Book to Note

Carroll Pursell. Technology in Postwar America: A History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. xvi + 280 pp. $36.50.

Reviewed by Audra Wolfe

Technology doesn’t drive history; people do. If we now find ourselves mired in any number of crises that appear to have been created by technological change, we must remember that we have only ourselves to blame. Such is the clear, if somewhat grim, message to emerge from Carroll Pursell’s masterful synthesis of the history of technology in postwar America. Using examples ranging from the growth of agribusiness to the construction of suburbia, Pursell shows how the technological choices made by political and economic elites committed the United States—and indeed, most of the world—to a system that encouraged consumption and reinforced existing power dynamics. In sections on the short-lived congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the 1970s-era appropriate technology movement, Pursell reflects on some attempts to counter what he calls attitudes of “unquestioned technological optimism.” The book concludes with a discussion of the place of American technology in an ever more interconnected world.