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Article: The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900.(Book review)
- Article from:
- The Historian
- Article date:
- June 22, 2009
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2009 Phi Alpha Theta, History Honor Society, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900. By David Edgerton. (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xviii, 270. $26.00.)
In this pathbreaking book, the author presents a radical reinterpretation of technology and invention, and in so doing he rereads not only the history of technology, but modern history itself. David Edgerton rejects the standard innovation-centered history of technology, one that looks to a succession of great technological inventions (and inventors) of high cultural visibility--Watt's steam engine, Oppenheimer's atomic bomb, Jobs's and Wozniak's personal computer--as transformative events characteristic of ...