Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUMMonday, April 27, 1998 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 AuditoriumCarroll Pursell"Documenting the African-American Experience with Technology"ABSTRACT -- A project I now have underway with my associate, Jill Snider at the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian Institution, will contribute to the documentation of the experience of African-Americans with technology. Deliberately kept out of the fields of engineering and invention for generations, African-Americans (like women, and for similar reasons) were defined out of the American experience with technology. It is the purpose of our project to redefine what it means to experience technology, and collect documents for a book that will provide a wide range of illustrations of how African-Americans have used and participated in American technological change. SPEAKER: CARROLL PURSELL
is currently Adeline Barry Davee Professor in the History Department, Case
Western Reserve University, where he is also director of the Graduate Program
in the History of Technology, Science, and Medicine. A former president
of the Society for the History of Technology and currently president of
the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC). His
most recent books are White Heat: People and Technology (1994) and The
Machine in America: A Social History of Technology (1995).
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