Technology and the African-American Experience: Needs and Opportunities for StudyBruce Sinclair Race and technology are two of the most powerful motifs in American history, but until recently they have not often been considered in relation to each other. This collection of essays examines the intersection of the two in a variety of social and technological contexts, pointing out, as the subtitle (borrowed from Brooke Hindle's classic 1966 work Early American Technology) puts it, the "needs and opportunities for study." The essays challenge what editor Bruce Sinclair calls the "myth of black disingenuity"—the historical perception that black people were technically incompetent. Enslaved Africans actually brought with them the techniques of rice cultivation that proved so profitable to their white owners, and antebellum iron working in the South depended heavily on blacks' craft skills. The essays document the realities of black technical creativity—in catalogs of patented inventiveness, in the use of "invisible technologies" such as sea chanteys, and in the mastery of complex new technologies. But the book also explores the economic and social functions of the disingenuity myth, and therefore its persistence. African-Americans often saw in new technologies a means to escape racial prejudice, but white Americans used them just as often to re-frame the boundaries of social behavior. The essays show that technologies and racialized thought are much more tightly connected than we have imagined. |
Contents
Rice Cultivation and African Continuities | 19 |
Invention and Innovation 16191930 | 49 |
History in the Funny Papers | 71 |
Technology Chanteys and AfricanAmericans in | 107 |
Automobility and Racial Uplift in the Interwar Years | 131 |
Other editions - View all
Technology and the African-American Experience: Needs and Opportunities for ... Bruce Sinclair No preview available - 2006 |
Technology and the African-American Experience: Needs and Opportunities for ... Bruce Sinclair No preview available - 2006 |
Common terms and phrases
African-American Experience African-American history Agricultural American history antebellum auto automobile black inventors black motorists Booker Bruce Sinclair California Eagle century chanteys Chicago Civil College Colored Coppin craft Driving While Black economic electrical embankment engineering education Environmental essay exhibitions explore Exposition fish folder Gambia River gender Georgia hair Hampton historians history of technology Hypertrichosis Industrial Department industrial education inland swamp Institute invention issues Jack Johnson Journal of Negro labor machines manual training material mechanical menhaden museums NAACP National Negro Education open road patent Philadelphia plantation planters political production programs race and technology racial Real McCoy reprint rice rice cultivation rice system River role Ruth Schwartz Cowan Science and Engineering segregation skills Slavery slaves social South Carolina Southern teachers tech Technology and Culture tidewater rice tion trades Tuskegee University Press urban W. E. B. Du Bois Washington West African rice women York