Description: This collection explores how technologies become forms of power. The questions addressed include: How do people embed their authority in technological systems? How do the machines and knowledge that make up technical systems strengthen or reshape social, political, or cultural power? The essays suggest ways that a more nuanced investigation of technology's complex history can enrich our understanding of the changing meanings of modernity; the relationship between the state, expertise, and authority; the construction of national identity; changes in the structure and distribution of labor; the relationship between political ideology and industrial development; political practices in the Cold War; and more. The essays show how insight into the technological dimensions of such broad processes can help synthesize material and cultural methods of inquiry and how a reframing of technology's past in broader historical terms can suggest new directions for science and technology studies.

The essays were written in honor of Thomas Parke Hughes and Agatha Chipley Hughes, whose spirit of inquiry they seek to continue.

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