Creating Knowledge, Making Money, and Being Famous in the 1980s
On the transformative role of greed in global science and technology during the 1980s. In the 1980s, a transformative era emerged where profit-driven motives and an entrepreneurial spirit dominated scientific research and technological innovation. This collection of essays, edited by Michael D. Gordin and W. Patrick McCray, examines how greed ......
Technology, Rebellion, and the Industrial Revolution in England, 1817-1818
Engines of Mischief explores the day-to-day labor, economic, political, and social climate at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in Manchester, England, between 1817 and 1818. Using new economic theories of the time, parliamentary commissions, and news reports, students will engage with crucial issues of the day, debating factory conditions and ......
As America's oldest merchant ship still afloat and the only wooden survivor of the once-vital whaling industry, the Charles W. Morgan has a complex story to tell. Elaborating on earlier volumes on the ship's history at Mystic Seaport Museum, this new book offers an expanded account, chronicling the ship's construction and launch in 1841 through ......
How American Women Bought Their Way into the Driver's Seat
A fascinating history of how the automotive industry and consumers battled to define what women wanted in a car. Since the commercial introduction of the automobile, US automakers have always sought women as customers and advertised accordingly. How, then, did car culture become so masculine? In Pink Cars and Pocketbooks, Jessica Brockmole shares ......
How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory
How the internet's memory infrastructure developed-averting a "digital dark age"-and introduced a golden age of historical memory. In early 1996, the web was ephemeral. But by 2001, the internet was forever. How did websites transform from having a brief life to becoming long-lasting? Drawing on archival material in the Internet Archive and ......
The Inside Story of Y2K Panic and the Greatest Cooperative Effort Ever
The new millennium. The Year 2000. Beyond Mayan prophecies, a more immediate danger loomed: Two-digit year date fields had been used by software programmers to conserve expensive computer storage space for decades. As a consequence, legacy systems reading "00" on January 1, 2000 would most probably interpret the date as 1900. ......
The fascinating history of the St. Louis Bridge, the first steel structure in the world.
In Spanning the Gilded Age, John K. Brown tells the daring, improbable story of the construction of the St. Louis Bridge, known popularly as the Eads Bridge. Completed in 1874, it was the first structure of any ......
How Marginalized American Motorists Fought to Drive and Park
Car ownership is central to the U.S. culture wars about global warming and urban sprawl. While the environmental issues surrounding car use are well known, the car is also the focus of debates about urban redevelopment, racially biased policing, women's employment, immigration, homelessness, and disability rights. Right to the Road: How ......
A timely collection of essays on the pressing possibilities and risks of gene-editing technology. Scientists and genetic engineers are becoming increasingly adept at editing the human genome. How far can-and should-they go in editing future generations? In The Promise and Peril of CRISPR, editor Neal Baer brings together a timely collection of ......
