When Warren Kendall Lewis left Spring Garden Farm in Delaware in 1901 to enter MIT, he had no idea that he was becoming part of a profession that would bring untold good to his country but would also contribute to the death of his family’s farm. In this book written a century later, Professor Lewis’s granddaughter, a cultural historian who has served in the administration of MIT, uses her grandfather’s and her own experience to make sense of the rapidly changing role of technology in contemporary life.

During the early decades of the 20th century, agricultural practice in America was transformed from a pre-industrial to an industrial activity. In this study Deborah Fitzgerald argues that farms became modernised in the 1920s because they adopted not only new machinery but also the financial, cultural and ideological apparatus of industrialism.

In a world of multinational commerce, satellite broadcasting, migration, terrorism, and global arms dealing, what is said and how it is said in one society can no longer be isolated from what is said and how it is said in another. Debating Muslims focuses on Iranian culture, Shi’ite Islam, and Iranians in the United States, offering an experiment in postmodern ethnography and an invitation to think in a multifaceted way about Islam in the contemporary world.

In a familiar story, the USS Monitor battled the CSS Virginia (the armored and refitted USS Merrimack) at Hampton Roads in March of 1862. In War, Technology, and Experience aboard the USS Monitor, David A. Mindell adds a new perspective to the story as he explores how mariners―fighting “blindly” below the waterline―lived and coped with the metal monster they called the “iron coffin.”

Using cultural anthropology to analyze debates that reverberate throughout the human sciences, George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer look closely at cultural anthropology’s past accomplishments, its current predicaments, its future direction, and the insights it has to offer other fields of study. The result is a provocative work that is important for scholars interested in a critical approach to social science, art, literature, and history, as well as anthropology. This second edition considers new challenges to the field which have arisen since the book’s original publication.

Life on the Screen is a book not about computers, but about people and how computers are causing us to reevaluate our identities in the age of the Internet. We are using life on the screen to engage in new ways of thinking about evolution, relationships, politics, sex, and the self.

These thirteen essays explore a crucial historical question that has been notoriously hard to pin down: To what extent, and by what means, does a society’s technology determine its political, social, economic, and cultural forms?

In Dream Worlds, Rosalind Williams examines the origins and moral implications of consumer society, providing a cultural history of its emergence in late nineteenth-century France.