The full structure of Technology and the Making of the Modern World (IE Humanities, Dr. Patrick De Oliveira), reconstructed from the official syllabus. The course runs chronologically from the late 1700s to the early 2000s, following Thomas Misa's Leonardo to the Internet, with the premise — after Walter Benjamin and Langdon Winner — that technologies are not neutral engines of progress but human creations that reorganize how power is distributed. This page lays out every module and all thirty sessions; the interactive demos let you manipulate the arguments these sessions build.
Overview
A first-year, compulsory IE IMPACT pillar course in the Humanities. We do not study the biographies of lone inventors; we study how technologies — from the early industrial revolution to the early computer age — reconfigured social, economic, and cultural relationships, and how technology is better understood as a site of contestation and negotiation than as a force that determines history. Expect to read widely: roughly 25–60 pages per week, usually a set of primary sources paired with a scholarly source.
Learning objectives
The Humanities pillar gives students anchors for a deeper analysis of the reality they live in — encouraging critical thinking and the tools both to analyze others' ideas and to construct and defend their own.
- Analytical, critical & creative thinking — develop the capacity to interrogate received narratives about technology and progress.
- Comprehensive reading of complex texts — work through dense primary sources and scholarly arguments at 25–60 pages per week.
- Investigate, research & obtain information — locate, weigh, and contextualize historical evidence.
- Learn about other cultures & human experiences — recover marginalized voices that simplistic, progress-only stories tend to erase.
- Write academic texts with different argumentation techniques — build claims layered on evidence and warrant (try the argument-anatomy demo).
Teaching methodology
IE's method is collaborative, active, and applied. The course mixes lectures (foundational context), readings (learning through critical analysis), and discussions (learning through constructive dialogue), with several asynchronous sessions. The bars show how the estimated 150-hour workload is weighted across activities.
Assessment
Continuous evaluation over the semester (ordinary call). Good participation means preparing the readings, listening, and contributing thoughtfully — merely speaking does not earn full marks. The bars show each component's weight.
Deliverable. Ongoing, prepared contribution to class-wide discussion across all live sessions.
Evaluated on. Doing the readings in advance, active listening, thoughtful and helpful questions, and being a good team member in group work. Merely speaking does not earn full marks; using a device for non-class activities lowers the grade.
Deliverable. In-class exercises, asynchronous-session work, and field work distributed through the semester.
Evaluated on. Consistent engagement with the weekly primary-source dossiers and Misa chapters, and the quality of critical analysis demonstrated in those activities.
Deliverable. In-class midterm in Session 15 (format TBD). Covers Sessions 1–14.
Evaluated on. Argument and use of evidence over recall; a printed copy of Misa may be consulted.
Deliverable. Comprehensive in-class final in Session 30 (format TBD). Covers the whole course.
Evaluated on. Synthesis across the chronological arc and command of the central thesis that technology is a site of contestation.
Deliverable. In-class written reflection (Sessions 28–29) connecting personal learning to the Session-1 framing.
Evaluated on. Depth of reflection and the ability to link course themes back to the humanities.
Program — all 30 sessions
Grouped into four chronological modules. The course moves from situating the machines, through empire and mobility, into systems and ideology, and out to the digital present. Live in-person sessions pair primary sources with discussion; asynchronous sessions are reading-only chapters of Misa.
Situating the Machines & the Industrial Revolution
Sessions 1–5 · 1740–1851What the humanities are as a domain of inquiry, whether artifacts carry politics, and how the industrial revolution reorganized labor.
- Explain how humanistic inquiry differs from technical or scientific explanation, and why it matters for understanding technology.
- Reconstruct and assess Winner's argument that artifacts "have politics," distinguishing inherently political technologies from those whose politics depend on context.
- Define the industrial revolution as a reorganization of labor, time, and space rather than a simple story of invention.
- Read a primary source critically — situating the Lowell sources in their authors' interests and silences.
How do the humanities operate as a domain of knowledge, and how are their modes of inquiry different from other fields?
The opening sessions establish the course's intellectual stance. Rather than narrating heroic inventors, we ask what kind of knowledge the humanities produce and why interpretation, context, and contestation matter. Cronon's essay frames a liberal education as the cultivation of connection and judgment; Winner's classic essay supplies the analytical move that runs through the whole semester — that technical artifacts embody and enforce particular arrangements of power.
- The goals of a liberal education; how and why to read critically
- Winner's thesis that artifacts have politics — see the "do artifacts have politics?" demo
- Course premise: technology as a site of contestation, not a verdict of progress
What was the industrial revolution, and what were its effects on labor?
The question mark is deliberate: we interrogate whether "the industrial revolution" was a single event at all, and shift attention from machines to the people whose working lives were reorganized around them. The Lowell mills offer a concrete case — a planned New England factory town whose young women workers ("mill girls") were simultaneously celebrated as model laborers and disciplined by the clock, the boardinghouse, and the wage.
- The emergence of factory work and clock-time discipline
- The Lowell mills and the "mill girls" — see the factory-clock demo
- Who gained and who lost from mechanized production — the power-redistribution demo
Where and why did industrialization concentrate, and how did it reshape geography?
An asynchronous reading session: Misa argues that industrialization was a profoundly geographical phenomenon, clustering in particular regions and cities rather than spreading evenly, and culminating symbolically in the 1851 Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace. The chapter helps periodize the "modern world" the course will trace.
- Regional geographies of early industry; why industry clustered
- Periodizing the modern world — the timeline demo
Empire, Mobility & the Lit City
Sessions 6–12 · 1840–1914How technology made nineteenth-century imperial conquest possible — practically and ideologically — structured global networks, and transformed urban life.
- Distinguish the material and ideological roles technology played in European imperialism — tools of conquest versus the rhetoric that justified it.
- Analyze infrastructure (railways, telegraphs, steamships) as a system that integrates and extracts at the same time.
- Explain the concept of the "large technical system" and how applied science became institutionalized after 1870.
- Read artificial lighting as a case study in how a single technology reorganizes time, labor, sociability, and the experience of the city.
How did technology contribute to nineteenth-century European imperial expansion, both practically and ideologically?
Drawing on Daniel Headrick's "tools of empire" thesis, these sessions show how steamships, quinine prophylaxis, the breech-loading rifle, and the telegraph made the late-nineteenth-century "scramble" for Africa and Asia logistically possible. The paired "measure of men" theme examines how Europeans treated their own machinery as proof of civilizational superiority, turning technical difference into a racial and moral hierarchy that justified domination.
- Steamships, quinine, the telegraph and the rifle as instruments of conquest — the tools-of-empire demo
- The "civilizing mission" and the ideology of technological superiority
How did technology help structure global networks in the nineteenth century?
If Sessions 6–7 concern conquest, these concern integration: how railways, steamships, and telegraph cables knit distant places into a single, unevenly connected world. The U.S. Transcontinental Railroad (completed 1869) anchors the discussion — a feat of engineering built on Chinese and Irish migrant labor and the dispossession of Native nations, exemplifying Benjamin's claim that every monument of civilization is also a record of barbarism.
- Railways and steam as infrastructures of integration and extraction
- The Transcontinental Railroad — read against Benjamin's dialectic in the civilization/barbarism demo
How did instruments of empire and emerging technical systems extend control across the globe?
A double-chapter async session. Misa's "Instruments of Empire" supplies the scholarly backbone for Sessions 6–9; "Science and Systems" then charts the post-1870 emergence of large technical systems and the industrial research laboratory, where science became systematically harnessed to production and management.
- Technologies of empire; the rise of large technical systems and applied science
How did new lighting technologies through the nineteenth and early twentieth century transform urban life?
Gas and then electric lighting did far more than brighten streets: they extended the working and leisure day, made the night a governed and commercial space, and required vast networked systems of pipes, wires, and utilities. Following historians like Wolfgang Schivelbusch, we treat illumination as a case study in how a technological system rewrites the rhythms and social order of the modern city.
- Gas and electric lighting; the networked, illuminated city
- Lighting as a technological system and a new social order of time and space
Sensation, System & Ideology
Sessions 13–20 · 1900–1950The reshaped human sensorium, the rationalization of labor, and how totalitarian regimes built technological ideologies — bracketing the midterm.
- Describe how speed, spectacle, and mechanized perception reshaped modern sensory experience, and how Futurism aestheticized that change.
- Compare Taylorism and Fordism as systems for rationalizing labor, and weigh their costs and promises for workers.
- Explain how totalitarian regimes mobilized technology both materially and symbolically, refusing the comforting idea that technical "progress" is inherently liberal or benign.
- Connect modernist materials and the industrialization of warfare to Benjamin's civilization/barbarism dialectic.
How did technological change from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century reshape the human sensorium?
Railways, cinema, electric light, the telephone, and the crowded metropolis bombarded modern subjects with unprecedented speed and stimulus. Following thinkers like Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin on "shock" experience, we ask how perception itself was retrained — and how the Italian Futurists, led by Marinetti, turned that bombardment into an aesthetic and political program glorifying speed, machinery, and even war.
- Speed, spectacle and shock in modern perception
- Futurism and the aesthetic embrace of the machine
In-class midterm evaluation (format TBD) — 30% of the final grade.
A single live in-person session given over to assessment. Closed format to be confirmed; a printed copy of Misa may be consulted. Expect to synthesize across cases rather than recall isolated facts.
- Covers Modules I–II and the first half of Module III (Sessions 1–14)
- Rewards argument, evidence, and the course's interpretive framework over memorization
How did new technological systems reshape industrial production and labor in the early twentieth century?
Frederick Winslow Taylor's "scientific management" sought to measure and optimize every motion of the worker; Henry Ford's moving assembly line (1913) embedded that logic in machinery, pairing it with the $5 day. Alongside, a transnational "science of fatigue" studied the worker's body as a motor to be made efficient. Together these systems remade the worker as an interchangeable component — for some a route to prosperity, for others to deskilling and alienation.
- Scientific management, the assembly line, and the science of fatigue
- Fordist mass production and the remaking of the worker — extends the factory-clock demo
How did technology factor into Stalinist and Nazi ideology?
Both Stalin's USSR and Hitler's Germany made technology central to their self-image — Soviet electrification and heavy industry, Nazi autobahns, rocketry, and the perverse industrialization of genocide. Following Jeffrey Herf's idea of "reactionary modernism," we examine how regimes could embrace advanced machinery while rejecting liberal modernity, the starkest demonstration that technical progress carries no built-in politics of freedom.
- Technological ideologies of totalitarian regimes
- Civilization and barbarism bound together — the Benjamin dialectic demo
How did new materials and the technologies of war define the first half of the twentieth century?
A double-chapter async session. Misa's "Materials of Modernism" covers steel, concrete, aluminum, and synthetics that built the modernist world; "The Means of Destruction" follows technology into total war, from chemical weapons to the atomic bomb, underscoring that the same systems that built modern life also industrialized killing.
- Modernist materials; the industrialization of destruction
Big Science, the Home & the Digital World
Sessions 21–30 · 1945–2016State-directed "Big Science," the gendered industrialization of the household, and the human history of computing — closing with reflection and the final.
- Explain how the Cold War state reorganized research into "Big Science" through the military-industrial-academic complex.
- Use the household as a case to show that labor-saving technology does not automatically save labor — and that its benefits are distributed along gender lines.
- Recover the hidden and diverse human labor behind computing, countering the myth of the lone (usually male, usually Western) genius.
- Synthesize the whole semester into a reflective argument about technology, power, and the humanities.
How did the state shape large-scale technological initiatives in the mid twentieth century?
After 1945 the scale of technological work changed: research migrated into vast, state-funded collaborations binding the military, industry, and universities — what Eisenhower warned of as the "military-industrial complex" and historians call "Big Science." The Apollo moon landing (1969) is the showcase case: a sublime achievement that was also a Cold War weapon, built atop ballistic-missile technology and the labor of half a million people.
- Big Science, state funding and the Cold War research complex
- The moon landing as civilization-and-barbarism case — the dialectic demo
How did gender factor into the industrialization of household labor?
Drawing on Ruth Schwartz Cowan's classic More Work for Mother, these sessions show that twentieth-century domestic appliances — the washing machine, vacuum, refrigerator — did not reduce housework so much as raise its standards and re-entrench it as women's unpaid work. The home becomes a powerful test of the course's thesis: a technology marketed as liberation can quietly reinforce an existing division of power.
- Domestic appliances and the gendered division of labor
- "More work for mother" — who really gained from home technology (the power demo's 1950s case)
How did global culture and digital technology come to dominate the turn of the millennium?
A double-chapter async session bringing the chronology to the present. "Promises of Global Culture" examines media, containerized trade, and globalization; "Dominance of the Digital" traces the personal computer, the internet, and the networked world — setting up the final live unit on the human history of computing.
- Globalized culture; the rise and reach of digital technologies
How have humans been — and how do they continue to be — central to digital technologies?
Against the myth of the lone (male, Western) computing genius, these sessions recover the people who actually made computing work — from the women "computers" and ENIAC programmers, to figures like Ada Lovelace and the data workers and content moderators of today's "ghost work." The session ties directly to the course's AI policy: the labor and inequality behind digital tools are not incidental but constitutive.
- The hidden human labor behind computing; diversity in computer history
- Resisting the "technology is neutral" reflex — the determinist-fallacy demo
How does the semester's arc connect back to the questions raised in Session 1?
The course closes by returning to its starting questions. Students write an in-class reflection (5% of the grade) tying the semester's cases back to the framing texts — Cronon on liberal education and Winner on the politics of artifacts — and to Benjamin's dialectic of civilization and barbarism. The aim is a personal, synthetic argument about what studying the history of technology has taught them.
- In-class written reflection (5% of grade) connecting the course's overarching themes
- Revisits the Cronon and Winner readings from Sessions 1–2
In-class final evaluation (format TBD) — 35% of the final grade.
A live in-person session given over to the comprehensive final. Format to be confirmed; a printed copy of Misa may be consulted. The exam rewards the ability to argue across the whole chronological arc rather than to recall isolated cases.
- Comprehensive across the whole course (Sessions 1–29)
- Assesses synthesis, evidence, and command of the course's central thesis
Key concepts
A working vocabulary for the course. These terms recur across modules; keep them in view when reading the primary-source dossiers and Misa, and when arguing in discussion or on assessments.
- Technological determinism
- The (rejected) view that technology autonomously drives historical change and that society merely adapts. The course argues the reverse: technology is shaped by — and reshapes — social choices.
- Social construction of technology
- The approach that technologies take their form through negotiation among interested social groups, rather than by a single technical logic.
- Politics of artifacts (Winner)
- Langdon Winner's claim that designs can embody power relations — either by settling a political issue (e.g., access) or by requiring a particular social order to function.
- Civilization / barbarism dialectic (Benjamin)
- Walter Benjamin's insight that "there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism" — every achievement carries hidden costs and violence.
- Liberal education (Cronon)
- An education measured by breadth of sympathy and the capacity to "only connect" ideas, people, and consequences — the interpretive ethos behind the course.
- Large technical system
- An interconnected ensemble of machines, organizations, standards, and people (e.g., an electric-power or railway network) that behaves as a system rather than a set of devices. (Sess. 10–12)
- Time-discipline
- The reorganization of work and life around clock-time, wages, and the factory bell — central to the industrial reordering of labor. (Sess. 3–4)
- Tools of empire (Headrick)
- The technologies — steamships, quinine, telegraphs, repeating rifles — that made nineteenth-century imperial expansion practically achievable.
- Civilizing mission
- The ideology that framed colonial domination as a benevolent gift of technology and progress, masking extraction and violence. (Sess. 6–7)
- Machines as the measure of men (Adas)
- The idea that Europeans used their machinery as a yardstick to rank cultures, converting technical difference into racial hierarchy.
- Nocturnalization
- The extension of social, commercial, and working life into the night made possible by gas and electric lighting. (Sess. 11–12)
- The human sensorium
- The historically changing organization of human perception; modern speed and spectacle retrained how people saw, heard, and felt. (Sess. 13–14)
- Taylorism / scientific management
- Frederick Taylor's system of measuring and standardizing every motion of work to maximize efficiency and managerial control. (Sess. 16–17)
- Fordism
- Mass production built on the moving assembly line, interchangeable parts, and high wages for routinized labor — Taylorism embedded in machinery.
- Science of fatigue
- The transnational effort to study the working body as a "human motor" to be optimized against exhaustion.
- Reactionary modernism (Herf)
- The embrace of advanced technology in the service of anti-liberal, anti-Enlightenment politics — exemplified by Nazi Germany. (Sess. 18–19)
- Futurism
- The early-twentieth-century avant-garde movement that aestheticized speed, machinery, and even war; a register of technological "shock."
- Big Science
- Large-scale, expensive, state-funded research conducted by big teams and institutions, characteristic of the post-1945 era. (Sess. 21–22)
- Military-industrial-academic complex
- The Cold War alliance of armed forces, industry, and universities that directed and funded large technological initiatives.
- "More work for mother" (Cowan)
- Ruth Schwartz Cowan's finding that household appliances raised domestic standards rather than freeing time, re-entrenching women's unpaid labor. (Sess. 23–24)
- Gendered division of labor
- The socially assigned split of work by gender, which domestic technology reinforced rather than dissolved.
- Hidden / ghost labor
- The often-invisible human work — programmers, data workers, content moderators — that sustains "automatic" digital systems. (Sess. 26–27)
- Primary vs. scholarly source
- A primary source is evidence produced in the period studied; a scholarly source interprets it. Each week pairs the two for critical reading.
- Primitive accumulation by dispossession
- The expropriation of others' work or resources to build capital — invoked in the AI policy to describe how generative-AI firms were built on uncompensated labor.
Bibliography
The course's compulsory text anchors the chronological spine; each live session adds a set of primary sources (and, where noted, a scholarly source) for critical reading. The reading list is subject to change, with guidance given on how to approach scholarly articles and primary sources.
- Compulsory text. Thomas J. Misa (2022). Leonardo to the Internet: Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present, Third Edition. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 9781421443102 The scholarly spine of the course; chapters set the context for each module. A printed copy is recommended — it may be consulted during assessments. Chs. 3–8, 10 across Sessions 5, 10, 20, 25
- Framing essay. William Cronon, "'Only Connect…': The Goals of a Liberal Education," The American Scholar 67, no. 4 (1998): 73–80. Defines a liberal education as breadth of sympathy and the ability to connect — establishes the course's interpretive ethos. Sessions 1–2; revisited 28–29
- Framing essay. Langdon Winner, "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" in Major Problems in the History of American Technology, eds. Merritt Roe Smith & Gregory Clancey (Houghton Mifflin, 1998): 7–13. The analytic move running through the whole semester: designs embody and enforce political arrangements. Sessions 1–2; revisited 28–29
- Edited reader. Merritt Roe Smith & Gregory Clancey, eds., Major Problems in the History of American Technology (Houghton Mifflin, 1998). Source volume for the Winner essay and a model anthology of documents-plus-interpretation. Sessions 1–2
- Weekly primary-source dossiers (~30 pp. each), assigned for the live sessions and read alongside Misa: Lowell Factory Mills (3–4) · the "civilizing mission" (6–7) · Transcontinental Railroad (8–9) · urban lighting (11–12) · Futurism (13–14) · Fordism (16–17) · Nazi technology (18–19) · the moon landing (21–22) · the modern household (23–24) · diversity in computer history (26–27). Read each for whose interests it serves and what it leaves out.
- Course document. The syllabus itself, read as a primary source. Sets expectations, the AI and laptop policies, and the Benjamin epigraph that frames the course. Session 1