Alan Marcus and Howard Segal's
Technology in America: A Brief History is a clear, readable, social constructivist history of technological development in the United States from the early 17th century to the late 20th. While its scope keeps the history of any particular technological development to the length of an encyclopedia article, its investment in social construction means that technologies are contextualized within social, economic, cultural, and historical developments. The result is a history of America told through the history of technology, with an emphasis on the ways in which American culture determines technological development.
Throughout, Marcus and Segal focus not on why things
didn't happen, but on
how things did happen. What made a technology acceptable and therefore applicable was a) how it was conceptualized and b) how it was explained to and understood by the people who would use it. Both technologies & their implementation are the products of what their inventors, investors, and potential users understand of their situation and whether they think a particular
