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Technology in Postwar America: A History. By Carroll Pursell. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Pp. xvi+280. $35.
Carroll Pursell is without question one of the most interesting historians of modern technology. The author of important papers and rich textbooks, he brings a great range of reading and sympathy to the subject.His latest book, covering the United States from World War II to the present, should be on the shelves of every student of American technology. It deals with familiar themes-familiar in part because Pursell has helped make them so-including the centrality of the military-industrial complex and the importance of the cultural change of the late 1960s and 1970s (and of Reaganism too). It should be read because it sums up rather well common assumptions among the best historians about American technology in its period, and about what the historiography of technology is.
This book sets out "to tell a story about American technology since World War II: how it changed, why it took the form it did, and what it has meant to the country" (p. ix). It is aimed "not at engineers and historians of technology, but to an audience of students and the general...