2003-2004
Co-sponsored by the University of Illinois at Chicago, Roosevelt University, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and Northwestern University
Seminars are held on Fridays from 3:30-5:00 PM
at the Newberry Library, 60 West Walton Street, Chicago, IL.
Papers are pre-circulated. For a copy e-mail scholl@newberry.org.
October 10, 2003 - "Federal Interviention, Technological Innovation, and the Communications Industry During the Wilson Administration, 1917-1921"
Jonathan Reed Winkler, Yale University
A little known story in the history of communications technology, business and U.S. foreign policy occurred in the waning months of the First World War. The Department of State, having become sufficiently concerned about the political and economic implications of inadequate submarine telegraph cable connections with Japan, China and the rest of Asia, took the lead in pushing the development of a submarine telegraph cable industry in the United States largely from scratch. The overall intention was to create a complete industry, capable of researching, developing, manufacturing and laying cables, that would allow the United States to lay its own global network without having to resort to the commercially or technologically superior British cable industry. Though ultimately unsuccessful, the State Department's efforts to launch a cable industry epitomized the changing worldview of certain U.S. officials about the place of the nation in the world after World War I as well as growing concerns about the security implications of dependency upon foreign powers for access to important technological innovations and raw materials. Also significant is that while the cable industry intervention failed, the parallel effort by the United States Navy into the nascent radio industry yielded the successful Radio Corporation of America. Drawing upon archival source from diplomatic, military and business records, this work is an outgrowth of a larger dissertation on U.S. foreign relations and international communications technology in the Wilson Administration.
November 14, 2003 - "Modernity, Gender, and Technology During the Popular Unity Government in Chile"
Margaret Power, Illinois Institute of Technology
The Popular Unity (UP) government of Salvador Allende (1970 to 1973) promised to modernize the nation. As Marxists and as nationalists, many UP leaders equated modernity with industrial development, the forging of a more equitable society, and the nationalization of domestic and foreign, principally U.S., financial and industrial holdings. This paper will explore the UP's conceptualization of modernity and gender, the policies it employed to achieve its goals, how it understood and used technology and science to advance its project, and the measures it adopted in the face of attempts to undermine it.
December 5, 2003 - "'Is Your Plant a Target?' Cold War Civil Defense and the Rise of the High-Tech Suburb"
Margaret Pugh O'Mara, Stanford University
In the early years of the Cold War, the Truman Administration took a series of administrative steps to establish a civil defense policy of "industrial dispersion" to encourage manufacturers to move out of potentially vulnerable central cities. A quiet effort that operated largely below the political radar screen, the dispersion campaign focused its attention on defense contractors --particularly small scientific firms with a heavy dependence on government business. This paper explores how these policies worked in concert with other federal tax and infrastructure measures to pull high-tech industry out to the suburbs, having an enduring effect on the economic landscape of late twentieth century America.
January 30, 2004 - "Firearms and the Global Origins of Early Modern Japan" (formerly Weapons, War, adn the Early Modern Japanese State, 1440-166-)
William D. Johnston, Wesleyan University
A monopoloy on the use of organized violence is a necessary condition for the establishment of both the early modern and the modern state. Historians of Europe have shown clearly how the rise of firearms and other technological changes helped determine battlefield outcomes, and consequently the rise of early modern political structures. Historians of Japan have often pointed out that firearms transformed the battlefield during the sixteenth century. Yet, it has not yet become conventional wisdom that trained companies of musketeers brought about both the demise of the traditional samurai and the rise of the early modern state by the year 1600. This paper demonstrates how this happened, and how the appearance of the early modern state in late-sixteenth-century Japan resulted from its integration in contemporary economic, technological, and political networks with global reach. The wider conclusions contribute to the reinterpretation of Japan's "isolation" from the seventeenth century, which was less important for cutting off the country from global networks as for marking its position in them. Consequestion, the "opening" of Japan in the nineteenth century did not change Japan's position in international relations so much as it re-integrated the country in global networks of political relations, economy, and technology.
February 27, 2004 - "Women of Steel: Gender, the Railroad, and Cultural Change, 1870-1900"
Amy G. Richter, Clark University
This paper is part of a larger study tracing the experiences and depictions of women railroad passengers during the second half of the nineteenth century. It investigates the "New Women" and "American Girls" of fiction, journalism and advertising copy deemed fit for the rails. Understanding the context in which brave and capable white women were celebrated as public actors reveals how the social and cultural changes posed by the railroad reshaped gender identities - confounding the Victorian ideal of separate spheres while reconciling the demands and pace of the railroad with familiar qualities of Victorian womanhood.
March 19, 2004 - "Rethinking Second Nature: Power and Nature in the 20th Century Southwest" (formerly "Mapping Power: Urban Space and 'Second Nature' in the American Southwest")
Andrew Needham, University of Michigan
In 1930, residents of central Arizona's Salt River Valley received their electric power from a number of small power plants all located within a 50-mile radius of downtown Phoenix. In 1968, residents of the Valley of the Sun relied on a sprawling network of hydroelectric dams and coal and natural gas-fired power plants centered on northern Arizona's Colorado Plateau, plants that also supplied consumers in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Albuquerque. This paper examines this transition from local to regional power production in order to investigate the new relationships between nature, technology, and capital forged by urban growth and rural industrialization in the postwar Southwest.
April 23, 2004 - "Culture and the Transfer of Technology: Sewing Machines, Glass Bottles, and Cyanide in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico (formerly "Culture and the Transfer of Technology: A Case Study from Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico")
Ted Beatty, University of Notre Dame
Between 1880 and 1910 Mexico underwent its first significant era of industrialization and economic growth, based in large part on the introduction of new technologies from abroad. Historians have long recognized the tremendous flow into Mexico during this period of machinery, tools, and industrial methods, as well as the considerable dependence of Mexican industry on foreign technicians. Yet the link betwen these two developments remains largely unexplored.
This paper considers technology transfer in late nineteenth century Mexico. It is based on three cases: sewing machines, glass bottles, and cyanide (a process used in the mining industry). In each cae, no one possessed perfect information. Innovators typically knew far more about the original design and purpose of a new technology than they did about its deployment in the particular social, economic, and political environment of lae-nineteenth-century Mexico. Consumers assumed the innovation process would be frictionless; in fact, it often involved a reciprocal adjustment betwen the technical object, its user, and the local setting.
Please do not request the paper unless you plan to attend.
Individuals interested in giving papers in the future should contact Richard R. John, History Department M/C 198, University of Illinois at Chicago, 601 South Morgan Street, Chicago, IL 60607-7109; phone: (312) 996-8569; e-mail: rjohn@uic.edu.