Newsroom

“25 years of Independence” reads the blue banner in Republic Square, Almaty, Kazakhstan, New Year’s Eve 2017. Photo by author. By Thomas J. Misa New Year’s 2017 in Almaty, Kazakhstan, it was the greatest display of fireworks imaginable. Everyone in the city...

The Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) is not what it used to be. The good news is that it continues to produce the world’s most dominant arsenal, even while imposing less of a “burden” on the country than during the Cold War. The bad news is that waste, fraud...

What is new about Sovereign Skies that sets it apart from other books in the field?While this is not the first book to address the early development of civil aviation policy in the United States, it is the first to demonstrate the central role that...

Havoc and Reform: Workplace Disasters in Modern America arose organically from my previous book, Vegas at Odds: Labor Conflict in a Leisure Economy, 1960-1985 (both published by Johns Hopkins). I was working on the latter project, reading old newspapers on a...

We wrote Swansea Copper out of a sense of frustration. Histories of global trade and industry seemed to have no place for copper. Cotton, sugar, tobacco: yes. But copper? What could copper tell us that we didn’t already know about global industrial history...

It was fencing that led me to my interest in the history and philosophy of timekeeping. Forget what you think you know about fencing—what you’ve seen in TV shows and movies and such. The reality is both less visually exciting and intellectually more engaging...

Taking Nazi Technology is a book about the largest-scale attempt at corporate/industrial espionage in history, about scientist spies and covert missions to steal technologies. When I discuss the topic, however, people sometimes ask whether it's really fair to...

Last year, Technology and Culture published a special issue titled "Shift CTRL: New Directions in the History of Computing." With seven essays covering the development of computing over time and specific issues relating to China, Chile and Taiwan, the issue...

Perhaps it’s the election of 2016. More and more of us, it seems, are obsessively checking the news on cable channels and websites several times a day. Or we haunt Twitter and Facebook for the latest updates. We typically think of this obsession with the news...

There was a great debate among horsemen in the mid-19th century, as to whether or not all four of a horse’s legs were lifted off the ground at the same time they were galloping. The action happened so fast that it was impossible to see the truth with the naked...