
Leonardo to the Internet
Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
Now updated โ A comprehensive, 500-year history of technology in society.
Historian Thomas J. Misa's sweeping history of the relationship between technology and society over the past 500 years reveals how technological innovations have shapedโand have been shaped byโthe cultures in which they arose. Spanning the preindustrial past, the age of scientific, political, and industrial revolutions, as well as the more recent eras of imperialism, modernism, and global security, this compelling work evaluates what Misa calls "the question of technology."
In this edition, Misa brings his acclaimed text up to date by drawing on current scholarship while retaining sharply drawn portraits of individual people, artifacts, and systems. Each chapter has been honed to relate to contemporary concerns. Globalization, Misa argues, looks differently considering today's virulent nationalism, cultural chauvinism, and trade wars. A new chapter focuses on the digital age from 1990 to 2016. The book also examines how today's unsustainable energy systems, insecure information networks, and vulnerable global shipping have helped foster geopolitical risks and instability and takes a look at the coronavirus pandemic from the perspective of Wuhan, China's high-tech district.
A masterful analysis of how technology and culture have influenced each other over five centuries, Leonardo to the Internet frames a history that illuminates modern-day problems and prospects faced by our technology-dependent world.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1 Technologies of the Court, 1450โ1600
- Chapter 2 Techniques of Commerce, 1588โ1740
- Chapter 3 Geographies of Industry, 1740โ1851
- Chapter 4 Instruments of Empire, 1840โ1914
- Chapter 5 Science and Systems, 1870โ1930
- Chapter 6 Materials of Modernism, 1900โ1950
- Chapter 7 The Means of Destruction, 1933โ1990
- Chapter 8 Promises of Global Culture, 1970โ2001
- Chapter 9 Paths to Insecurity, 2001โ2010
- Chapter 10 Dominance of the Digital, 1990โ2016
- Chapter 11 The Question of Technology
- Notes
- Essay on Sources
- Index