Kategoria BISAC: Technology & Engineering >> History

Sometime around 1500 A.D., an African farmer planted a maize seed imported from the New World. That act set in motion the remarkable saga of one of the world's most influential crops--one that would transform the future of Africa and of the Atlantic world. Africa's experience with maize is distinctive but also instructive from a global perspective: experts predict that by 2020 maize will become the world's most cultivated crop.

James McCann moves easily from the village level to the continental scale, from the medieval to the modern, as he explains the science of maize production...

From 1900 to 1960, the introduction and development of four so-called urbanizing technologies-the telephone, automobile, radio, and electric light and power-transformed the rural United States. But did these new technologies revolutionize rural life in the ways modernizers predicted? And how exactly-and with what levels of resistance and acceptance-did this change take place? In Consumers in the Country Ronald R. Kline, avoiding the trap of technological determinism, explores the changing relationships among the Country Life professionals, government agencies, sales people, and...

Engagingly written and richly illustrated, Putting Meat on the American Table explains how America became a meat-eating nation--from the colonial period to the present. It examines the relationships between consumer preference and meat processing--looking closely at the production of beef, pork, chicken, and hot dogs.

Roger Horowitz argues that a series of new technologies have transformed American meat. He draws on detailed consumption surveys that shed new light on America's eating preferences--especially differences associated with income, rural versus urban areas, and...

This special issue of American Quarterly asks powerful and poignant questions about technology and its effects on our bodies, minds, families, economies, armies, and academies. Technology is an entry point for American studies scholars to find new and creative ways to think through social and cultural problems. The essays in this collection provide an interdisciplinary exploration of the ways scholars of culture use the study of technology to examine the flows, conflicts, tensions, and hazards of American culture.

Re-reading the narrative of U.S. technology, the contributors...

Among the hordes of starry-eyed 'argonauts' who flocked to the California gold rush of 1849 was an Australian named Edward Hargraves. He left America empty-handed, only to find gold in his own backyard. The result was the great Australian rush of the 1850s, which also attracted participants from around the world. A South African named P.J. Marais was one of them. Marais too returned home in defeat - only to set in motion the diamond and gold rushes that transformed southern Africa. And so it went.

Most previous historians of the gold rushes have tended to view them as acts of...

WithMarginal Man, Alexander John Watson provides the first in-depth intellectual biography of Harold Adams Innis (1894-1952), the great Canadian economic historian and communications guru. Melding biography and analysis, Watson presents, in unprecedented detail, the links between key events in Innis' life and scholarly influences, and the intellectual synthesis that Innis produced.

Watson illustrates and reconciles the great thinker's movement from rural Ontario to the centre of Canadian and international scholarship, followed by his relegation to the margin by scholars who did...