Department of Modern History

Local Navigation

•    Division of Humanities


•    Home
•    About Department
•    Staff
•    News & Events
•    Conferences & Seminars
•    Undergraduate
•    Honours
•    Postgraduate
•    Research
•  
•    Writing Essays in History
•    Australian History Museum

Professor Carroll Pursell

PhD, University of California (Berkeley)

Office:	W6A 412
Phone:	+61 2 9850 8806
Email:	carroll.pursell@hmn.mq.edu.au

 

• Research
• Selected Publications
• Teaching
• Administration

 

Research

Research Interests
American History
History of Technology
Gender and Technology
Technology and the Environment

 

Selected Publications

Books Authored

Technology In Postwar America: A History (Columbia University Press, 2007) Book Description Carroll Pursell draws fascinating connections between icons of popular culture and landmarks of American technological innovation as he studies the effect of postwar politics on the evolution of science and technology. Pursell's entertaining history involves a range of technologies, from television, the automobile, and genetically engineered crops to contraceptives, Tupperware, and the Veg-O-Matic, and extracts political meaning from private objects, like toy soldiers, low riders, and lawn chemicals. He also discusses the state of technology today, addressing such issues as globalization and other challenges to "modernist" technologies.
The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
White Heat: People and Technology (companion volume to a BBC television series). London: BBC Books, 1994. [American edition by University of California Press, 1994].

Books Edited

• A Companion to American Technology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2004.
  
  
• A Hammer in Their Hands: A Documentary History of Technology and the African American Experience. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004.
  
  
• American Technology. Blackwell Readers in American Social and Cultural History. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001.
  
• From Conservation to Ecology: The Development of Environmental Concern. New York, 1973.
  
  
• The Military Industrial Complex. New York, 1972.

Articles

• “Appropriate Technology, Modernity and U.S. Foreign Aid,” Science and Cultural Diversity: Proceedings of the XXIst International Congress of History of Science, I, Plenary Lectures (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 2003), 175-187.
  
  
• “Domesticating modernity: the Electrical Association for Women, 1924-86,” British Journal for the History of Science, 32 (March, 1999), 47-67.
  
• “The Hoe or the Tractor? Appropriate Technology and American Technical Aid After World War II,” Icon, 5 (1999), 90-99.
  
  
• "'Am I a Lady or an Engineer?': The Origins of the Women's Engineering Society in Britain, 1918-1940," Technology and Culture, 34 (Jan., 1993), 78-97.
  
  
• "The Construction of Masculinity and Technology," Polhem, 11 (1993), 206-219.

Essays in Books

• “Feminism and the Rethinking of the History of Technology,” Feminism in Twentieth-Century Science, Technology, and Medicine, ed. Angela N.H. Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck and Londa Schiebinger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 113-127.
  
  
• "The Long Summer of Boy Engineering," Possible Dreams: Enthusiasm for Technology in America, ed. John L. Wright (Dearborn: Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village, 1992), pp. 34-43.
  
  
• "The History of Technology and the Study of Material Culture," Material Culture: A Research Guide, ed. Thomas J. Schlereth (Lawrence, 1985), pp. 113-126.
  
  
• "Conservation, Environmentalism, and the Engineers: The Progressive Era and the Recent Past," Environmental History: Critical Issues in Comparative Perspective, ed. Kendall E. Bailes (Lanham, 1985), pp. 176-192.
  
  

[Back to Top]

 

Teaching

 

 

Administration

Committee
Executive Council, International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC)

 

Go To

Staff List