[PDF] Technology A World History eBook

Author : Daniel R. Headrick Professor of Social Sciences and History Roosevelt University
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 197 pages
File Size : 16,34 MB
Release : 2009-02-25
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 0199713669

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Today technology has created a world of dazzling progress, growing disparities of wealth and poverty, and looming threats to the environment. Technology: A World History offers an illuminating backdrop to our present moment--a brilliant history of invention around the globe. Historian Daniel R. Headrick ranges from the Stone Age and the beginnings of agriculture to the Industrial Revolution and the electronic revolution of the recent past. In tracing the growing power of humans over nature through increasingly powerful innovations, he compares the evolution of technology in different parts of the world, providing a much broader account than is found in other histories of technology. We also discover how small changes sometimes have dramatic results--how, for instance, the stirrup revolutionized war and gave the Mongols a deadly advantage over the Chinese. And how the nailed horseshoe was a pivotal breakthrough for western farmers. Enlivened with many illustrations, Technology offers a fascinating look at the spread of inventions around the world, both as boons for humanity and as weapons of destruction.

Author : James Edward McClellan
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 504 pages
File Size : 39,80 MB
Release : 2006
Category : History
ISBN : 9780801883590

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Author : W. Bernard Carlson
Publisher :
Page : 7 pages
File Size : 46,13 MB
Release : 2005
Category : Technology and civilization
ISBN : 9780195218220

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From the invention of the wheel to the mapping of the genome, technology has always been deeply intertwined with the course of human history. Now, this fascinating set explores the role technology has played in eighteen separate cultures in world history, and reveals the many ways people use technology to control their environment, express religious values, deploy political power, confer social status, and afford themselves varying degrees of pleasure, comfort, and security. Whether focusing on Egyptian pyramids or medieval cathedrals, the Mayan astronomical calendar or the internet, Technology in World History illuminates the amazing array of technologies that humans have developed to shape and give meaning to their lives.

Author : Arnold Pacey
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 357 pages
File Size : 46,7 MB
Release : 2021-08-03
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 0262542463

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The new edition of a milestone work on the global history of technology. This milestone history of technology, first published in 1990 and now revised and expanded in light of recent research, broke new ground by taking a global view, avoiding the conventional Eurocentric perspective and placing the development of technology squarely in the context of a "world civilization." Case studies include "technological dialogues" between China and West Asia in the eleventh century, medieval African states and the Islamic world, and the United States and Japan post-1950. It examines railway empires through the examples of Russia and Japan and explores current synergies of innovation in energy supply and smartphone technology through African cases. The book uses the term "technological dialogue" to challenges the top-down concept of "technology transfer," showing instead that technologies are typically modified to fit local needs and conditions, often triggering further innovation. The authors trace these encounters and exchanges over a thousand years, examining changes in such technologies as agriculture, firearms, printing, electricity, and railroads. A new chapter brings the narrative into the twenty-first century, discussing technological developments including petrochemicals, aerospace, and digitalization from often unexpected global viewpoints and asking what new kind of industrial revolution is needed to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene.

Author : David Deming
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 239 pages
File Size : 19,42 MB
Release : 2014-01-10
Category : History
ISBN : 0786456426

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Science is a living, organic activity, the meaning and understanding of which have evolved incrementally over human history. This book, the second in a roughly chronological series, explores the evolution of science from the advents of Christianity and Islam through the Middle Ages, focusing especially on the historical relationship between science and religion. Specific topics include technological innovations during the Middle Ages; Islamic science; the Crusades; Gothic cathedrals; and the founding of Western universities. Close attention is given to such figures as Paul the Apostle, Hippolytus, Lactantius, Cyril of Alexandria, Hypatia, Cosmas Indicopleustes, and the Prophet Mohammed.

Author : Andrew Ede
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 40,5 MB
Release : 2019-11-07
Category : History
ISBN : 1108425607

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Celebrates the creativity of humanity by examining the history of technology as a strategy to solve real-world problems.

Author : David Edgerton
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 290 pages
File Size : 48,3 MB
Release : 2011-08-29
Category : History
ISBN : 0199832617

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In this new history, David Edgerton invites us to rethink how technology is used. For instance, horses contributed more to Nazi conquests than the V2. In influence, IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad matches Bill Gates. And corrugated iron is not dead yet.

Author : Daniel R. Headrick
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 412 pages
File Size : 39,98 MB
Release : 2012-03-25
Category : History
ISBN : 0691154325

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In this work, Daniel Headrick traces the evolution of Western technologies and sheds light on the environmental and social factors that have brought victory in some cases and unforeseen defeat in others.

Author : George Basalla
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 26,43 MB
Release : 1989-02-24
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 1316101584

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This book presents an evolutionary theory of technological change based upon recent scholarship in the history of technology and upon relevant material drawn from economic history and anthropology. It challenges the popular notion that technology advances by the efforts of a few heroic individuals who produce a series of revolutionary inventions owing little or nothing to the technological past. Therefore, the book's argument is shaped by analogies taken selectively from the theory of organic evolution, and not from the theory and practice of political revolution. Three themes appear, and reappear with variations, throughout the study. The first is diversity: an acknowledgment of the vast numbers of different kinds of made things (artifacts) that have long been available to humanity; the second is necessity: the belief that humans are driven to invent new artifacts in order to meet basic biological requirements such as food, shelter, and defense; and the third is technological evolution: an organic analogy that explains both the emergence of novel artifacts and their subsequent selection by society for incorporation into its material life without invoking either biological necessity or technological progress. Although the book is not intended to provide a strict chronological account of the development of technology, historical examples - including many of the major achievements of Western technology: the waterwheel, the printing press, the steam engine, automobiles and trucks, and the transistor - are used extensively to support its theoretical framework. The Evolution of Techology will be of interest to all readers seeking to learn how and why technology changes, including both students and specialists in the history of technology and science.

Author : Eric Schatzberg
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 353 pages
File Size : 15,43 MB
Release : 2018-11-12
Category : History
ISBN : 022658397X

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In modern life, technology is everywhere. Yet as a concept, technology is a mess. In popular discourse, technology is little more than the latest digital innovations. Scholars do little better, offering up competing definitions that include everything from steelmaking to singing. In Technology: Critical History of a Concept, Eric Schatzberg explains why technology is so difficult to define by examining its three thousand year history, one shaped by persistent tensions between scholars and technical practitioners. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, scholars have tended to hold technicians in low esteem, defining technical practices as mere means toward ends defined by others. Technicians, in contrast, have repeatedly pushed back against this characterization, insisting on the dignity, creativity, and cultural worth of their work. ​The tension between scholars and technicians continued from Aristotle through Francis Bacon and into the nineteenth century. It was only in the twentieth century that modern meanings of technology arose: technology as the industrial arts, technology as applied science, and technology as technique. Schatzberg traces these three meanings to the present day, when discourse about technology has become pervasive, but confusion among the three principal meanings of technology remains common. He shows that only through a humanistic concept of technology can we understand the complex human choices embedded in our modern world.