by faith in the power of science and efficiency� (p. 103). They had to balance the competing interests of farmers, who wanted short routes focused on markets, and tourists, who wanted long-distance recreational roads. In cities, property owners were increasingly marginalized by the competing interests of street traction companies, pedestrians, and motorists.

Reconstructing the view: the Grand Canyon photography of Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe

Reconstructing the View contains three parts. Most compellingly, it offers 64 color plates, many covering two pages. These are not individual images but photographs taken by Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe between 2008 and 2011 within which are inserted historical images, postcards, and paintings. Second, Rebecca A. Senf ’s 32-page illustrated essay explains the process involved in photographic reconstructions and the intertextual relationships between the rich body of canyon imagery created over 130 years and these new panoramic views. Because Senf spent time with Klett and Wolfe in the field and discussed their practices with them, her essay is invaluable. Third, Stephen J. Pyne’s eight-page ‘The Shock of the Old’ does not engage the esthetics of re-photography or the images in the book but rather distils his How the Canyon Became Grand into a brief cultural history of the Grand Canyon’s role in American culture. If useful for a general reader, it does not put the Klett–Wolfe project into a scholarly framework. Mark Klett is well-known for collaborative re-photographic projects – Second View (1984), Third View, Second Sights (2004), and Yosemite in Time (2005) – that combine a surveyor’s precision with the eye of an artist to represent often quite famous landscapes. The difference between the original and the modern view was often small, yet the new images were in color, and a wider frame went beyond the borders of famous images. Klett often revealed an unusual angle, choice of lens, or vantage point. His paired images provided not merely a sense of before and after, but an exploration of the esthetic and methods of the original photographers. The contrasts underlined how much both photography and tourism have changed in the 150 years since the first photographers entered the American West. This collaboration with Byron Wolfe is not merely an application of previous methods to another site. The title page features 100 images of Grand Canyon sunsets downloaded from an image-sharing website, arranged in a decorative line of suns. It immediately suggests engagement both with historical image-making and popular reiterations of famous views. Plate 19 is a three-page foldout color panorama taken from ‘the foot of Toroweap to the “Devil’s Anvil” overhang with an upstream view of the Colorado River’ into which are inserted four black and white images taken by William Bell in 1872. One can see not only the austerity imposed by black and white, but also how the Colorado River itself was clearly visible from this vantage point and yet purposely omitted from Bell’s work. If the rock formations seem little changed after 136 years, the sensibility is far different. Bell and other early photographers on the rim selected a small portion of the view to make images that might arouse the powerful feelings evoked by the Grand Canyon itself. Klett and Wolfe make panoramic views within which older photographs are located. The resulting assemblies emphasize the selectivity and artificiality of

Designing Tomorrow: America's World's Fairs of the 1930s (review)

835 clusion to her chapter on “Janus-faced” London, although in fairness, it is directly addressed in Miriam Levin’s coda, and to that extent, any charge of neglect is disarmed. The feeling persists, nonetheless, that despite the occasional cross-reference, and with the understandable exception of the Tokyo piece, the chapters on the Western cities are rather more self-contained and less comparative than might have been expected from the genesis of the volume. This is a perennial issue in urban studies, to be sure. These reservations aside, the collection can be commended as a valuable addition to the literature on the urban history of science and technology. It succeeds in its main aim: to highlight the contributions of city-based elites to a new urban culture of science and technology, above all as this found expression in museums and exhibitions. It is particularly instructive, and seemingly a genuinely common feature, that these innovative urban museums and exhibitions performed a dual role, both as showcase of modernity in the form of science and technology, and also as a reassuring link to past history and traditions.