Engineering Colloquium Home
Schedule for this lecture.

Goddard Space Flight Center Engineering Colloquium

Date: Monday, April 27, 1998

Title: Documenting the African-American Experience with Technology

Speaker: Carroll Pursell

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 Bio

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).


Colloquium Committee Sponsor: Jim Heaney


Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov