{"title":"A Mirrored City Underground: Air-Raid Shelters as Political Architectures in Barcelona and London, 1936-40.","authors":"Jaume Valentines-Álvarez","doi":"10.1353/tech.2025.a956847","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2025.a956847","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines air-raid shelters in Barcelona and London during the late 1930s as architectural embodiments of political ideologies and social dynamics. During the Spanish Civil War, Barcelona became a huge laboratory to test not only new means of destruction but also of protection for the coming World War: a city of shelters emerged underground, mobilizing nature, knowledge, expertise, and community networks. In London, the heated debate on civil defense was informed by the experiments held in Barcelona. Focusing on three types of shelters and the politics that they reflected, the study reveals how wartime protection technologies mirrored the conflicts and hierarchies of the societies they served. By situating these shelters within broader wartime technopolitics, the article highlights the interplay between technological landscapes, social networks, gender constructs, and political ideologies during moments of crisis.</p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 2","pages":"321-355"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143993697","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":"Before Arsenic: Recovering a Forgotten Indian Technique of Painting with Indigo and its Implications for Knowledge Transfer.","authors":"Alka Raman","doi":"10.1353/tech.2025.a956853","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2025.a956853","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article challenges the prevailing historiography, which asserts that painting with indigo on cotton was technically impossible until the British innovation with arsenic trisulphide in the 1730s. By reconstructing the Indian indigo painting process from the Beaulieu manuscript, the study demonstrates that European dismissal of fermented coconut sap as a viable technique stemmed from a lack of understanding and the incompatibility of the Indian technique with capital-intensive production models. Painting with indigo was not a technical impossibility but an economic and artisanal problem, requiring specialized knowledge of fermented coconut sap's properties. The study argues that successful knowledge transfer depends on adaptability to environmental and structural conditions, advancing a broader definition of \"useful knowledge\" in global economic and technological history-one not limited by immediate economic applicability.</p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 2","pages":"509-534"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144037086","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":"Colliding Views of Technological Accidents: Legal and Technical Histories of Aviation's Black Boxes.","authors":"Peter Hobbins","doi":"10.1353/tech.2025.a956851","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2025.a956851","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines the contested adoption of cockpit voice recorders and flight data recorders (\"black boxes\") in aviation. It uses the 1971 collision between two airliners in Sydney, Australia, as a case study. Australia, the first country to mandate cockpit voice recording for large, jet-powered airliners, encountered resistance due to the poor performance of early recorders and pushback from pilots through industrial action. The analysis reveals how technical, political, legal, and financial factors shaped air safety investigations and debates over evidence use. It also explores tensions between legal frameworks of admissibility, liability, and restitution and aviation's \"just culture,\" which encourages open admission of errors to prevent future incidents. The article argues for integrating judicial and technological perspectives to better understand aviation safety and risk epistemologies.</p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 2","pages":"449-479"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144005503","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":"Americanization Through Innovation: Polish American Women, Domestic Appliances, and the Household Revolution Debate, 1900-40.","authors":"Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>For Polish-American women, household appliances-promoted in Polish-language magazines in the United States in 1930s-were not merely labor-saving tools, but symbols of Americanization and social mobility. Revisiting Ruth Schwartz Cowan's argument that the domestic technological revolution primarily benefited middle-class women, this article examines the experiences of immigrant and second-generation Polish-American women in early twentieth-century and interwar Chicago. While Cowan highlights the increased expectations these technologies imposed on women, this article demonstrates how they facilitated Polish-American women's integration into American consumer culture and adaptation of American values. Drawing on oral histories and advertisements, this article explores the intersection of gender, class, and ethnicity in shaping immigrant women's interactions with modern domestic technology.</p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 1","pages":"161-184"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143383291","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":"Technological Models as Object Lessons of Agitation: Multiscale Materiality and Agency of Sand Filtration in an Industrial City, 1895.","authors":"Ellan F Spero, Christine Ortiz","doi":"10.1353/tech.2025.a965823","DOIUrl":"10.1353/tech.2025.a965823","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>How might forces and interactions at the surface of sand particles contribute to material agency with tangible impact on human life? This article explores the multiscale materiality of a technological model and how it catalyzed social action and influenced the development of larger-scale municipal infrastructure systems. It focuses on a demonstration sand filter constructed through civic engagement in Pittsburgh in 1895. This locally embedded community technology, situated in international networks of scientific knowledge, served as a practical \"object lesson\" in abstract principles of sanitation engineering-publicly demonstrating and validating the counterintuitive ability of local sand and gravel to purify city water. By bridging materials science and engineering with histories of technology, this study contributes to discourses on new materialism by identifying nonhuman agency at the nano- and micrometer scale and tracing its implications for public health, civic identity, and infrastructure design.</p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 3","pages":"751-776"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144734868","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":"Disability Without Borders: Blind Activism and the Limits of Technology as Neutral Ground in Cold War Europe.","authors":"Maria Cristina Galmarini","doi":"10.1353/tech.2025.a956849","DOIUrl":"10.1353/tech.2025.a956849","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>During the Cold War, the European Regional Committee (ERC) of the World Council for the Welfare of the Blind sought to use assistive technologies as neutral tools for fostering depoliticized cooperation across the East-West ideological divide. This article examines the ERC's collaborative projects during the 1970s, arguing that although they facilitated connections between research centers and manufacturers across geopolitical borders, they were ultimately constrained by both activists' conflicting approaches to disability and Cold War political realities. By analyzing the intersections of disability, technology, and geopolitics, the article contributes to our understanding of how global technological collaboration was both enabled and restricted by broader political and cultural forces.</p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 2","pages":"381-410"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144024871","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":"Collective Wisdom: Collecting in the Early Modern Academy ed. by Anna Marie Roos and Vera Keller (review)","authors":"Aurélien Ruellet","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a933117","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a933117","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Collective Wisdom: Collecting in the Early Modern Academy</em> ed. by Anna Marie Roos and Vera Keller <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Aurélien Ruellet (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Collective Wisdom: Collecting in the Early Modern Academy</em><br/> Edited by Anna Marie Roos and Vera Keller. Turnhout: Brepols, 2022. Pp. 323. <p>In January 1742, a mummified ibis was presented at a meeting of the Egyptian Society in London, then carefully dissected a few days later. During another session, a mummy was opened by one of the members, Charles Pococke, who made hypotheses regarding the chemical components of the pigments used for coffins as well as the embalmment techniques. This is one of the numerous narratives that are scattered throughout the volume <em>Collective Wisdom</em>, edited by Anna Marie Roos and Vera Keller, the result of three conferences that brought together scholars from different countries and thematic horizons.</p> <p>At the core of most of the eleven contributions, finely put in a wider historiographical perspective by the introduction, lays the question of the circulation of objects and the building of collections within the learned societies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ingeniously referred to as “collective wisdom,” the focus of the book is on “the knowledge gained from studying collections . . . and the collections generated through objectbased study and exchange (archives, correspondence, journals)” (p. 16). The chapters are not about the birth of museums, but rather about the way collections, sometimes heterogeneous, composed of antiquities as much as of natural specimens, were circulated among equally heterogeneous social grounds, involving physicians, surgeons, quacks, merchants, and apothecaries, and how those objects were the support of an intellectual interest that was not confined to curiosity. The geographic focus is on central and northern Europe, with chapters devoted to the Leopoldina, which held its meetings in Halle; the Spalding Gentlemen Society in Lincolnshire (SGS); the multifarious activities of the collector and professor Ole Worm in Copenhagen; the uses of objects and collections in pedagogic activities inspired by Comenius; or learned circles in the commercial cities of Frankfurt/Main and Dantzig.</p> <p>The historian of technology will find many points of interest: besides the discussions of technical objects (like the “roman lamp”—actually a medieval Jewish lamp used for Sabbath—that Hans Sloane offered to the Society of Antiquaries) or technical processes (see for example the chapter by C. Grell on the metrological works of Burratini in Egypt), the contributions shed light on a series of technologies of knowledge management in those learned societies. The reader can appreciate, thanks to many illustrations in color, extracts from the minute book of the SGS: its entries, pointing at the presence of an object during a session, also gave ","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141743487","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":"Franklin Ford Collection ed. by Dominique Trudel and Juliette De Maeyer (review)","authors":"Will Mari","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a933119","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a933119","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Franklin Ford Collection</em> ed. by Dominique Trudel and Juliette De Maeyer <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Will Mari (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Franklin Ford Collection</em><br/> Edited by Dominique Trudel and Juliette De Maeyer. Bethlehem: Mediastudies.press, 2023. Pp. 297. <p>In this unique assembly of the key writings of American poly-math and philosopher Franklin Ford (1849–1918), Dominique Trudel (Audencia Business School) and Juliette De Maeyer (University of Montreal) have provided scholars with an invaluable resource. Namely, they have curated and placed into critical context, via an open-access publisher, Ford’s most important, surviving work on communication technology, as expressed via journalism, markets, transportation, and government. Furthermore, this work is from a formative moment in the creation of the modern field of sociology—specifically, media sociology—and the broader study of technology itself.</p> <p>Ford was a brilliant, if eccentric and mysterious, figure—with part of the mystery enhanced by the loss of many of his personal papers and <strong>[End Page 1024]</strong> correspondence in a fire at Columbia University in October 1914 (pp. viii, xxviii). Best known for his ill-fated <em>Thought News</em> project with John Dewey at the University of Michigan in the early 1890s, Ford’s contributions to the development of pragmatist philosophy and, perhaps more indirectly, the Chicago School tradition (associated with one of his friends, Robert Park) are less well known. Scholars as varied as Daniel J. Czitrom, James Carey, and Norman Sims, along with Andrej Pinter, John Durham Peters, Jeff Pooley, and Zena Beth McGlashan, have worked to reconnect Ford to his contemporaries.</p> <p>While Ford had a falling out with Dewey, the former influenced the latter’s ideas, especially the central concept of scientific inquiry. Trudel and De Maeyer review the relevant historiography surrounding Ford, and introduce the primary texts themselves, in an introduction that builds on their previous research into this enigmatic figure. They then discuss the three main themes of Ford’s often intellectually itinerant life (ranging from Detroit to New York City and everywhere in between), including “the specific problems of the press and the many remedies he envisioned . . . the interconnected flows of money, transportation, and communication central to modern industrial societies . . . and the political and social theory that lay behind Ford’s projects” (p. ix). Ford was interested in ideas that still impact our information economy, including how to sustain journalism and how technology could help markets govern themselves.</p> <p>Of interest to historians of technology is how Ford conceived of “electric communication” in the form of early telephone and telegraph networks, as well as transportation systems (pp. 195, 236). Ford was fascinated with such tools and how they promised to reinvigor","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141743490","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":"Microhistories of Technology: Making the World by Mikael Hård (review)","authors":"Corinna R. Unger","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a933103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a933103","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Microhistories of Technology: Making the World</em> by Mikael Hård <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Corinna R. Unger (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Microhistories of Technology: Making the World</em><br/> By Mikael Hård. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. Pp. xx + 290. <p>In the preface to his new book, Mikael Hård describes how his approach to the history of technology has evolved over the decades. He started out with a conviction that nineteenth- and twentieth-century history could be captured by terms like industrialization and mechanization. Later, though, he came to argue that those concepts were too abstract to do justice to the complexity of history. He then became interested in the notion of globalization but questioned its macroperspective, which tended to hide particularities from historical view. His new book documents in impressive ways how the history of technology has evolved as a field, and it shows the exciting avenues open to historians of technology today.</p> <p>In his book on microhistories of technology, Hård demonstrates the richness of technologies that individuals and communities across the world have used and, in part, continue to use in their everyday lives. His understanding of technology is notably broad and informed by methods borrowed from microhistory, social history, cultural history, and gender history. The volume, which covers the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, contains chapters on carpentry and construction work, communication via drums, sugar production, electricity networks, housing, cooking, beer brewing, and menstruation pads. In terms of geographic range, the chapters cover today’s Indonesia, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Ghana, northern India, Tanzania, Argentina, Kenya, Uzbekistan, and South Korea. Referring to nation-states is somewhat misleading, though, as Hård is less interested in national structures than in local and regional phenomena. By drawing on historical cases, he highlights the variety of technological knowledge related to all aspects of life.</p> <p>For example, by using European travel accounts and ethnographic studies from the nineteenth century and complementing them with contemporary literature, Hård emphasizes how well adapted the so-called Indigenous building techniques in Indonesia and sugar production techniques in India were to local climatic and economic conditions. Furthermore, he underlines that <strong>[End Page 994]</strong> Europeans acknowledged and admired local practices and incorporated them into their own work, just as representatives of local communities were eager to learn about practices Europeans brought with them. Hård thereby shows how an in-depth analysis of a specific technology in situ can allow historians to speak to broader questions about the nature of colonial relations.</p> <p>Hård does not question the fact that colonial relations were unequal and exploitative, or that they were anchored in racist and ","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"121 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141743662","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":"Moving Crops and the Scales of History by Francesca Bray et al (review)","authors":"Harro Maat","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a933105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a933105","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Moving Crops and the Scales of History</em> by Francesca Bray et al <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Harro Maat (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Moving Crops and the Scales of History</em><br/> By Francesca Bray, Barbara Hahn, John Bosco Lourdusamy, and Tiago Saraiva. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023. Pp. 352. <p>Four renowned historians of technology have delivered a wonderful and inspiring collection of crop histories. The book is important for more than just that. While the heart of <em>Moving Crops</em> is historic, stringing together a wealth of cases from different parts of the world, its central purpose is conceptual and historiographic: to demonstrate that much of the existing global history of crops, materials, and technology more generally is distorted.</p> <p>Indeed, crops are the central topic to present a new approach to material artifacts and commodities that, as the authors put it, are the stuff of rooted global history. The choice for crops is for a purpose. Inspired by the French Annales school historians focusing on landscapes, the authors present the cropscape as the leading concept.</p> <p>The methodological depth of the cropscape is convincingly explained, which is not to suggest the reader has to plow through abstract elaborations. A major reason the book is such a great read is the way critique, method, and principles are grafted onto concrete cases, presented as “riffs,” underlining the lively and entertaining style by which the crop stories are told. The introduction chapter needs only a handful of pages to set the stage for the first of these stories, portraying the centrality of crops in the transformation of the Cuban landscape and society through the works of two Cuban writers.</p> <p>At this point the authors add an important critique. Most histories involving Cuba and crops almost inevitably give prominence to Sidney Mintz. He’s not called on stage for the opening riff, where Cuban writers perform with equal verve. This is a returning pattern in the book and brings less familiar authors and unexpected twists to the crop stories. Blended with renowned Western scholars—Mintz is sampled at various other points—the aim is to be global in the use of sources.</p> <p>Neither crops nor historical periodization structure the book. The first chapter, “Times,” opens with a riff on date palms that dismisses straightforward historical chronology in clear terms. The movements of date trees, in both ancient Arab and recent American settings, defy a progressive historical narrative. Other riffs, on tobacco, rice, and cocoa, illuminate the intricate connections between crops and surrounding social-material structures in terms of seasonality, growth duration, and maturation. A final riff on millets connects history to current and future projections.</p> <p>In chapters 2 and 3, the playful yet profound comments on analytical categories target understandings of “Places” and “Sizes","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"48 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141743667","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}