The American West—where such landmarks as the Golden Gate Bridge rival wild landscapes in popularity and iconic significance—has been viewed as a frontier of technological innovation. Where Minds and Matters Meet calls attention to the convergence of Western history and the history of technology, showing that the region’s politics and culture have shaped seemingly placeless, global technological practices and institutions. Drawing on political and social history as well as art history, the book’s essays take the cultural measure of the region’s great technological milestones, including San Diego’s Panama-California Exposition, the building of the Hetch Hetchy Dam in the Sierras, and traffic planning in Los Angeles.
Contributors: Amy Bix, Louise Nelson Dyble, Patrick McCray, Linda Nash, Peter Neushul, Matthew W. Roth, Bruce Sinclair, L. Chase Smith, Carlene Stephens, Aristotle Tympas, Jason Weems, Peter Westwick, Stephanie Young
Volker Janssen is Associate Professor of History at California State University, Fullerton.
“Through a combination of solid scholarship and widely differing historical perspectives, the contributing authors make convincing and often counter-intuitive arguments to explain the motives behind some of the most fascinating large-scale projects undertaken during the last 100 years. While scholarly in tone, this one goes alongside Uglow’s The Lunar Men and Johnson’s The Ghost Map for just plain good reading."—Ken Phillips, Curator for Aerospace Science, California Science Center, Los Angeles
400 pp.6 x 9Illus: 35 b/w illustrations
9780520289109$85.00|£71.00Hardcover
Dec 2012