Globalization and Vulnerability: Challenges and Opportunities for SHOT around Its Fiftieth Anniversary

Bijker presents a provocative argument about the challenges and opportunities of Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) around its fiftieth anniversary. SHOT's key challenges in the first years centered on defining the subject matter of the history and the methods by which to research it. In contribution to this set of essays, Tom Hughes recounts discussions on the definition of "technology," and on appropriate approaches to study its relation to civilization and culture. Though the patriarchs of SHOT explicitly thought about their relation to the engineering community and to general historians, the thrust of the discussions was internally directed.