Martin William Aspray, Nathan Ensmenger, and Jeffrey R. Yost, Computer: A History of the Information Machine,Westview Press, 3rd ed., 2013 David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2003) Allan Isaacman, Cotton is the Mother of Poverty: Peasants, Work, and Rural Struggle in Colonial Mozambique, 1938-1961 (Heineman, 1995) Peter Marsh, The New Industrial Revolution: Consumers, Globalization and the End of Mass Production (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012) Paul Virilio, The Administration of Fear (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012) Schedule of discussions and readings: Sept 7: Labor Day, no meeting, classes do not begin until Tuesday, Sept. 8 Sept. 14: Welcome and introduction, and our first discussion, on historical contingency Please look over John K. Brown’s “Not the Eads Bridge: An exploration of counterfactual history of technology,” Technology and Culture 55 (2014): especially through page 527, and come prepared to discuss the idea of means and ends in history, and counterfactual historical arguments. At issue for our discussion will be the idea of historical contingency, and how central assumptions of such contingency are to the developing field of history of technology. Sept. 21: History over the long-term: a dispute Jo and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge University Press, 2014) updated 2015 on-line at http://historymanifesto.cambridge.org/ An argument that historians should take up and less specialized approaches. “AHR Exchange on The History Manifesto,” Apr. 2015, American Historical Review, pp. 527-554. Includes: Deborah Cohen and Peter Mandler, “The History Manifesto: A Critique,” American Historical Review 120 (2015): 530-542 Jo Guldi and David Armitage, “The History Manifesto: A Reply to Deborah Cohen and Peter Mandler,” American Historical Review 120 (2015): 543-554
Ferdinand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th – 18th Century, Vol I: The Structure of Everday Life (University of California Press, 1992) An early and highly influential attempt to look at the longue durée, from one of the founders of the Annales school, which advocated long-range history. Basically, Braudel looks at things that didn’t change. Sept. 28 Introducing philosophy and criticism of technology Now that we have a number of empirical studies in mind, we turn to philosophy and criticism of technology. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2013) This is a difficult to read piece, but it is essential to know, because it serves as the backdrop for the work of many later thinkers. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, 2nd ed. (Beacon Press, 1991) Marcuse was a student of Heidegger, and is one of the most influential critics of technology in the American context. This piece was influential in the “do not fold, spindle, or mutilate” movement of the 1970s. For further reading: See also John MacQuarrie, Heidegger and Christianity: The Hensely Hensen Lectures 1993-1994 (Continuum International Publishing Group 1994). Despite the title, this little book has little to do with Christianity, but is instead the clearest introduction to Heidegger, and especially to his thinking on technology. Oct. 5: Technology and the human-created world Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld: From garden to earth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), selections. Robert Rosenberg, et al, eds., Postphenomenological Investigations: Essays on Human-Technology Relations (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015) We will read the introduction, and pieces by Borgmann and Feenberg. Please also select two chapters that are of interest to you. For further reading: Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb (Verso, 2006) This is the work that brought Virilio to the attention of American scholars.