
P.K. Sinha
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2026

P.K. Sinha
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2026

P.K. Sinha
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2026
David Lynch Jr.
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2018
EMORY L. KEMP
West Virginia University Press, 2014
John N. Briggs
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2004

S.S. Swords
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1986
Edited by Hamilton Cravens, Alan I Marcus, and David M. Katzman
University of Alabama Press, 1996
Addresses the relationships between what modern-day experts say to each other and to their constituencies
Technical Knowledge in American Culture is an interdisciplinary volume that brings together leading historians to investigate how science, technology, and medicine have shaped—and been shaped by—American intellectual and cultural traditions since the early nineteenth century. Rather than treating science and technology simply as products of social forces, the contributors examine them as forms of knowledge with their own internal logics, debates, and authority structures. The book asks a central question: how do experts—scientists, engineers, physicians—communicate with one another and with broader audiences, and how does that communication influence American society?
The volume is organized into three major sections, each anchored in a distinct historical moment: Part I: The Rise of Democratic Culture, 1800–1870; Part II: The Age of Hierarchy, 1870–1920; and Part III: Toward an Infinity of Dimensions (20th Century). Across its essays, the book argues that technical knowledge is not just a tool of progress—it is a cultural force shaped by communication, interpretation, and authority. By focusing on case studies rather than sweeping narratives, the volume reveals how expertise operates in practice and how it influences broader debates about science, society, and public trust.
Lewis Mumford
University of Chicago Press, 2010
Technics and Civilization first presented its compelling history of the machine and critical study of its effects on civilization in 1934—before television, the personal computer, and the Internet even appeared on our periphery.
Drawing upon art, science, philosophy, and the history of culture, Lewis Mumford explained the origin of the machine age and traced its social results, asserting that the development of modern technology had its roots in the Middle Ages rather than the Industrial Revolution. Mumford sagely argued that it was the moral, economic, and political choices we made, not the machines that we used, that determined our then industrially driven economy. Equal parts powerful history and polemic criticism, Technics and Civilization was the first comprehensive attempt in English to portray the development of the machine age over the last thousand years—and to predict the pull the technological still holds over us today.
Ian Swain
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2025
Thomas Dekeyser
University of Minnesota Press, 2026
A radical history of technology told through acts of resistance, not progress
The history of technology is often told as a history of progress, moving optimistically and inevitably from one emancipatory invention to the next. Techno-Negative turns this story on its head, taking us on a journey to the critical junctures where people have pointedly rejected and tried to undo, rather than adopt, new technologies. Beginning with Archimedes’s decision to destroy his own war machines, this book explores the will to negate technology as a deep—but persistently condemned—current in history.
As he presents a new theory of technological power, Thomas Dekeyser argues that technologies, never neutral, operate as “ontological policing,” drawing the boundaries of humanness as they are unequally leveraged by select groups. Looking beyond the Luddites to medieval monks banning tools, seventeenth-century loom burners, revolutionary lantern smashers, and computer arsonists, Dekeyser shows how people have long recognized and resisted the machine as a violent, sometimes deadly force implicated in defining who counts as human and whose lives (and ways of life) are worth saving.
Against the ubiquitous demands to reform or accelerate technological “advancement” that have failed to disrupt our present, Dekeyser proposes a spirited alternative: abolition. He challenges us to rethink the terms of our technological present and future. In a time when Big Tech grows increasingly enmeshed with authoritarian control, Techno-Negative is a conceptual declaration, and source of inspiration, for those searching for a new paradigm of technological politics.
Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.
David S. Roh
Rutgers University Press, 2025
Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin, editors
Duke University Press, 2025
Nachiappan Chockalingam
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022
Karthik Ramamurthy
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2023
Muhyaddin J.H. Rawa
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2025
G.A. Armstrong
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2007
Edited by Stephen H. Cutcliffe and Terry S. Reynolds
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Rowan-Kenyon, Heather T.
Rutgers University Press, 2018
By Steven A. Moore
University of Texas Press, 2001
Developing "sustainable" architectural and agricultural technologies was the intent behind Blueprint Farm, an experimental agricultural project designed to benefit farm workers displaced by the industrialization of agriculture in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Yet, despite its promise, the very institutions that created Blueprint Farm terminated the project after just four years (1987-1991).
In this book, Steven Moore demonstrates how the various stakeholders' competing definitions of "sustainability," "technology," and "place" ultimately doomed Blueprint Farm. He reconstructs the conflicting interests and goals of the founders, including Jim Hightower and the Texas Department of Agriculture, Laredo Junior College, and the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, and shows how, ironically, they unwittingly suppressed the self-determination of the very farm workers the project sought to benefit. From the instructive failure of Blueprint Farm, Moore extracts eight principles for a regenerative architecture, which he calls his "nonmodern manifesto."
Noreen Herzfeld
Templeton Press, 2009
Technology is changing all the time, but does it also have the ability to change us and the way we approach religion and spirituality? In Technology and Religion: Remaining Human in a Co-created World, Noreen Herzfeld examines this and other provocative questions as she provides an accessible and fascinating overview of the relationship between religion and the ever-broadening world of technology.
Edited by Eric Higgs, Andrew Light, and David Strong
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Edited by Terry S. Reynolds and Stephen H. Cutcliffe
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Edited by Susanna Delfino & Michele Gillespie
University of Missouri Press, 2008
Because of its strong agrarian roots, the South has typically been viewed as a region not favorably disposed to innovation and technology. Yet innovation was never absent from industrialization in this part of the United States. From the early nineteenth century onward, southerners were as eager as other Americans to embrace technology as a path to modernity.
This volume features seven essays that range widely across the region and its history, from the antebellum era to the present, to assess the role of innovations presumed lacking by most historians. Offering a challenging interpretation of industrialization in the South, these writings show that the benefits of innovations had to be carefully weighed against the costs to both industry and society.
The essays consider a wide range of innovative technologies. Some examine specific industries in subregions: steamboats in the lower Mississippi valley, textile manufacturing in Georgia and Arkansas, coal mining in Virginia, and sugar planting and processing in Louisiana. Others consider the role of technology in South Carolina textile mills around the turn of the twentieth century, the electrification of the Tennessee valley, and telemedicine in contemporary Arizona—marking the expansion of the region into the southwestern Sunbelt.
Together, these articles show that southerners set significant limitations on what technological innovations they were willing to adopt, particularly in a milieu where slaveholding agriculture had shaped the allocation of resources. They also reveal how scarcity of capital and continued reliance on agriculture influenced that allocation into the twentieth century, relieved eventually by federal spending during the Depression and its aftermath that sparked the Sunbelt South’s economic boom.
Technology, Innovation, and Southern Industrialization clearly demonstrates that the South’s embrace of technological innovation in the modern era doesn’t mark a radical change from the past but rather signals that such pursuits were always part of the region’s economy. It deflates the myth of southern agrarianism while expanding the scope of antebellum American industrialization beyond the Northeast and offers new insights into the relationship of southern economic history to the region’s society and politics.
Wenbing Zhao
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022
Eric Schatzberg
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Edited by George E. Marcus
University of Chicago Press, 1995

J.E. Flood
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1997
Sharon Evans
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2003
Roger Ackerley
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2003
Antony Oodan
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2003
John Buckley
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2003

Richard Manterfield
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1999

R.E. Farr
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1988
Jill Hills
University of Illinois Press, 2007
Jill Hills picks up from her pathbreaking study The Struggle for Control of Global Communication: The Formative Century to continue her examination of the political, technological, and economic forces at work in the global telecommunications market from World War II to the World Trade Organization agreement of 1997. In the late twentieth century, focus shifted from the creation and development of global communication markets to their intense regulation. The historical framework behind this control--where the market was regulated, by what institution, controlled by what power, and to whose benefit--masterfully complements Hills's analysis of power relations within the global communications arena.
Hills documents attempts by governments to direct, replace, and bypass international telecommunications institutions. As she shows, the results have offered indirect control over foreign domestic markets, government management of private corporations, and government protection of its own domestic communication market. Hills reveals that the motivation behind these powerful, regulatory efforts on person-to-person communication lies in the unmatched importance of communication in the world economy.
As ownership of communications infrastructure becomes more valuable, governments have scrambled to shape international guidelines. Hills provides insight into struggles between U.S. policymakers and the rest of the world, illustrating the conflict between a growing telecommunications empire and sovereign states that are free to implement policy changes. Freshly detailing the interplay between U.S. federal regulation and economic power, Hills fosters a deep understanding of contemporary systems of power in global communications.

Mehdi Hasan
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2026
Eduardo Kac
University of Michigan Press, 2005

R.W. Burns
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1998
J.R. Leigh
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1988

James Eade
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2014
Blaise Ravelo
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2020
Rajveer S. Yaduvanshi
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022
Alfred Hiatt
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Sumathi Ramaswamy
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Edited by Kären Wigen
University of Chicago Press, 2025
Yichuang Sun
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2008
Robert E. McShea
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2010
Robert E. McShea
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2014
By Mark Lambert, James Harkins, Brian A. Stauffer, and Patrick Walsh
University of Texas Press, 2025
2025 Second Place, Presidio La Bahía Award, Sons of the Republic of Texas
2026 Ron Tyler Award for Best Illustrated Book on Texas History and Culture, Texas State Historical Association (TSHA)
A comprehensive volume on historical mapping in Texas.
The Texas General Land Office’s map collection contains over 45,000 maps, some dating from the sixteenth century, making it one of the most important cartographic archives in Texas. As products and agents of history drawn by cartographers with motives and means as diverse as the places they document, maps provide a unique perspective on geopolitical, cultural, and economic processes. The maps of the GLO offer key insights into Texas’s sprawling history. They speak to issues of changing borders, social and political upheaval, and questions of sovereignty and power.
Texas Takes Shape offers an illuminating selection from the GLO archive: over one hundred maps that tell—and sometimes obscure—the stories of European colonization, Spanish and Mexican rule, the Republic of Texas, and the modern US state. There are maps here of every scale, from the hemispheric visions of European explorers to individual survey plats. Accompanying essays offer fascinating lessons on topics ranging from Indigenous cartography to military and railroad mapmaking and frontier surveys. Artful and informative, Texas Takes Shape examines a unique place through the eyes and imaginations of those who sought to govern it, profit from it, understand it, and call it home.
Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard
West Virginia University Press, 2025