2005-2006
Co-sponsored by the University of Illinois at Chicago, Roosevelt University, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and Northwestern University's School of Communications
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.
September 23, 2005 - Urgency, Uncertainty, and Innovation: Building Jet Engines in
Postwar America
Philip Scranton, Rutgers University and the Center for
the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum &
Library
During the Second World War, the U.S. military
experimented with a landmark British invention: the jet aircraft engine. Jet
propulsion came too late to shape the outcome of the war. Not until after 1945
would military-funded research and development transform this invention into a
viable innovation. This project would preoccupy several major American
corportations - including General Electric, Pratt & Whitney, Westinghouse,
GM-Allison, and Curtiss-Wright. This paper tells the largely unknown story of
how military planners and corporate leaders defined and managed this urgent
Cold War challenge, and explains why it was so frustratingly difficult to build
a jet engine that worked.
November 18, 2005 - Negotiating
Technology: River Masters, Steamboat Entrepreneurs and the State in
Southeastern China, 1927-1933
Grant Alger, University of
Pennsylvania
In the early twentieth century, local communities and
the Chinese state grappled with the shift from sail to steam in the river
transport trade. Focusing on the Min River in the southeastern province of
Fujian at a time when the Nationalist government was struggling to centralize
its authority, this paper documents how new technologies complicated the
relationship between society and the state by thrusting the local government
into a new role as a mediator between different technology-based interest
groups. In addition, it highlights how champions and critics of the new
technology deployed divergent notions of progress, tradition, and livelihodd in
their pursuit of political support.
December 16,
2005 - The Health and Physique of the New Negro:
Science and African-American Physicians in the Early Twentieth
Century
Adam Biggs, Harvard University
This paper examines how two early twentieth century African-American physicians, John A. Kenney and Charles V. Roman, employed science as a tool to construct the image of a "New Negro" while challenging popular theories of racial inferiority. It explores Kenney's efforts to commemorate the achievements of Daniel Hale Williams, an African-American surgeon who performed the first successful heart operation. In his celebratory accounts, I argue, Kenney downplayed controversial aspects of Williams' career in order to portray him as a model intellectual. The paper also shows how Roman, in his treatise American Civilization and the Negro (1916), exposed racial prejudice as an underlying premise in scientific classifications of race.
January 20, 2006 - From Users to Everyday Use:
The Portable Missionary Radio Receiver in West Africa, 1954-1970
Timothy
Stoneman, Georgia Institute of Technology
In the closing decades of the twentieth century,
American evangelical broadcasters dramatically expanded their global
operations. Using a wealth of original source materials, the current paper
provides an intensive prehistory for the rise of international religious radio.
The paper focuses on a single dimension, addressing how missionary users with
Station ELWA in Liberia employed "pretuning" as a technical and social device
to simultaneously construct audiences and constrict listenership between 1954
and 1970. The gradual diffusion of receivers and missionary programs in West
Africa served to legitimate American conservative evangelical religion in the
region and contributed to the continent's rise after 1970 as an epicenter of
world Christianity.
February 17, 2006 - The Telephone on Main Street: Local
Networks in the United States and Canada before 1900
Robert MacDougall,
University of Western Ontario
How would the hisotry of telecommunications change if we centered our attention on something as mundane as the telephone pole? This article compares the first decades of telephony in the Midwestern United States and Central Canada, arguing for a "bottom-up" history of the information age rooted in local conditions and physical space. We may imagine the telephone as an "annihilator of space," but 19th century telephony was profoundly shaped by its municipal milieu. Local politics - and the politics of localism - had a lasting impact on the development of the industry and indeed the culture and meaning of telephone use.
March 17, 2006 - Radio
Interference, "National Service," and the Development of European National
Broadcasting Systems in the Interwar Period
Jennifer Spohrer, Columbia University
Why did broadcasting develop along private lines in the
United States during the 1920s-30s, but along national, public lines in Europe?
The most common explanation is that radio was an outgrowth of
telecommunications systems, which were state monopolies in Europe, but private
ones in the United States. While convincing in the case of point-to-point
communications, however, this argument is less satisfying in the case of radio
broadcasting. In this paper I suggest an alternative, demonstrating how
European responses to the technical constraints of the radio spectrum - namely,
to problems of radio interference and frequency scarcity - encouraged the
growth of a national, public broadcasting model in Europe during the interwar
period.
April 28, 2006 - From Security to
Globalization: American Diplomacy and the Cold War Quest for Live
Trans-Atlantic Television
James Schwoch, Northwestern
University
This presentation discusses American interests regarding the development of communication satellites in the 1960s. Details include Telstar (1962), the first satellite capable of sending a live transatlantic TV signal, and INTELSAT, the first satellite network capable of world-wide live TV signal distribution. INTELSAT became globally operational only 19 days before the 1969 Apollo 11 Moon landing. Set against a background of Cold War telecommunications policy and global media activities that began during the Allied occupation of postwar German, the paper also argues that American interests in developing a central position in global television, as well as a wide array of global electronic information networks, is evident from the earliest days of the Cold War, concluding this interest is bound up in American visions of both east-west security as well as an emergent vision of globalization. The presentation will include computer projection of several maps and images, and a short video clip of the Telstar launch.
The seminar will meet on scheduled Fridays from 3:30 to 5:00 pm, to be followed by dinner in a local restaurant. Sessions will feature either an original paper or a particularly suggestive text. If you plan to attend, please contact Ginger Shulick at scholl@newberry.org, or call 312.255.3524 to request a copy of the paper (specify hard copy or e-mail attachment; we prefer the latter). The seminar format assumes that all participants have read the essay, and that everyone who requests a paper will attend the seminar. Seminars are held at the Newberry Library, 60 West Walton Street, Chicago, Illinois.
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.