Geoffrey B. Pingree

This interesting volume collects essays about how various technologies, many of them now disappeared, were understood and used when they were new. I liked: Wendy Bellion’s study of profiles – created by a device that physically traced over a person’s body – and the meaning of “representationâ€? in art and politics in Jeffersonian American; Patricia Crain’s exploration of the “optical telegraph,â€? used to teach large numbers of school children in rote learning, and the ways it was used to homogenize and enculturare Native American children; Katherine Stubbs on “telegraphic fiction,â€? stories written by telegraph operators about telegraphy, used to express and negotiate anxieties about the feminization of the initially all-male profession; Diane Zimmerman Umble’s piece on competing meanings of the telephone in Amish country – its arrival was so disruptive that it caused both the Amish and the Mennonites to split; and Ellen Gruber Garvey’s fascinating essay on the hobby of scrapbooking, showing how nineteenth-century families created their own identities by clipping bits and pieces from newspapers and other sources and pasting them into books; the scrapbooks often weren’t blank, but were printed books repurposed to function as scrapbooks, industrial-age palimpsests.… (plus d'informations)