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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...

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...

In William Faulkner’s well-known aphorism “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Faulkner’s understanding of history forcefully applies to the story of Maryland during the Civil War. If we had forgotten his point, the recent controversy over the future...

Why One Refrigeration History Book Was Not EnoughI first became interested in the history of refrigeration while I was in graduate school, when I started leafing through back issues of a late-nineteenth century trade journal housed in the engineering library...

We all take it for granted that clicking on an underlined word on a web page will magically transport us to a new site on the Internet almost instantly, but the concept of hyperlinking had a legacy well dating decades earlier. In July of 1945, Vannevar Bush...

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...

In August 2016 Ford Motor Company president Mark Fields announced that his company would have autonomous cars, with no steering wheels or pedals, available for ride-sharing services by 2021. “We believe in our plan that taking the driver out of the loop is...