On the road in New Mexico

This year’s Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) conference took place in Albuquerque, which is one of those many American cities where most Europeans would find it hard to live but which definitely attracts the traveler. Isabel Perez, a PhD student in my department, writes her thesis on environment and literature in this culturally intriguing part of the United States, so to some extent our KTH delegation knew what to expect and what to look out for. But the conference also coincided with the famous Albuquerque International Baloon Fiesta, which proved to a truly magnificent event. I also took the opportunity to head north along the road toward Santa Fe, New Mexico’s legendary capital city, and the even more mythical town of Los Alamos, higher up in the mountains, where in the 1940s Robert Oppenheimer and his colleagues built the world’s first atomic bombs. Not much remains these days of the original war-time facilities, but the local historical museum has an excellent exhibition on display and at the Fuller Lodge it is still possible to get an idea of the social atmosphere during those bomb-making years.

The SHOT meeting itself featured some interesting discussions about the future of history of technology as a field that touched on quite a few of my own thoughts that I’ve had in recent years. Although the history of technology to a certain extent remains my home in academia, I have long had a feeling that it would be counterproductive to define my area of interest in terms of what is discussed at history of technology conferences or published in history of technology journals.

History of technology, or so it appears to me, can only survive as a research field through close interaction with other fields such as economic and business history, environmental history, STS, innovation studies, aera studies, historical geography – and in particular general history. The ultimate proof of success in history of technology research, as I now tend to see it, is that our research results become integrated into general history books dealing with, say, Sweden’s modern history, the history of the Soviet Union, or the history of the World Wars. By this measure, those of us who still refer to us as historians of technology have so far usually failed in our research efforts.