Overview

Now updated — A comprehensive, 500-year history of technology in society. Historian Thomas J. Misa's sweeping history of the relationship between technology and society over the past 500 years reveals how technological innovations have shaped—and have been shaped by—the cultures in which they arose. Spanning the preindustrial past, the age of scientific, political, and industrial revolutions, as well as the more recent eras of imperialism, modernism, and global security, this compelling work evaluates what Misa calls ""the question of technology."" In this edition, Misa brings his acclaimed text up to date by drawing on current scholarship while retaining sharply drawn portraits of individual people, artifacts, and systems. Each chapter has been honed to relate to contemporary concerns. Globalization, Misa argues, looks differently considering today's virulent nationalism, cultural chauvinism, and trade wars. A new chapter focuses on the digital age from 1990 to 2016. The book also examines how today's unsustainable energy systems, insecure information networks, and vulnerable global shipping have helped foster geopolitical risks and instability and takes a look at the coronavirus pandemic from the perspective of Wuhan, China's high-tech district. A masterful analysis of how technology and culture have influenced each other over five centuries, Leonardo to the Internet frames a history that illuminates modern-day problems and prospects faced by our technology-dependent world.

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9781421443096

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Reviews

A fascinating, informative, and well-illustrated book. -- Choice A powerful pick for any library interested in a scholarly yet lively survey of connections between science and culture. -- Midwest Book Review An engaging and worthy study of the interaction of technology and culture over the last 560 years . . . Misa's excellent study can contribute much to such critical circumspection regarding technology, human reason and choices, and the purposes and possibilities of human thriving and communal life. -- Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies Closely reasoned, reflective, and written with insight, grace, and wit, Misa's book takes us on a personal tour of technology and history, seeking to define and analyze paradigmatic techno-cultural eras. -- Technology and Culture Follows [Thomas] Hughes's model of combining an engaging historical narrative with deeper lessons about technology. -- American Scholar His case studies, such as that of Italian futurism or the localizations of the global McDonald's, provide good starting points for thought and discussion. -- Journal of Interdisciplinary History This review cannot do justice to the precision and grace with which Misa analyzes technologies in their social contexts. He convincingly demonstrates the usefulness of his conceptual model. -- History and Technology

This book is indispensable and exciting reading for both scholars and a wider audience. -Emanuela Scarpellini, Technology & Culture

Author Information

Thomas J. Misa is the author or coauthor of many books, including A Nation of Steel: The Making of Modern America, 1865–1925 and FastLane: Managing Science in the Internet World.

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