Technology in American Life

Resources on the Web

The material for this seminar is drawn from my undergraduate lecture course, History 398: Technologies and Their Societies. If you would like see the sources on which that course is based, see the Extended Syllabus I prepared for the Sloan Foundation's New Liberal Arts Program.
Participants in my 1984 and 1985 NEH Summer Seminars for Secondary School Teachers on "Technology and the Human Experience" prepared teaching modules on the theme of Reading a Machine, which you might find them interesting and helpful. They are the most frequently visited pages on my site.
Explore the WWW Virtual Library of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine

The Lowell mills have become the site of the Lowell National Historical Park, which has an extensive website on the history of the mills and of the textile industry in general.

.There are a lot of Model T Fords still around.
Visit and browse through the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village.
Ben Wattenberg devoted a segment of his PBS series, "The First Measured Century", to the Lynds' Middletown.
Visit the Center for Middletown Studies at Ball State University
From the Arthur Vidich's introduction to Rita Caccamo's Return to Middletown (1999), a critical study of the Lynds' work.

The syllabus for my Freshman Seminars on The World of the Computer contains a wealth of materials which should also work well with high-schoolers.
Tom Haigh maintains an updated list of resources in the history of computing on his web site. Take some time to tour its links.
Visit Jonathan Bowen's Virtual Museum of Computing for a wealth of online resources
Timelines for the history of computing can be found at:

To close the circle, Simon Schaffer has written on the connections between Babbage's Difference Engine and his Economy of Machinery in "Babbage's Intelligence: Calculating Engines and the Factory System"