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.

160: Reyner Banham's Well-Tempered Environment

In The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, Reyner Banham argues that architecture is not just about beautiful building facades - it's also about the mechanical systems that make those buildings function.  Frustrated by the lack of attention paid to mechanical systems by architectural histories (in the late 1960s, when Banham was writing, there were apparently none), Banham pored through trade catalogues, lectures to professional societies, specialist periodicals, building plans and patent-office records, and other primary sources in pursuit not of firsts, but of mosts - of the point at which most buildings had incorporated a new technology and thus the point at which that technology had begun to shape architectural design.  His descriptions of particular buildings are thus discussions of the "typical" rather than the iconic.  With this approach, he takes architecture out of art and subsumes it into a larger category of "environmental management," an interdisciplinary, problem-based profession that treats architecture as context-dependent technological systems or "habitable volumes."

138: Langdon Winner's Autonomous Technology

Published in 1977, Langdon Winner's Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a Theme in Political Thought examines the idea of autonomous technology as a "convenient receptacle for a host of  contemporary anxieties." Using literary and political writings from a wide range of historical moments, he shows how autonomous technology has been associated with fears about a loss of human agency and self-governance, both at the individual and the societal level, to machines of our own creation.  Technology therefore has a politics, and if humans are to regain control and autonomy, we need to dismantle technologies, learn how they work, and rebuild them so that they serve human needs rather than their own dominance and reproduction.

Winner argues that while technology has been central to political thought for some 200 years, the 20th century proliferation of technologies and their integration in everyday life has made technology into a "vast, diverse, ubiquitous totality that stands at the center of our modern culture."  This diversity makes the word "technology" so complex as to be meaningless, or at least illegible, with the result that technology itself becomes a rather terrifying black box, appearing to usurp political power and move forward of its own volition.  In modernity, the complexity of technology requires a new ruling class, engineers, to interface with it, and an environment conducive to its operations, with which architects and engineers happily comply.  Technology also requires a particular social order to fulfill its operational requirements - which is to say that technology creates a particular form of technological politics, where the claim that "man controls technology" looks more irrational than the opposite.

74: David Levering Lewis' Biography of a Race

David Levering Lewis' W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919, is a massive popular biography of Du Bois and one of two planned volumes on his life and work.  Lewis takes "biography" in two different directions: as a writer who focused on recovering African American voices and reconstructing their agentive participation in their own history, Du Bois was a biographer of a race; as a person who was born right after the Civil War and who died during the Civil Rights movement, his life can also be used to trace the trajectory of an oppressed group from slavery to freedom (and, for Du Bois, on to Africa.)  Therefore, the book is both a deeply contextualized biography of Du Bois' life, career, and work, and an attempt to recreate the massive political, social, and economic changes impacting the lives of black Americans during his lifetime.

Biography of a Race belies a huge amount of research, and Lewis spends a great deal of time reconstructing Du Bois' rather "prickly" personality and his tendency toward separatism as he got older. Working from Du Bois' personal papers, he works to humanize him, so that we see his troubled childhood, his difficult relationships with his wives, and his philandering tendencies in plain relief.  And he includes a full 8 chapters on Du Bois and the NAACP, including his frustration with Booker T. Washington and the "accomodationist" Tuskegee Institute.  He also traces the shift in Du Bois' thought around the turn of the century from a "naive" faith in science's ability to solve racial inequality to the more political route of the NAACP.  And he ends - rather precipitously - during the "Red Summer" of 1919.

While this book really helps humanize Du Bois, Lewis' strategy seems to be to keep in every detail, no matter how small, and he often includes several versions of the same story rather than working to figure out which pieces seem the most well-supported.  Further, his chatty speculations and asides sometimes detract from his larger point, as when he offhandedly suggests that a white woman living with him and his wife might have been a boarder - or perhaps the three were involved in a menage a trois.  He also apparently went to a psychoanalyst in the guise of Du Bois by way of interrogating his psyche.  I appreciate the humanization of the subject, but I do wish Lewis or his editor had been a little more careful.