145: John Kasson's Civilizing the Machine

The five essays that make up John Kasson's Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776-1900 all examine different aspects of the relationship between technology and Republican ideology.  Using a wide variety of primary sources, including speeches, newspaper accounts, sketches, and writers like Emerson, Bellamy, Thomas Jefferson and Tenche Cox, Kasson shows that Americans first rejected technological development because they feared becoming corrupt like Europe; then incorporated Republican ideology into industrialization to stave off that same corruption by lending moral purity, industry, and restraint to technological development; and then found themselves being exploited by the very technologies they hoped to control, all in the name of Republicanism.  Kasson thus uses the relationship between political ideology and industrialization in the 19th century to complicate the relationship between technology and culture.

57: Drew McCoy's The Elusive Republic

In The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America, Drew McCoy investigates the fierce debates among the Revolutionary generation regard the best economic structure for the new American Republic; the "elusive" republic is the one that could chart a middle stage of social development between Jeffersonian agriculture and Hamiltonian industrialization.  He situates political economy, which at that time was a combination of political science, sociology, and economics and was considered a practical subject for statecraft, within a larger Republican ideology intent on developing the American economy in line with Republican ideals.  I'm pretty sure his main innovation is to complicate the old Jefferson-Hamilton debate by suggesting that the elusive republic would have required freezing time, and, by extension, to show that Republicanism itself, if attached to these time-freezing economic policies, was also ill-fated.  Whew.