http://www.lib.iastate.edu/spcl/wise/wise.html

Jonathan Coopersmith’s manuscript on the history of the fax machine, 1843-2000, continues with much progress but, he writes, like socialism, its accomplishment remains on the horizon, though much closer. His recent publications include “Humans in Space: Is the Cost Too High?” AAS Space Times July-August, 2002, “Taking Up the Garbage,” Ad Astra 14, 4 (July-August 2002), and “Membership Has Its Partisans,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 24,2 (April-June 2002).

Ruth Cowan says that after 34 years at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, she left to become the Janice and Julius Bers Professor of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, in September 2002.

Deborah Douglas has been preparing a new exhibition of photographs to open in November as part of a project to rehouse the MIT Museum’s collection of 19,000 negatives documenting the MIT Radiation Laboratory. A new unit on the arts, humanities and social sciences will be added to the museum’s “Mind and Hand” (last year’s big show) in October. The revised manuscript of American women in aviation is off to the press. Participating in the workshop “Race and/in the History of Technology” sponsored by Evelynn Hammonds’ Center for the Study of Diversity was a major highlight of the year.

Deborah Fitzgerald continues her work to develop a scholarly group in Cambridge, Massachusetts of people interested in history and anthropology of rural life, technological change, and environmental/agricultural issues. Last year, with colleague Harriet Ritvo, she got a grant from the Mellon Foundation for a seminar called “Modern Times, Rural Places.” She writes that the seminar attracted quite a large group of scholars from area universities. This year she is on leave, but plans to restart the project next fall. She has completed a book called Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture, which will be published by Yale in spring 2003.

Daryl Hafter’s article “Women in the Underground Business of Eighteenth-Century Lyon,” in Enterprise & Society 2 (March 2001) won the Newcomen Award for best article of the year. She gave one of the two plenary speeches for the Textile Society of America meeting at Northampton, Massachusetts in September 2002, and has been elected to the board of the Western Society for French History.

Haven Hawley spent the summer of 2002 in residence for two Reese Fellowships in American Bibliography and the History of the Book in the Americas, one in Worcester, Mass and the other at the University of Virginia. She will be giving presentations at Georgia Tech and the University of Toronto Centre for the Book in late 2002. She is currently working on her dissertation, “American Publishers of Indecent Books, 1840-1890,” and hopes to finish during the 2002-2003 academic year.

Rebecca Herzig is working on a book to be published with Rutgers University Press, tentatively titled Suffering for Science: Faith and Reason in Nineteenth-Century America. She is also co-editing (with Evelynn Hammonds and Abby Bass) a volume of primary scientific documents on race and gender to be published by MIT Press.

Susan Schmidt Horning successfully defended her dissertation, “Chasing Sound: The Culture and Technology of Recording Studios in America, 1877-1977,” and received her Ph.D. in History from Case Western Reserve University in August 2002. She is teaching at CWRU for the 2002-2003 academic year and was selected to participate in the “Sound Matters: New Technology and Music” international workshop at the Universiteit Maastricht, The Netherlands, in November.

Pamela Laird of the University of Colorado, Denver writes that she has begun a project with the working title “How to Succeed in Business: The Power of Social Capital in American Enterprise.” It will focus on the invention of processes such as what we now call networking and mentoring. She spent the past year on an American Association of University Women fellowship, but will return to teaching this fall as an associate professor.

Nina Lerman was granted tenure and promoted to Associate Professor at Whitman College, where she teaches broadly in US history. Her current work seeks to incorporate race and regionalism into our understanding of access to and ideologies of technological knowledge. See also the announcement for her book in the announcements section.

Maura Phillips Mackowski graduated in May from Arizona State University, in Tempe, Arizona, with a doctorate in history. Her dissertation advisors were co-chairs Stephen J. Pyne and Jannelle Warren-Findley and Robert Trennert. The title of her dissertation was “Human Factors: Aerospace Medicine and the Origins of Manned Space Flight in the United States.”

Alan D. Meyer of the University of Delaware reports that he successfully defended his prospectus, tentatively titled, “Why Fly? A Social and Cultural History of Private Aviation in Post-WWII America.” This autumn he will be continuing his research and writing in Washington, D.C., thanks to a 1-year Guggenheim Dissertation Fellowship at the National Air and Space Museum. After four years together, he and Evelyn (Lyn) Causey are getting married in October.

Kathleen Ochs is recovering from complications resulting from an accident, and is unable to attend meetings. However, she continues to work on finding frameworks in which to understand the history of technology and science from their beginnings 2.6 million years ago to the present, the longue duree approach– and to teach. She hopes to go into semi-retirement in May 2004, to have more time for the research.

Ruth Oldenziel is pleased to announce a new book, co-edited with fellow WITHies Nina Lerman and Arwen Mohun. For more details, see the announcements section of this newsletter. Ruth’s other publications include the History of Household Technology in Twentieth-Century Netherlands (2001) as part of a multivolume work on Dutch history of technology and “Man the Maker, Woman the Consumer: The Consumption Junction Revisited” in Feminism in Twentieth-Century Science, Technology and Medicine (Chicago University, 2001). Carroll Pursell, Pamela Mack, Michael Mahoney and Ruth Schwartz Cowan also have essays in this volume.

Mary Orisich is a graduate student in Economics at the University of Massachusetts, whose research interests include industrial organization and technological change, and gender issues, loosely defined. She is in the later stages of writing her dissertation on the relationship between strategic groups, choice of technique and technical diversity. She writes that while her work does not have a gender component, she takes great interest in “women and technology” issues.

Sara Pritchard has moved to the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania for an eighteen-month Mellon postdoc. She is working on her book, tentatively titled Recreating the Rhone: Nature, Technology, and the State in France Since 1945. Her dissertation was awarded the Rachel Carson Prize for the Best Dissertation in Environmental History in 2001 by the American Society for Environmental History. In December 2003, Sara will be heading west to a tenure-track position in world/France/French empire at Montana State University in Bozeman.

Bayla Singer’s book “Sex With Gods; A Cultural History Of Flying” is scheduled to be published in the spring of 2003 by Texas A&M University Press. The book will be about 200 pages (plus back matter), with about 20 illustrations that you won’t find in other histories of flying. It’s intended for general audiences, and has a full scholarly apparatus so anyone who wants to pursue any given topic in greater depth may easily do so.

Amy Slaton is working under an NSF grant on a project entitled “Minority Engineering Education in the United States Since 1945,” which compares the education of African-American and non-minority students in an effort to explain the persistent “whiteness” of American engineering occupations. The project will examine instructional materials, built environments, and the political conditions under which engineering has been taught since WWII. She received tenure this year in the Department of History and Politics at Drexel University.

Julie Wosk’s new book Women and the Machine: Representations From the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age was published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in December 2001. During 2001 and 2002, she presented papers at the Society for Literature and Science conference in Buffalo, at a feminist art history conference at Barnard College, at Union College in Schenectady, and at the New York Academy of Sciences. She’s looking for suggestions and ideas for a new website: womenandthemachine.com.

Marian E. Vlasa is an active duty Army officer, currently stationed at Ft Hood, Texas. She is enrolled in the History PhD program at Syracuse University. She writes that she is interested in issues of gender and technology in military applications, as well has having an interest in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, social and political responses to industrialization and technology, political iconography, women’s history and military history.

There was a flurry of listserv activity in late 2000 and early 2001, followed by a long lull, and then a remarkable outpouring of issues in late September 2001 related to the terrorist attacks on the United States. While a portion of the discussion could be characterized as strictly scholarly, this year Withniks tended to use the listserv more as a means of professional support. The listserv became an important means of communicating with one’s colleagues the impact and impressions made by the unfolding events. The following is a summary of the various inquiries and discussions.

Non-member Aenne Soell (soell@hdk-berlin.de) asked for recommendations books and articles on women and speed, particularly in the context of the history of the automobile. Among the items mentioned was Taking the Wheel by Virginia Scharff, and Bayla Singer’s article, “Automobiles and Femininity”in Research in Philosophy & Technology, 1993.

Jonathan Coopersmith solicited suggestions for readings for a lecture on the history of birth control. This generated numerous responses which dominated the listserv in December 2000. Among the suggestions were The volume edited by Judy McGaw’s Early American Technology: From the Colonial era to 1850; Lost, Hidden, Obstructed and Repressed: Contraceptive and Abortive Technology in the Early Delaware Valley by Susan E. Klepp, pp 68-113; Body Talk, edited by Mary Lay and Laura Gurak; chapter three of Autumn Stanley’s Mothers and Daughters of Invention; Linda Gordon’s Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: Birth Control in America; Kristin Luker’s Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood; a reading by Margaret Sanger from Kerber and De Hart, Women’s America; and Andrea Tone’s Controlling Reproduction. Judy McGaw called to the attention of those who teach about women and technology that WHYY (Philadelphia Public TV) aired a documentary about Rebecca Lukens early in 2001. Finally, there was some discussion of the appropriateness of job announcements on the WITH listserv, and it was generally agreed that these could continue to be posted.

Early in 2001 the discussion turned briefly to electrical blackouts, in part because California was experiencing “rolling” blackouts at the time.

A discussion of textiles that took place late in 2000 was followed in early 2001 with a query on potential sources for the history of carriage blankets. This took the textile talk along a new path after Karen Freeze initiated what became a fascinating dialog on the re-use of textiles such as flour sacks as clothes or other useful articles. Pretty soon, this became a debate on the nature of improvised, domestic “making-do” and bricolage. The discussion briefly got heated when some of the male subscribers slipped up and revealed one of the Big Male Secrets–that household repairs and tasks are thought of (by some men) as burdens that cut into more enjoyable pastimes. The list members then began debating the gender, class, and generational aspects of household maintenance.

After a long summer lull, the listserv cranked back to life in September following the terrorist attacks on the U.S. American scholars were particularly active on the list, sharing reflections about the events and telling about how they discussed the events with their students. The discussion was ongoing at this issue of the newsletter went to bed, so perhaps it can be archived more fully next time.

Following a contribution by Eleanor Maass of WITH newsletters dating to Vol.1; No. 1(Oct. 1,1977), the WITH archive was underway. Listserv members were asked for ideas about other contributions.

Sometimes history finds the historians and it is clear that the listserv provided a useful space for some of WITH’s members to explore the vertigo of intellect and emotion resulting from the events of September 11th. It was a great relief to all to hear from many living in or near the areas most directly affected. Online, WITH members conveyed myriad reactions both personal and professional. Poems and prayers were offered along with petitions and urgent pleas to contribute our voices as scholars to the national discourse. Several WITH members who teach in colleges and universities communicated the challenge of addressing and discussing the numbing issues with their students. To date much of that dialogue has been among WITH members living in the United States. The thoughts and contributions of our international members are most welcome. The decision to reprint this exchange is one which will be taken up at the meeting in San Jose.

In closing, it is important to acknowledge the many silent voices, those who have chosen not to participate in the online discussion or whose contact with WITH comes through this newsletter. To our knowledge no member of WITH lost her or his life on September 11th but it is likely that WITH members may have lost loved ones, friends or colleagues. To you we extend our collective sympathy.