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Reviews
| A Hammer in Their Hands: A Documentary History of Technology and the African-American Experience. Ed. by Carroll Pursell. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005. xviii+397 pp., illus., bibl., index. $40 hb (ISBN 0-262-16225-3).
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With the intention of jump-starting a literature on the contributions of African Americans to the development of American technology, Carroll Pursell has produced A Hammer in Their Hands: A Documentary History of Technology and the African-American Experience. The book resembles an annotated bibliography, bringing together excerpts, essays, and other documents to illustrate with editorial commentary the forgotten role of Africans and African Americans in the history of American technology. Pursell describes in his preface how social conditions in America have led to the widespread belief that African Americans had little participation in the development of new technologies. To help correct this skewed perspective, he compiled this volume with a tripartite purpose. First, he aimed to demonstrate how Africans and African Americans were deeply involved in the creation and use of many different technologies. Second, he compiled the documents to serve as examples of the types of resources available for future research on African American history and the history of technology. Third, Pursell wanted to provide a starting point for scholars interested in these topics.
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To accomplish these goals, Pursell has assembled a wide variety of original source material: stories, advertisements, laws, jokes and folklore, pamphlets, songs, and other resources, organizing them into seven sections that are arranged chronologically. Each of these sections has a short introduction on the place of African Americans in American society and in the technological community during that chronological period. For each of the documents provided within a section, Pursell provides brief editorial comments and discusses its significance.
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The first section, called the Colonial Era, is typical, including excerpts on the use of "African Medicine in the New World," the African basis for Cotton Mather's inoculation for smallpox, and several examples of advertisements for runaway slaves. The second section covers the Antebellum Years. It includes, among other things, excerpts from The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass and Uncle Tom's Cabin, an advertisement for "colored" inventors, patent specifications by African American inventors, and descriptions of the use of slave labor. The section on War, Reconstruction, and Segregation includes an essay on African Americans finding a place in the industrial age, short stories from the period, and an essay on the use and underlying meaning of the bicycle in African American women's lives.
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The chapters dealing with the 20th century are a bit longer and richer in documentation. The Progressive Era section contains information on African American female inventor Clara Frye, a 50-year summary of colored inventors, an essay on the state of racial progress, and an excerpt from Booker T. Washington's Working with the Hands, among other documents. In the section titled Between the World Wars, Pursell includes information on "Industrial Employment," a meaningful short story titled "The Typewriter" about the hidden meanings of a typewriter, as well as a description of industrial education at Tuskegee Institute and a patent for the traffic signal by African American inventor G. A. Morgan.
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The section on World War II and the Cold War has information on African American aviator Janet Harmon Bragg, the use of Black women in a wartime airplane assembly plant, and "Elm City, a Negro Community in Action" following the war. The final section, The Movement and Beyond, focuses on recent aid to African nations using technology, Black women engineers and technologists, African Americans and the development of the Internet, and movements to prevent environmental injustices from occurring in African American neighborhoods. Pursell also offers two pages of further reading. While some of the citations in this section are for books such as The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, others are more narrowly focused.
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| Purcell's commentaries on the volume's documents are well written and make the documents more meaningful by placing them in context. Illustrations are infrequent but include patent designs, archival photographs, and historic sketches. I suspect few will read the book from cover to cover; rather, it seems better suited to be a reference. For industrial archaeologists, this book offers a new perspective for understanding the development, use, and origins of a number of technologies in which African Americans have had a prominent role. Overall, Pursell's collection offers researchers a good base for initiating exploration of the role of African Americans in American technology and nicely complements a companion volume of essays produced by MIT Press in 2004: Technology and the African-American Experience. |
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