164: Louis Hunter's Steamboats on the Western Rivers

In Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technological History, Louis Hunter situates a detailed history of the development of steamboat technology in the social, technological, and economic context in which it developed; he argues that "the growth of the West and the rise of steamboat transportation were inseparable; they were geared together and each was dependent upon the other."

Using contemporary newspapers, census documents, traveller accounts, and other primary sources form about the 1780s to the end of the 19th century, Hunter shows that steam transportation technology was the result of many people's contributions (both English and American), not just those of a few great men.  He also shows that in America, steam navigation started on the Atlantic seaboard but quickly moved inland to the Western rivers, where steamboats dominated inland transportation and commerce for a generation; and he argues that from 1925 to 1850 the steamboat was the main technological agent in developing the Mississippi basin from a "raw frontier society" to "economic and social maturity."  Finally, he claims that the Western steamboat was known worldwide as the "typical" American steamboat partly because it was so important to the economy of the region and partly because it was unique in its design, construction, and operation.  Published in 1949, this book was the scholarly survey of the development of steam navigation on the Western rivers that pulled together technology, operations, and governmental intervention into a consistent whole.

142: Marcus & Segal's Technology in America

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

63: George Rogers Taylor's The Transportation Revolution

In The Transportation Revolution, 1815-1860, George Rogers Taylor argues that transportation played a key role in the shift from a "colonially oriented economy" to a "national economy" by 1860 by facilitating the shift from an "extractive-commercial" economy to an industrial one.  Because the US is so vast, revolutions in transportation and communication were the only way to connect the country enough to facilitate the massive growth in the later decades of the 19th century.

This book was published in 1951, and it provides a clear, readable survey of the development of the various transportation networks in the US.  Taylor builds his history out of histories of the various transportation modes, economic data from government sources, photos from Culver and other readily accessible archives, and detailed tables that piece together the costs associated with building roads, canals, steamboats, and railroads, with an eye toward the rather substantial federal subsidies that went into transportation in the 19th century.  He also integrates economic history, labor history, and discussions of industrialization and urbanization, so that transportation development occurs within its larger social, geographic, and economic contexts.