I mean the constellation combining the gasoline-powered automobile with assembly-line manufacturing, asphalt highways, mobile mechanized warfare, traffic signals, suburban living, suburban sprawl, and the rubber, oil and petrochemicals industries. In fact, they are aware of it in much the same way fish are aware of the sea. Of several examples my own favorite technocultural constellation, the one I like best to present to American students, is the one that is so much of a daily reality for the majority of them. It lends itself to what I call "constellations," broader than what the technology historian calls "complexes," which bring together technological, economic, social and environmental facts in relationships that students rarely expect, but find easy to understand. For this kind of exercise technology is the ideal factor. Forster put it best in Howard's End: "Only connect." Many teachers will agree that the best way to explain a factor in world history is to demonstrate its connections to other factors and to itself. Footnotes and bibliography are attached in a way that should provide teachers with the means to find out what they need to know to construct a unit or a posthole and materials, like those indispensable Connections videos, which both teachers and students will find useful.
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What is presented here, then, is a brief general chronological outline of the world history of technology, postholed with technology complexes worth highlighting and how to engage students' interest in them. As a theme, it carries a class from the beginnings of our species all the way to the 21st century, and it is worth pointing out that, according to most modern macroeconomists, the single most important factor in the growth of per capita GNP is productivity-the value added per worker per hour-and that the single most important factor in increasing productivity is capital investment in new technology. The history of technology is not divorced from diplomatic, economic or social history, but it is a clearly separable focus, as William McNeill has often pointed out. That is, it affects very large number of human beings in very deep ways for a very long time. "After all, they had the money then, didn't they?" For some students, honest answers to this sort of question can be the first accessible and interesting kind of historical reasoning they run into. Freshmen will occasionally ask me why the radio or the automobile wasn't invented and marketed in ancient Rome. American students are particularly interested in the technology that is now commercially aimed at them, complete with sophisticated marketing and planned obsolescence but they are not aware of the web of connections that give it a history. It is a primary category for the anthropological study of cultures and it should be a part of every introductory history survey course if only because contemporary students all over the world are fascinated by how things work and even more fascinated by how new devices change the lives of millions of people. Technology is the making and social use of tools-extensions of mind and body. The newer World History textbooks are better on technology but World History teachers will need to know why some historians 2 use the term, "industrial revolution" to describe the technological changes that occurred in Song-Dynasty China, or for China in the 12th century. In Western Civilization textbooks, the sections on the Industrial Revolution sometimes no longer tell a student how a Bessemer converter made steel, or changed the economics of steel production, or even what steel is. Besides, textbooks often fail to be concrete about this most material of topics, which bores students at best and at worst makes the theme unteachable. Some treat technology as a subtopic of economic history, but technology creation and technology transfer do not always happen for purely economic reasons and not all their effects are economic. Technology is not in every history textbook. HOW TO USE THE THEME OF TECHNOLOGY IN TEACHING THE WORLD HISTORY SURVEY COURSE 1 William Everdell
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