Blueprint for Modernity: A Global History of Engineering
History 30986 (crosslisted in KSGA, IDS, and STV)
University of Notre Dame
Description
This class examines the history of engineering in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (ca. 1870-1940) and its relationship with capitalism and economic development on a global scale. Engineers came to design, implement, and manage nearly all elements of the modern world from their positions within corporations and state bureaucracies; they quickly became the primary agents in development and planning in the 20th century. To examine this history, we take a data science approach, using digital tools to gather. organize, and analyze historical evidence, instead of more traditional archival research. In the course, we will examine the history of modern engineering, introduce students to basic tools in data science, digital humanities, and data visualization, and, finally, students will develop their own data-intensive research projects using the knowledge and skills they have learned. The class is designed for students from both Arts & Letters and STEM disciplines as a window onto historical methods, and an introduction to using qualitative data for analysis and visualization. There are no prerequisites.
This course emerges from a three-year NSF-funded research grant, which includes a commitment to develop new undergraduate courses on the subject, as well as open access course materials. Student projects from this course are eligible for potential inclusion in our global dataset and/or for hosting on the project website.
Learning Goals
1. Students will be able to synthesize and articulate central themes in the rise of university-based professional expertise--specifically engineering--and its place in growth of corporate and state organizations in the early 20th century.
2. Students will be able to discuss the relative role and relationship of diffusion from the global North and development in the global South, and to critically engage this framework.
3. Students will gain an appreciation for the cultural context of engineering, including issues of nationality/nationalism, gender, race, class, and other forms of social positioning.
4. Students will gain experience with the use of qualitative and non traditional historical data sources, which will improve their flexibility to do research in academic or professional settings.
5. Students will be able to recognize and use basic skills in OCR data scraping, R programming, and Excel to create, clean, and manage data sets, as well as create basic data visualizations.
6. Students will have practiced the basic skills of professional digital presentations, both to synchronous on-line audiences and through mock-website interfaces.
Course Requirements & Grading
1. Attendance and participation are required in every class session. University Covid protocols apply in this class.
2. Assigned Readings, for class discussion. See the participation guidelines at the end of this syllabus.
All readings will be available on the class Sakai page, and should be completed before the class in which they are assigned.
= Participation in class = 20% of final grade
3. Frequent mini-assignments (Blog posts on readings, small-group work, primary source exercises, etc.) See additional guidelines at the end of this syllabus.
4. Digital techniques exercises, as scheduled (be sure to download the free software, identified below.
= Daily assignments & exercises = 30% of final grade
5. Final project with data, analytical, narrative, and presentation components, as scheduled. Further guidelines to be distributed in class.
= final project (including sequenced assignments) = 50% of final grade
Assigned Readings are all available either on the class Sakai site, or electronically via the Hesburgh Library, or from the instructors.
Assignments are due via Sakai, unless otherwise specified.
Technology in Class: Students should have a laptop in class for all of the coding (“skills module”) sessions, and we may ask for digital access to course materials in other class sessions as well. Students may choose to take lecture and discussion notes on their laptops, but we are well aware that (1) laptops present temptations to engage in distracting, non-class activities; any sign of that in class will result in an “absence” for that class day; and (2) note taking by hand offers large rewards in cognitive learning, as research shows (e.g. in this Scientific American article).
Coding Requirements
1. Every student should have a laptop in class for the schedule coding sessions;
2. Please download, beforehand, these three (free) programs:
https://rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/
https://gephi.org/users/download/
Late Policy – Late work is strongly discouraged and will be penalized1/3 a grade for every class day late. Contact the instructors if you have medical or other emergencies, which will be treated as per normal University guidelines.
Academic Honesty -- All students should be familiar with Notre Dame’s Academic Code of Honor: http://honorcode.nd.edu/. All students must observe its provisions in all written and oral work, including oral presentations, quizzes and exams, and drafts and final versions of projects. Plagiarism on any assignment is grounds for failing both the assignment and the course. Most simply, if you take the ideas or words from another author (or fellow student) and represent it as your own, you plagiarize. Don’t. If you have any questions or want guidance on how to avoid plagiarism, please see me.
Accessibility Services – Any student with a documented disability should contact the Sara Bea Disability Services regarding any accommodations that might need to be made. For more information about Disability Services, or to register, please visit http://sarabeadisabilityservices.nd.edu/ .
DO NOT HESITATE TO CONTACT US VIA EMAIL WITH ANY QUESTIONS OR CONCERNS.
Course Content
The course has three primary goals: to introduce students to the global history of modern engineering, to introduce them to some elements of digital humanities and database work, and to develop their own historical database projects:
1: Introduction to engineering in global history
Class sessions and related coursework will introduce students to the history of modern engineering in a global context. Class time will include a mix of short lectures and discussions, occasional use of flipped-classrooms to maximize discussion, mini-presentations by students on specific topics, and small-group (breakout) discussions. Readings will cover the central elements and debates in the history of engineering and expertise ca. 1870-1940. We will pay particular attention to the rise of professional engineering in Europe and the US, the global mobility and work of these engineers, and subsequent local experiences and responses in countries such as India, China, Mexico, Chile and beyond.
2: Technical instruction in basic database work and coding
Class sessions will be devoted to introductory lessons focused on creating a database from qualitative historical sources, and using it to create data visualizations. This includes introductory skill work on OCR and manual data scraping, cleaning data with regex methods, and data visualizations. This is not a full-blown coding class, but rather an introduction to coding in Rand its tools for creating, cleaning, analyzing, and visualizing qualitative data. Each student will have opportunities to locate non-traditional qualitative and historical sources, guided and mentored by the instructors. We will examine what constitutes historical sources, we will practice locating data sources online, building an archive/database, and we will develop introductory methods for extracting, cleaning, and visualizing data.
3: Building, using & presenting a database from qualitative sources and a Project Report
The knowledge and skills acquired through other elements of the course will be used by students to build, analyze and visualize their own database. Students will write a short project report that frames and situates their database, and explains how they address an analytical question in the history of global engineering. Student work will be project-focused in individual, small group, or lab settings, with time scheduled for instructor review and peer sharing and feedback. The final class session/s will be devoted to the practice of presenting concise narrative stories using data. These presentations may take the form of either a data visualization, web or poster presentation, or an analytical narrative, geared toward a web-based audience. Final projects will be eligible for hosting on the project’s NSF-supported public-facing website, with credits to the student authors.
CLASS SCHEDULE – readings and assignments may be modified by instructors with at least 2 days notice
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Week 1: What is Engineering? What is an Engineer?
Tuesday 8/24 – What is an engineer? What do engineers do?
Thursday 8/26 – The Blueprint Project: Introduction to our work and yours
Read for Thursday: John Rae and Rudi Volti, “Introduction” to The Engineer in History (NY: 2001), pp. 1-4.
è Due Thursday in class: “This is engineered…” assignment; see class instruction.
Week 2: Where … and What … is the World?
Read for Tuesday: Rosenberg, Emily. “Circuits of Expertise,” pp. 919-959 in A World Connecting, 1870-1945 (Harvard University Press, 2012).
è Blog post #1, on readings, due midnight 8/30.
Tuesday 8/31 – Discussion & Lecture: World History 1870-1930: the BIGS
Thursday 9/2 – Skills module: What is history, historical data, and interpretive questions?
Week 3: Where do Engineers Come From?
Read for Tuesday: Edwin Layton, “Mirror-Image Twins: The Communities of Science and Technology in 19th-Century America,” Technology and Culture 12:4, 1971, pp. 562-580.
è Blog post #2, on readings, due midnight 9/6
Tuesday 9/7 – Discussion & Lecture: A (Short, Global) History of Engineering
Thursday 9/9 – Skills module: Introduction to coding in R. Types of information
Week 4: Are Engineers Creative? Engineering and Innovation
Read for Tuesday: Usselman, Steven W. “Patents, Engineering Professionals, and Pipelines of Innovation: The Internalization of Technical Discovery by Nineteenth-Century American Railroads,” in Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Daniel M.G. Raff and Peter Temin, eds., Learning by Doing in Markets, Firms, and Countries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999, 61-102.
è Patent assignment (see separate instructions), due midnight 9/13
Tuesday 9/14 – Discussion & Lecture: Designing Big Business (& Big Government)
Thursday 9/16 – Skills module: Historical sources & data science
Week 5: Is Engineering Imperialistic?
Read for Tuesday: Tuffnell, Stephen, “Engineering Inter-Imperialism: American Miners and the Transformation of Global Mining, 1871-1910,” Journal of Global History 10, 2015, pp. 53-76
è Blog Post #3, on readings, due midnight 9/20.
Tuesday 9/21 – Discussion & Lecture: Designing Big Empires
Thursday 9/23 – Skills module: Conditionals and functions
Week 6: Engineers at War
Read for Tuesday: Choose one of the following:
Mimura, Janis, chapter 1: “Japan’s Wartime Technocrats,” in Planning for empire: reform bureaucrats and the Japanese wartime state (Cornell University Press, 2011)
OR
Guse, John C. "Nazi Ideology and Engineers at War: Fritz Todt’s ‘Speaker System’," Journal of Contemporary History 48:1 (2013): 150-174.
è Be prepared to present status report on source and research question for your project; 3 ppt slides max; see separate instructions.
Tuesday 9/28 – Discussion of Reading + Data source presentations & peer evaluation
Thursday 9/30 – Data source presentations & peer evaluation (cont’d)
Week 7: Where do Engineers Work?
Read for Tuesday: Moore, Aaron Stephen. "“The Yalu River Era of Developing Asia”: Japanese Expertise, Colonial Power, and the Construction of Sup'ung Dam." The Journal of Asian Studies 72.1 (2013): 115-139
è Due: First Research Project Progress Report: Data source for the project, discussion of, and a research question, due midnight 10/4
è Blog Post #4, on readings, due midnight 10/4
Tuesday 10/5 – Discussion and Lecture: Engineering Careers and Career Paths
Thursday 10/7 – Skills module: Processing and plotting.
Week 8: A Global Profession?
Read for Tuesday: Choose one of the following:
Ramnath, Aparajith, “Engineers in India, 1900-1947,” introduction to The Birth of an Indian Profession: Engineers, Industry, and the State 1900-1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 1-25.
OR
Köll, Elisabeth, “The Making of the Civil Engineer in China: Knowledge Transfer, Institution Building, and the Rise of a Profession, in XXX
è Blog post #5, on readings, due midnight 10/11
Tuesday 10/12 – Discussion & Lecture: Engineering goes Local, Globally
Thursday 10/14 – Skills module: Extracting and cleaning. Tidyverse
è Instructors provide progress report on participation & assignments.
è Optional Fall Break Extra Credit Movie assignment – choose one movie from our “engineers & film” list (or propose your own for approval. Watch it, and submit an blog entry by 10/24 midnight.
FALL BREAK ==========================================================
Week 9: Engineers and the Corporation
Read for Tuesday: James W. Martin, Banana cowboys: The United Fruit Company and the culture of corporate colonialism. University of New Mexico Press, 2018., Chapter 5, “Becoming Banana cowboys”
Tuesday 10/26 – Discussion & Lecture: From independent experts to corporate citizens
Thursday 10/28 – – Skills module: Extracting and cleaning. Tidyverse, reshape, dplyr
Week 10: Is there a Global Engineering Network?
Read for Tuesday: Read both of the following:
Bruce Sinclair, “”The Power of Ceremony: Creating an International Engineering Community,” History of Technology 21, 1999, pp. 203-211.
AND
Stephen Tuffnell, “Engineering Gold Rushes: Engineers and the Mechanics of Global Connectivity,” in A Global History of Gold Rushes (University of California Press, 2018), pp. 229-245.
è Blog post #6, on readings, due midnight 11/1
Tuesday 11/2 – Discussion & Lecture: How do Engineers Interact and Build Networks?
Thursday 11/4 – Skills module: Visualization 2. Sf, Tmap, plotly
Week 11: Engineering, Resources & the Environment
Read for Tuesday: Choose one of the following:
Brown, Kathryn L. Plutopia: Nuclear families, atomic cities, and the great Soviet and American plutonium disasters. Oxford University Press, USA, 2013. Chapters 7-9
OR
Wellock, Thomas R. "The children of Chernobyl: Engineers and the campaign for safety in soviet-designed reactors in Central and Eastern Europe." History and technology 29.1 (2013): 3-32
Tuesday 11/9 – Discussion & Lecture: Engineers and externalities
Thursday 11/11 – Project progress – peer evaluation
è (a) cleaning & coding progress report; (b) preliminary research bibliography (see instructions) due by midnight 11/11
Week 12: Engineers on the Frontier (from railroads to smart phones)
Read for Thursday: choose one of the following:
Lécuyer, Christophe. Making Silicon Valley: Engineering Culture, Innovation, and Industrial Growth, 1930–1970. MIT Press, 2006, Chapter 4. Revolution in Silicon
OR
Usdin, Steven T. Engineering communism: how two Americans spied for Stalin and founded the Soviet Silicon Valley. Yale University Press, 2008. Chapter 8. “Zelenograd”
è Blog post #7, on readings, due midnight 11/15
Tuesday 11/16 – Discussion & Lecture: Innovation: streams, cycles, patterns…and constraints
Thursday 11/18 – Project progress – peer evaluation
Week 13: Engineering our World
Read for Tuesday: McClellan III, James E., and Harold Dorn. “Under Today’s Pharaohs,” in Science and technology in world history: an introduction. JHU Press, 2015. Chapter 20.
Tuesday 11/23 – Individual project consultations
THANKSGIVING
Week 14: Your Turn …
Tuesday 11/30 – Project Presentations
Thursday 12/2 – Project Presentations
Week 15: Engineering the Future
Read for Tuesday: TBD
Tuesday 12/7 – Final Discussion: Engineering the Future, Engineering our Demise?
Final Project due no later than 12/10, 12:30.
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Participation Guidelines
Our time in class will be spent in discussion as much as in traditional lectures. The role of the instructor is to guide the discussion, to provoke responses by raising questions or alternative interpretations, and occasionally to offer extended commentary on the broader context of a particular issue or event.
Students should:
1. complete all the assigned readings before class; read actively and critically!
2. come to class prepared to participate: to offer your ideas, interpretation, and/or questions about the assigned reading;
3. take notes (at least note the main ideas, events, and issues in the readings), and what you find particularly interesting, unexpected, confusing, and/or persuasive;
4. identify and note any questions you have about the readings and their context, including the who, what, where, & when, but also issues of interpretation (why) and the broader historical context.
Effective participation does not mean you have to offer extended and insightful commentary on every issue. It does mean that you should be prepared to say something in class:
· to ask a question,
· to summarize the main point or an important issue in each reading,
· to comment on what you found interesting or confusing or surprising.
Our cardinal rule is to respect (and be interested in) the opinions and comments of others in the class. This does not mean we all have to agree. Disagreement is important and common among historians, but disagreement should be informed. That is, we should be prepared to explain the basis of our opinions, the evidence from the reading that supports our own ideas, and to ask informed questions. FINALLY, if you are frustrated, unsure of something, or simply excited about issues from the class (!), please feel free to contact us during office hours or at another time.
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Blog Post Instructions
Your assignment is to write a short “blog post” on the assigned reading/s, with a 400 word limit. This is an exercise in professional writing, in reaching broad audiences for your ideas.
Blogs are one form of the traditional “reading response,” except aimed at engaging a broader audience than just the professor. The first objective is to capture the attention and interest of the reader, and to convey to them some aspect/s of the content, message, or argument of the reading. It is often useful to focus your post on what you find most interesting, surprising, provocative, confusing, or important in the reading. Your interest and engagement is likely to carry over to the reader. The second objective is to connect your blog to the material in the readings in a clear, direct fashion. Your focus should be on the readings assigned since the previous blog assignment, but you are encouraged to incorporate ideas and references from any previous reading.
What makes a good blog post? There is no single, effective format. Good strategies include:
• The “make a provocative statement then explain” approach – the initial statement needs to connect to the reading in some way, and be as attention-grabbing as possible (or, that highlights an odd fact that provides a window onto a bigger issue or question). Then you proceed to explain it in clear, simple terms, drawing from the reading. Examples might include “Everything you know about XXX is wrong,” or “Roadbuilding created empires. Here’s why.”
• The “What is XXX” approach – here you focus on a central concept (or definition) in the reading. Your blog post then offers a discussion how the author defines the concept (or the gaps in the definition, or your uncertainties in what a concept means or entails).
• The Answer-a-Question approach – Pose a question that gets at the (or one of the) central issues in the reading. For example, “Were engineers imperialists?” Why did (e.g.) India/China/Mexico develop engineering education programs?” Your blog post then addresses and discusses the question, drawing on the issues raised in the reading.
• The Contrarian Approach – Play the devils advocate (but show you understand the author’s argument!). This approach is easier when you are an expert in the subject matter (rather than a student), but can be fun to play with. They key is to engage seriously with the issues and argument/s of the author.
• The list – for example, titled “4 Reasons why Mining Engineers are the Most Important Topic Ever” (ok, you can do better than that…!). Your blob post would include a short introduction and then the list, with a brief explanation of each item, and a short wrap-up. This could take the form of “3 Things I don’t Understand”!
Again, your argument or explanation in each blog should be rooted in material from the assigned readings. Use parenthetical citations to refer to specific ideas or passages, like this: (Rosenberg, 532). You may directly quote short phrases, but avoid using long quotations.
To avoid:
• overly general, vague language
• your opinion or assertion, without evidence from the readings (in other words, insufficient references to the readings)
• disorganized presentation, or lack of clarity generally
The blog posts are due at 12:00am (midnight) as listed on the class schedule; submitted via Sakai.
Grading will be as follows:
0 points = no submission
1 point = submission, but brief, and no compelling or sustained use of ideas from the reading
2 points = good post, based on ideas and issues drawn from the reading, but without the clarity or depth of explanation that would warrant a top score.
3 points = excellent post, an original argument but based firmly on ideas and issues drawn from the readings, presented in a clean, clear, and compelling style.