This revision of the da Vinci Medal Address, delivered at SHOT's annual meeting in Los Angeles on October 28, 2023, presents two valedictories. The first reviews fifty years in SHOT studying and teaching the history of technology and warfare. It argues that not only is technology a particularly useful category of analysis for understanding change in warfare over the course of human history, but warfare is an equally useful category of analysis for studying technological change. The second valedictory invites SHOT members to clarify what they mean by the term "technology." There is no need for a single definition, but the term is so widely and loosely used in contemporary discourse that it behooves SHOT members to explain what they mean by it.
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This revision of the da Vinci Medal Address, delivered at SHOT's annual meeting in Los Angeles on October 28, 2023, presents two valedictories. The first reviews fifty years in SHOT studying and teaching the history of technology and warfare. It argues that not only is technology a particularly useful category of analysis for understanding change in warfare over the course of human history, but warfare is an equally useful category of analysis for studying technological change.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOn the occasion of the award of the author's da Vinci Medal in 2022, this article sketches a perspective, material political economy, employed by the author, explaining it by drawing on Marc Bloch's classic account of the dispute in European feudalism between milling grain on watermills or windmills controlled by feudal superiors, who could exact fees, and common people's use of hand mills. It considers the material political economy aspects of two modern technologies. The first is automated high-frequency trading in finance, where there are typically conflicts with incumbents and material efforts to favor "market-making" over "aggressive" algorithms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTechnology is an indispensable element in all societies. But early histories gave us only a narrow perspective of the rich human experience with technology. In the last thirty years, scholars have embraced histories of technology from less familiar vantage points, taking up neglected histories and neglected peoples.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOn the occasion of the award of the author's da Vinci Medal in 2020, this article looks back to the early twentieth-century origins of the history of technology. Spotlighted are three pioneering historians, Sigfried Giedion, Abbott Payson Usher, and Lewis Mumford, whose writings were important to society and the author's intellectual journey. Their histories, written in the wake of World War I and the Second Industrial Revolution, addressed a question as urgent today as in their time: will the human spirit survive the age of machines? Their shared quest to save the soul of technology took them into the world of machines but also cosmic realms.
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