Technology and Culture最新文献

{"title":"Suburban Empire: Cold War Militarization in the US Pacific by Lauren Hirshberg (review)","authors":"M. X. Mitchell","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920546","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920546","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Suburban Empire: Cold War Militarization in the US Pacific</em> by Lauren Hirshberg <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> M. X. Mitchell (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Suburban Empire: Cold War Militarization in the US Pacific</em> By Lauren Hirshberg. Oakland: University of California Press, 2022. Pp. xii + 365. <p>Since time immemorial, Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands has been the ancestral home of the ri-Kuwajleen. For nearly eight decades, it has also been the site of a massive U.S. military installation that is central to the American nuclear program and force posture. Lauren Hirshberg's brilliant cultural history of the U.S. militarization of Kwajalein explores the too-often-overlooked racialized, colonial dimensions of the U.S. military-industrial-academic complex.</p> <p>The places and peoples of Kwajalein Atoll—American and Marshallese; civilian and military—anchor <em>Suburban Empire</em>. This is a book about place-making—about the contested ways in which the U.S. military endeavored to transform ri-Kuwajleen places into both a technologically sophisticated military installation and a simulacrum of a segregated American suburb. The U.S. military used facilities at Kwajalein to provide logistical support for nuclear blasting in the Marshall Islands during the 1940s and 1950s. From the 1950s to the present day, the atoll has served as an \"impact zone\" for U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile targeting shots. Hirshberg argues that the suburbanization of Kwajalein served to sanitize the geographical expansion of the U.S. nuclear complex by obscuring its violent emplacement abroad in expropriated Native lands and waters.</p> <p>The book begins with an exploration of the interplay between securitization and racialization in the U.S. colonization of the Marshall Islands from the 1940s through the 1960s. Once administered by Japan as part of a League of Nations mandate, the United States invaded in 1944 and in 1947 designated the Marshall, Caroline, and Northern Mariana Islands as a part of a one-of-a-kind United Nations \"strategic trusteeship.\" The international colonial status authorized U.S. militarization and justified U.S. use of sites in the Marshall Islands for nuclear blasting and missile targeting. Hirshberg enriches the first chapter's overview of important events during this time period by exploring how they were commemorated and represented in local publications like Bell Laboratories pamphlets, the <em>Atomic Blast</em>, the <em>Marshall Post Inquirer</em>, and the <em>Micronesian Monthly</em>.</p> <p>The core of <em>Suburban Empire</em>, developed in chapters 2, 3, and 4, offers a rich and difficult-to-summarize exploration of the U.S. expropriation of lands at Kwajalein and the imposition of a regime of racial segregation that shaped <strong>[End Page 390]</strong> life on the atoll from the 1950s through the 1980s. The Army's cultivation of Kwajalein as an American home,","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140008531","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Technology, Novelty, and Luxury ed. by Artemis Yagou (review)","authors":"Peter McNeil","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920529","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920529","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Technology, Novelty, and Luxury</em> ed. by Artemis Yagou <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Peter McNeil (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Technology, Novelty, and Luxury</em> Edited by Artemis Yagou. Munich: Deutsches Museum Verlag, 2022. Pp. 118. <p>This elegant and useful book takes luxury studies as its subject, and as its object a range of material culture goods that are not commonly associated with luxury per se. An introduction and four chapters are provided by a design historian, an organologist, a historian of science and culture, and a historian of decorative arts. Their research springs from a symposium conducted by the editor, Artemis Yagou, at an annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology in Milan (2019). Yagou is an Athens-born historian who, in her capacity as research associate of the Deutsches Museum, gathered these chapters and directed their focus to artifacts housed in the museum. Richly illustrated in tonal and revealing color and printed on high-quality paper, the study looks and feels like a little luxury object in and of itself, representing the best type of museum-collection, academic-inflected writing.</p> <p>Yagou provides a brief but also concise and useful introduction that sets out the main contours of the field. Luxury studies in her view is less about the marketing, branding, or image-making aspect of an industry and more closely connected to studies of consumption; the \"hierarchy of values\" (citing Douglas and Isherwood, <em>The World of Goods</em>, 2021); the politeness and sociability associated with eighteenth-century studies of the Enlightenment; novelty; and also technology. Yagou argues for the necessary interdisciplinarity of successful luxury studies and the imbrication of design with technological innovations.</p> <p>Panagiotis Poulupoulos is correct to note, in \"Aspects of Technology in Populuxe Musical Instruments of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,\" that \"musical instruments have rarely been examined within the context of luxury in scholarly studies.\" Using the figure of the entrepreneur Sébastien Erard, famed maker of pedal harps, Poulupoulos argues that the combination of new technologies (design of metal mechanisms), new materials (molded \"composition\"), and new aesthetic forms (neoclassical and other <strong>[End Page 358]</strong> motifs redolent of the ancien régime) combined to create new instruments. This new range of \"populuxe,\" or more affordable, formats opened up music to new middle-class groups around the world. The focus in this chapter is on French- and German-made musical instrument artifacts in the museum collection.</p> <p>Joseph Wachelder, in \"Instructive Toys,\" considers a category of objects also not commonly considered in luxury studies, that of childhood toys. Wachelder charts the rise of new \"educational toys,\" such as the cup and ball, yo-yo, diabolo, and kaleidoscope. He focuses on German Anglo","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140008599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"American Independent Inventors in an Era of Corporate R&D by Eric S. Hintz (review)","authors":"Alexander Donges","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920553","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920553","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>American Independent Inventors in an Era of Corporate R&amp;D</em> by Eric S. Hintz <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Alexander Donges (bio) </li> </ul> <em>American Independent Inventors in an Era of Corporate R&amp;D</em> By Eric S. Hintz. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021. Pp. 368. <p>Since the late nineteenth century, corporate R&amp;D labs have become an increasingly important source of innovation in the United States. Yet independent inventors still accounted for the majority of all patented inventions until the 1930s, and despite representing a declining share, they delivered notable inventions throughout the twentieth century. In his book <em>American Independent Inventors in an Era of Corporate R&amp;D</em>, Eric S. Hintz delves into the fascinating world of independent inventors in the United States and explores their contributions amid the dominance of corporate R&amp;D. Through comprehensive research, Hintz sheds light on the challenges, successes, and impact of these inventors in shaping innovation and driving technological change.</p> <p>The fact that independent inventors accounted for a large share of patented inventions until the mid-twentieth century is well documented by economic historians. Building on this research, Hintz uses various cases to illustrate different commercialization strategies. He distinguishes between four types of inventors: first, inventor-entrepreneurs who founded their own companies to exploit patented inventions commercially; second, inventors who sold their patents to existing firms, which then could either use these patents to scale up production or to hold down potential competitors; third, inventors who joined long-run cooperations with existing firms based on license or consulting agreements; fourth, inventors who used mixed strategies. There was vigorous cooperation between independent inventors and large firms, some of which had their own R&amp;D labs. Thus, independent inventors and corporate R&amp;D were somehow complementary inputs for the generation of innovation.</p> <p>Hintz shows that independent inventors could profit from cooperation with large firms by leveraging resources and expertise to bring inventions <strong>[End Page 403]</strong> to the market, but there were also conflicts. There was no level playing field when large corporations infringed patents of independent inventors, given that the latter did not possess similar financial means to endure lengthy court cases. Hintz highlights how patents were used to circumvent antitrust laws and build up barriers to market entry, for example by the creation of patent pools as in the market for light bulbs.</p> <p>Throughout the book, Hintz explores the challenges faced by independent inventors in navigating complex legal and economic landscapes. Independent inventors often found themselves marginalized and facing numerous obstacles. In contrast to other professions, inventors were no","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140008528","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Making Machines of Animals: The International Livestock Exposition by Neal A. Knapp (review)","authors":"Eva Rivas Sada","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920537","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920537","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Making Machines of Animals: The International Livestock Exposition</em> by Neal A. Knapp <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Eva Rivas Sada (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Making Machines of Animals: The International Livestock Exposition</em> By Neal A. Knapp. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023. Pp. 202. <p><em>Making Machines of Animals</em> by Neal A. Knapp is a key piece within the historical studies addressing the relationship between biotechnology and agricultural economics, particularly concerning the productive model that revolutionized the American meat industry in the twentieth century. It is a work that can well be placed in the historiography that has driven evolutionary history in recent decades. It clarifies an <strong>[End Page 372]</strong> understudied phenomenon: the institutional mechanisms of diffusion and reproduction of a new productive model in the American meat industry, which took place in a powerful ecosystem that revolved around the International Livestock Exposition in Chicago (1900–1975) and its main promoting institutions—the packing industry and the land-grant colleges.</p> <p>Throughout five chapters, the author analyzes in detail how genetic improvement of the herd, breeding, and fattening supported the idea of livestock modernization promoted in the competitions of the Expo, as well as in classrooms, fields, and university publications. These techniques were aimed at achieving standardization and productive specialization of ranches, while integrating and generating greater added value in the production chain, led by the packing industry. The book shows how the gradual imposition of industrial economic criteria in livestock activities ultimately increased productivity and product quality. However, it emphasizes that the intermediation of packers and specialists in the agro-industrial chain imposed a new rationality that led to the denaturalization of animals, which began to be conceived of as machines for transforming grains and producing high-quality cuts.</p> <p>The author's proposal becomes very suggestive when analyzing certain ideological aspects of the model. Under the prevailing eugenic ideas, nationalism, and imperialism of the time, these institutions associated the socio-racial hierarchies of human groups with the races of farm animals. Using phenotypic and aesthetic criteria, they penalized the nineteenth-century model based on free grazing and classified certain breeds as inferior and semiwild due to their Hispanic colonial origin (e.g., the Texas longhorn). The heterogeneity and seasonality of production did not fit the requirements of modern industry and urban consumption. Additionally, the institutions rewarded genetically improved animals through crossbreeding with English breeds, considered superior due to the ancient practice of artificial selection by British breeders, but also because of their adaptability to various territories of t","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140008533","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Politics and Policies of European Economic Integration, 1850–1914 by Yaman Kouli and Léonard Laborie (review)","authors":"Vincent Lagendijk","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920547","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920547","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The Politics and Policies of European Economic Integration, 1850–1914</em> by Yaman Kouli and Léonard Laborie <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Vincent Lagendijk (bio) </li> </ul> <em>The Politics and Policies of European Economic Integration, 1850–1914</em> By Yaman Kouli and Léonard Laborie. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. Pp. xiii + 169. <p>When did European integration start? For a long time, the standard perspective was that this only took place after 1945, as a sort of <em>Stunde Null</em>. Initially, this viewpoint was dominated by political science perspectives that explained the rise of what would become the European Union through theories of functionalism, liberal intergovernmentalism, and multilevel governance.</p> <p><em>The Politics and Policies of European Economic Integration, 1850–1914</em> combines an older existing strand of the literature—the role of technology in European integration pioneered by the Tensions of Europe network—with a relatively newer one: the economic integration of Europe as part of the globalization wave starting at the end of the nineteenth century. The book's introduction spells out a threefold mission: (1) measuring European economic integration, (2) discussing together four sectors that had been previously disconnected in historiography (namely, the postal services, patents, health and social policies, and plant protection), and (3) exposing the coproduction of national and international regimes.</p> <p>The first aim is the subject of chapter 1. Building upon indexes pioneered by Kouli, it seeks to show how European economic integration took shape in terms of prices and markets. A set of European countries are discussed here, but not how they were selected. The second goal is integral to the book and is treated in chapters 3–6. Here, a set of rich case studies is presented, showing how national policies link up to, and sometimes give rise to, international initiatives. Even though these policies did not always lead to an institutionalization of specific European policies, Kouli and Laborie convincingly show how in various ways a form of coordination and harmonization took place—in their words, a coproduction of the national and international.</p> <p>The book delivers in particular on the third objective—showing how the national and international meshed together. This is where the book contains the most insightful findings. This theme has been covered in parts of the literature on nationalism, internationalism, and the history of technology. The dependency of the nation-state and its policies on international coordination has been a major theme in the work of Alan Milward, for <strong>[End Page 392]</strong> example. Yet this connection between international and national policies has only to a limited extent been traced back to the end of the nineteenth century up until World War I. Here, the book with its rich cases shows how these forms of gove","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140008593","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Engineering the Lower Danube: Technology and International Cooperation in an Imperial Borderland by Luminita Gatejel (review)","authors":"Stelu Şerban","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920548","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920548","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Engineering the Lower Danube: Technology and International Cooperation in an Imperial Borderland</em> by Luminita Gatejel <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Stelu Şerban (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Engineering the Lower Danube: Technology and International Cooperation in an Imperial Borderland</em> By Luminita Gatejel. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2022. Pp. 341. <p>The history of river infrastructure is a space of confluence of several research fields, such as the history of international relations, environmental history, and science and technology studies (STS). Luminita Gatejel's book discusses the Lower Danube, from the Iron Gates to the mouth of the Black Sea, between 1770 and the end of the nineteenth century, combining these different approaches.</p> <p>From the perspective of geopolitical relations, the author brings to the fore the \"hydroimperialism\" (Sara Pritchard, <em>From Hydroimperialism to Hydrocapitalism</em>, 2012) of the empires then influential in this part of the Danube: the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg Empire, and the Tsarist Empire. The defeat of the Ottoman Empire by the Tsarist Empire in the war concluded in 1774 resulted in the liberalization of trade on the Black Sea, so that after 1780 the Lower Danube was seen by Habsburg and Russian rulers as the main trade route between the Black Sea and Central Europe. However, the existence of natural obstacles, the most formidable being the Iron Gates and the Danube Delta, slowed down the use of this route.</p> <p>In the five chapters of the volume, the author addresses how access through these two great natural obstacles was improved throughout the nineteenth century. A series of geopolitical contexts and groups of bureaucrats, technocrats, and entrepreneurs, as well as crucial institutions such as the European Danube Commission (EDC), are analyzed. Gatejel emphasizes that the completion of these infrastructural projects took a long time because the actors involved in the project were confronted with a number of problems, which in addition to the natural barriers included political conflicts, which forced them to adjust their initial plans. The divergences between the states involved in the two projects, the alternative opinions of technocrats on different solutions, and also the influence of economic factors that led to the transformation of the Lower Danube into a cost-effective transport option are presented.</p> <p>Gatejel discusses first the case of the Iron Gates. The engineers of the Habsburg government, charged at the end of the eighteenth century with describing this area, signaled the dangers to navigation and proposed solutions for regulation. It was only in the mid-1830s, however, in the context of the liberalization of trade on the Danube following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, that the first large-scale project developed. The project was led by István Széchenyi, civilian commissioner of the Danu","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140008833","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Feminism and Capitalism under the Nuclear Cloud & Barbie","authors":"Rachel Maines","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920527","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920527","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>abstract:</p><p>The Warner Brothers/Mattel movie <i>Barbie</i> is meant to be about feminism and capitalism in complicated, comical, and nuanced ways. It mostly succeeds in its dual purpose of comedy and inspiration. The doll's origin in 1959 places her and her consort, Ken, squarely in the context of the Cold War, although neither the movie nor the doll's long and successful marketing history acknowledges anything outside the sunny world of Barbie Land. The nuclear shadow does affect the movie's reception, however, in the form of international protests over the dashed lines scrawled on a supposed \"World Map\" in one scene. For nations in and around the South China Sea, the dashed lines evoke the specter of war in a nuclear age over claims to territorial sovereignty. Yet director Greta Gerwig's film is a runaway success, the first film solo directed by a woman to gross more than a billion dollars and counting.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140008597","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Public History: Introducing Barbenheimer","authors":"Ruth Oldenziel","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920525","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920525","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Public History:<span>Introducing Barbenheimer</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Ruth Oldenziel </li> </ul> <p>The summer of 2023 marked the surprising blockbuster season of two films: Christopher Nolan's <em>Oppenheimer</em>, a biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist and scientific director of the Manhattan Project, and Greta Gerwig's <em>Barbie</em>, a fantasy comedy about the American doll who conquered the world. Released on the same day, July 21, the cultural phenomenon also created a portmanteau of the films' titles. The portmanteau <em>Barbenheimer</em> was first coined as a joke to place the two films in the same analytical frame precisely because they seemed like such polar opposites—one about a serious and recognized scientific subject, the other about a frivolous fashion doll. The two films, now joined at the hip, provoked much public comment. <em>Technology and Culture</em> invited two prominent historians of technology to offer their perspectives on the public history point of view of technology.</p> <p>In Aimee Slaughter's essay on <em>Oppenheimer</em>, she critiques the film for its conspicuous omission of crucial perspectives, noting the absence of the perspective of the people of New Mexico, whose land was occupied during the Manhattan Project and who have been affected by its aftermath ever since, as well as the oversight of the contributions of women scientists during the Manhattan Project. Equally important is her critique of the film's failure to address the profound suffering of the Japanese people in Hiroshima as a result of the atomic bombing, weaving her personal and local reception of the film into her reading of it.</p> <p>Nolan's <em>Oppenheimer</em>, according to Slaughter, is instead \"in awe of physics and the power it can bestow.\" The film is less interested in science than in power, pitting Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director, against Lewis Strauss, a man who worked for the U.S. military, managing and rewarding munitions production, and who went on to become a major figure in nuclear weapons development, energy policy, and U.S. nuclear power after the war. She finds the figure of Strauss particularly noteworthy as the counterpoint to Oppenheimer \"because it highlights the relationship between scientists and government, which is often ignored in popular images of science.\" Moreover, <strong>[End Page 315]</strong> \"federal and military involvement in science is not portrayed in a particularly positive light.\"¹</p> <p>At the same time, <em>Oppenheimer</em> offers an all-too-familiar public image of science and technology as the \"individualized work of masculine genius,\" despite scholarship to the contrary.² Barbie is Oppenheimer's photographic negative. Since the 1950s, Barbie has represented a universe for girls in which the serious business is to catch a husband, raise a family with him, and thriftily outfit the growing children—with the pr","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140008925","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare by Paul Lockhart (review)","authors":"Kaushik Roy","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920568","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920568","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare</em> by Paul Lockhart <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Kaushik Roy (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare</em> By Paul Lockhart. New York: Basic Books, 2021. Pp. xii + 624. <p>Gunpowder changed the course of warfare and, ipso facto, global history. The advocates of the Military Revolution thesis (starting from Michael Roberts and Geoffrey Parker's <em>The Military Revolution</em>, 1988) argue along this line. Even if one challenges this \"big\" assertion, there is no denying that gunpowder weaponries definitely constitute a break with the medieval past. There are some sophisticated global surveys about the history of the interrelationship between the changing contours of war and the evolution of military technology (for instance, Martin van Creveld's <em>Technology and War</em>, 1989; Trevor N. Dupuy's <em>The Evolution of Weapons and Warfare</em>, 1990; and Jeremy Black's <em>War and Technology</em>, 2013, among others). However, such broad-range accounts provide few details about how the different weapons worked. On the other hand, we have monographs detailing the characteristics of particular weapon systems like AK-47s, Tiger tanks, etc. Such microstudies with a wealth of technical information interest only collectors of weapons and military buffs. Interested educated readers and historians are thus left hanging between broad-brush treatments of weapon systems at one pole and microstudies of specific weapons at the other.</p> <p>In the voluminous work under review, Paul Lockhart, professor of history at Wright State University, fills this vacuum. He turns the focus on the technicalities of the weapons that made up the era of gunpowder warfare during the last 600 years. He begins in circa 1400 and ends with the end of the Cold War. To avoid the barrage of criticisms that Parker and W. H. McNeill (for his <em>The Pursuit of Power</em>, 1982) received, Lockhart limits his gaze to Western Europe and the United States. Rightly he says that the 1980s marked the end of the dominance of gunpowder weapons and the 1990s saw the beginning of the Information Revolution, which resulted in the primacy of networking of information systems, with firepower taking a secondary role in war. <strong>[End Page 431]</strong></p> <p>Lots of information regarding the arms and munitions used in the three domains (air, land, and sea) is pounded on the readers analytically and succinctly. Lockhart tells us concisely about the characteristics of the important weapons, how they worked, and why they were being replaced by other weapon systems. We get a clear idea of a matchlock and why it was replaced by a musket in the sixteenth century, the difference between breechloaders and muzzleloaders, the shift from black powder to smokeless powder toward the end of the nineteenth century, the transition from coal to oil engines at the beginning of the twentieth cen","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140001895","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Homi J. Bhabha: A Life by Bakhtiar K. Dadabhoy (review)","authors":"Souvik Kar","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920557","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920557","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Homi J. Bhabha: A Life</em> by Bakhtiar K. Dadabhoy <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Souvik Kar (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Homi J. Bhabha: A Life</em> By Bakhtiar K. Dadabhoy. New Delhi: Rupa Publications, 2023. Pp. 723. <p>This biography of Indian nuclear physicist Homi Jehangir Bhabha (1909–66), the first chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission of India, places Bhabha at the center of an era straddling early twentieth-century Indo-European scientific exchange, the atomic age, Indian independence from British colonial rule, and the development of the Indian nuclear program.</p> <p>Dadabhoy divides his biography into three sections, each detailing a phase of Bhabha's life: \"Scientist as Researcher,\" \"Scientist as Institution-Builder,\" and \"Scientist as Administrator.\" A final section, \"Coda,\" describes Bhabha's untimely and controversial death. Dadabhoy sketches a life of high drama: Bhabha's apprenticeship with European luminaries of physics in the 1930s, his decision to return to freshly independent India to build nuclear establishments from scratch—despite acute resource scarcity—and steer Indian nuclear policy amid Cold War pressures, and finally, his mysterious death in a plane crash near Mont Blanc in 1966. Bhabha's story, as a major Indian <strong>[End Page 410]</strong> nuclear historian has described, possesses the ingredients for a \"modern fairy tale\" for India (Itty Abraham, <em>The Making of the Indian Nuclear Bomb</em>, 1998).</p> <p>Modern historiography of the Indian nuclear program demystifies such a fairy tale, especially calling attention to Bhabha's problematic fostering of a culture of authoritarian secrecy around the civil nuclear complex (Abraham, 1998; George Perkovich, <em>India's Nuclear Bomb</em>, 1999; Janhavi Phalkey, <em>Atomic State</em>, 2013). On the other hand, a long hagiographic tradition represents Bhabha as a postcolonial hero, harnessing science to rejuvenate a people colonially stereotyped as technological laggards and rebuild a nation left impoverished by centuries of colonial plunder (Ganeshan Venkataraman, <em>Magnificent Obsessions</em>, 1994; Chintamani Deshmukh, <em>Homi Jehangir Bhabha</em>, 2010; Biman Nath, <em>Renaissance Man</em>, 2022).</p> <p>Taking a middle path between the above traditions, Dadabhoy's biography commits to painting a complex portrait of a man emerging from Parsi society (Indian Zoroastrians, a wealthy, heavily Westernized minority community) and grappling with historical forces with some lasting achievements and some equally lasting problematic legacies. This translates into following a structure of oscillation between opposites in representing Bhabha's life and decisions: for example, Dadabhoy remarks on the theme of <em>individualism</em> animating Bhabha's policy of institution building—where talented individuals were first identified, and institutions were then built around them. Then, Dadabhoy follows up with a descr","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140001889","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}