Amy Sue Bix
Biographic Data
| ID | 1019364 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Amy Sue Bix |
| GIVEN NAMES | Amy Sue |
| FAMILY NAME | Bix |
| SIGNATURE | BIX A S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Iowa State University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 14 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 26 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Bikes and Bloomers
Remember the Sabbath’
The relationship of Modern Orthodox Jewish communities to technology is mediated by the calendar, following requirements to keep the Sabbath holy. As nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twentyfirst-century inventions reshaped work, public spaces, and domestic living, rabbis intensely debated whether, how, and why observant Jewish people should avoid using electric switches, kitchen appliances, elevators, and other everyday devices on the Sabbath. To jus…
The Wider Context of Samuelson’s MIT Textbook—Depression-Era Discussions about the Value of Economics Education for American Engineers
Standard histories of economic thought portray Paul Samuelson’s 1948 Economics textbook as the first serious attempt at teaching economics to young engineers. In reality, many other professors, both in economics and engineering, had extensively addressed that issue before World War II. Throughout the 1930s, the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education, faculty, and engineering professionals analyzed the relevance of economics to their w…
Mastering the Hard Stuff
This article details the history of college engineering competitions, originating with student concrete-canoe racing in the 1970s, through today’s multi-million-dollar international multiplicity of challenges. Despite initial differences between engineering educators and industry supporters over the ultimate purpose of undergraduate competitions, these events thrived because they evolved to suit many needs of students, professors, schools, corpor…
Joy Lisi Rankin. A People's History of Computing in the United States. Cambridge
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Molly Ladd-Taylor. Fixing the Poor
In Fixing the Poor, Molly Ladd-Taylor layers thought-provoking new levels of analysis to unpack links between American eugenics, social policy, and welfare practices. While other scholarship has traced extensive sterilization abuses in North Carolina, Virginia, and California, Ladd-Taylor offers Minnesota as a “relatively restrained” and thus important contrast (p.15). Early-twentieth-century Minnesota officials required guardians and often patie…
Disruptive Fixation
Reviewed by: Disruptive Fixation: School Reform and the Pitfalls of Techno-Idealism by Christo Sims Amy Sue Bix (bio) Disruptive Fixation: School Reform and the Pitfalls of Techno-Idealism. By Christo Sims. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Pp. 232. $27.95. Ethnographer Christo Sims addresses what he calls "the pitfalls of techno-idealism," specifically, the historically-repeated dream of improving K-12 education by introducing the lat…
David E. Nye. America's Assembly Line
Journal Article David E. Nye. America's Assembly Line. Get access David E. Nye. America's Assembly Line. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013. Pp. xii, 338. $29.95. Amy Sue Bix Amy Sue Bix Iowa State University [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 119, Issue 4, October 2014, Pages 1288–1289, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/119.4.1288a Published: 03 October 2014
Trapped by Opportunity
This essay review analyzes The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes by Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder, and David Ashton. The book argues that technological changes and business trends have facilitated deskilling and marginalization of workers, fostering a worldwide economic race to the bottom and raising the intensity of high-pressure competition for individuals and nations alike
Technology and Human Experience
As this issue of the OAH Magazine of History heads to press, the nation has turned its collective gaze to the unfolding disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Americans occupy a world saturated with technology. Many of us spend vast numbers of hours each day in front of electronic displays, or what we used to call screens. Our morning papers (what is left of them, anyway) regularly contain fullpage ads filled with the latest gadgetry, and a few of those…
Beyond Amelia Earhart
From the railroad to the atom bomb to the iPad, new technologies in the United States have repeatedly captured public attention. Historians of technology write about the novelty of such innovations in speed, power, and visual brilliance. But they also seek to understand how such inventions both reflect and affect the broader context of their particular time and place. Technology is not just about dazzling machines. It always needs to be understoo…
"Creating "Chicks Who Fix
Selling Mrs. Consumer
Reviewed by: Selling Mrs. Consumer: Christine Frederick and the Rise of Household Efficiency Amy Bix (bio) Selling Mrs. Consumer: Christine Frederick and the Rise of Household Efficiency. By Janice Williams Rutherford. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003. Pp xx+283. $49.95/$22.95. There are few better places to examine where history of technology meets women's history than the subject of household equipment. The life of Christine Frederick …
From ?Engineeresses? to ?Girl Engineers? to ?Good Engineers
Throughout the first half of the 20th century and into the second, women studying or working in engineering were popularly perceived as oddities at best, outcasts at worst, defying traditional gender norms. To gain public recognition for women engineers, advocates celebrated their successes in the field. To improve the climate for women in education and employment, activists organized to call attention to problems and demanded change. To aid wome…
Hard Times in the New Economy
Book Review| October 01 2004 Hard Times in the New Economy Ursula Huws, The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003.Andrew Ross, No Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs;Behind the Myth of the New Office Utopia. New York: Basic Books,2003. Amy Sue Bix Amy Sue Bix Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Radical History Review (2004) 2004 (90): 79–86. https://doi.org…
The Rahmi M. Koc Museum, Istanbul
The past decade has witnessed the establishment, rapid growth, and gradual maturing of the Rahmi M. Koç Museum in Istanbul, Turkey's only museum of science, technology, and the history of technology. Its focus on transportation, industrial, and communications technologies is familiar to European and American visitors, but new for Turkish citizens. While the Koç Museum displays objects from all over Europe and the United States, it seeks to highli…
Race on the Line
Equipped for Life
In tracing the development of technical education in American colleges and universities, historians have tended, perhaps inevitably, to concentrate on engineering departments. Those programs tell an important story: the evolution of specialized disciplines from practical, shop-oriented learning to theoretical science. Also, engineering schools were (as many still are) dominated by male students and faculty, who often connected technical expertise…
Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs? America's Debate over Technological Unemployment, 1929-1981
Americans today often associate scientific and change with progress and personal well-being. Yet underneath our confident assumptions lie serious questions. In Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs? Amy Sue Bix locates the origins of this confusion in the Great Depression, when social and economic crisis forced many Americans to re-examine ideas about science, technology, and progress. Growing fear of technological unemployment-the idea that increasing…
"Engineeresses" invade campus
Engineering education in the United States has a gendered history, one that reveals an ongoing debate over women's place in the predominantly male engineering profession. Historically, women in engineering programs, even more than in science, have stood out due to their rarity. Their very presence thus led university communities to confront questions about what it means to be a man or a woman in a modern technological society, what it means to be…
Talking About Machines
Reviewed by: Talking About Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job, and: Between Craft and Science: Technical Work in U.S. Settings * Amy Sue Bix (bio) Talking About Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job. By Julian E. Orr. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996. Pp. xvi+172; bibliography, index. $32.50 (cloth); $13.95 (paper). Between Craft and Science: Technical Work in U.S. Settings. Edited by Stephen R. Barley and Julian E. Orr. Itha…
Life in a Technocracy
126 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE and Yves Cohen’s 1930s-era comparison of political hostility to mar ket concerns in the USSR and French “market[s] that pushed entre preneurs into politics” (p. 227) are both finely drawn yet, like most of the empirical studies, rest unconnected to the theoretical cohort. Two small gems close this collection: Thomas Hughes’s examination of managing technical and organizational complexity in U.S. mili tar…
Life in a Technocracy
Diseases Chasing Money and Power
Through the 1980s and early 1990s, the course of American health research was increasingly shaped by politically-aggressive activism for two particular diseases, breast cancer and AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome). Even as national stakes rose, both in dollars spent and growing demands on the medical system, breast cancer and AIDS advocates made government policy-making for research ever more public and controversial. Through skillful cul…
Experiences and Voices of Eugenics Field-Workers
Experiences and ideas of eugenic 'field-workers' offer a new historical perspective on American eugenics, while highlighting terms of women's early twentieth-century scientific education and research employment. To advance knowledge of heredity, the US Eugenics Record Office (ERO), between 1910 and 1924, trained 258 students (85% of them women) to collect information about individuals, families and communities. Though some historians have dismiss…
"Creating "Chicks Who Fix
Equipped for Life
In tracing the development of technical education in American colleges and universities, historians have tended, perhaps inevitably, to concentrate on engineering departments. Those programs tell an important story: the evolution of specialized disciplines from practical, shop-oriented learning to theoretical science. Also, engineering schools were (as many still are) dominated by male students and faculty, who often connected technical expertise…
Experiences and Voices of Eugenics Field-Workers
Experiences and ideas of eugenic 'field-workers' offer a new historical perspective on American eugenics, while highlighting terms of women's early twentieth-century scientific education and research employment. To advance knowledge of heredity, the US Eugenics Record Office (ERO), between 1910 and 1924, trained 258 students (85% of them women) to collect information about individuals, families and communities. Though some historians have dismiss…
Mastering the Hard Stuff
This article details the history of college engineering competitions, originating with student concrete-canoe racing in the 1970s, through today’s multi-million-dollar international multiplicity of challenges. Despite initial differences between engineering educators and industry supporters over the ultimate purpose of undergraduate competitions, these events thrived because they evolved to suit many needs of students, professors, schools, corpor…
Race on the Line
Diseases Chasing Money and Power
Through the 1980s and early 1990s, the course of American health research was increasingly shaped by politically-aggressive activism for two particular diseases, breast cancer and AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome). Even as national stakes rose, both in dollars spent and growing demands on the medical system, breast cancer and AIDS advocates made government policy-making for research ever more public and controversial. Through skillful cul…
Experiences and Voices of Eugenics Field-Workers
Experiences and ideas of eugenic 'field-workers' offer a new historical perspective on American eugenics, while highlighting terms of women's early twentieth-century scientific education and research employment. To advance knowledge of heredity, the US Eugenics Record Office (ERO), between 1910 and 1924, trained 258 students (85% of them women) to collect information about individuals, families and communities. Though some historians have dismiss…
The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought . Marouf A. Hasian, Jr
Life in a Technocracy
126 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE and Yves Cohen’s 1930s-era comparison of political hostility to mar ket concerns in the USSR and French “market[s] that pushed entre preneurs into politics” (p. 227) are both finely drawn yet, like most of the empirical studies, rest unconnected to the theoretical cohort. Two small gems close this collection: Thomas Hughes’s examination of managing technical and organizational complexity in U.S. mili tar…
Life in a Technocracy
Talking About Machines
Reviewed by: Talking About Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job, and: Between Craft and Science: Technical Work in U.S. Settings * Amy Sue Bix (bio) Talking About Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job. By Julian E. Orr. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996. Pp. xvi+172; bibliography, index. $32.50 (cloth); $13.95 (paper). Between Craft and Science: Technical Work in U.S. Settings. Edited by Stephen R. Barley and Julian E. Orr. Itha…
"Engineeresses" invade campus
Engineering education in the United States has a gendered history, one that reveals an ongoing debate over women's place in the predominantly male engineering profession. Historically, women in engineering programs, even more than in science, have stood out due to their rarity. Their very presence thus led university communities to confront questions about what it means to be a man or a woman in a modern technological society, what it means to be…
Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs? America's Debate over Technological Unemployment, 1929-1981
Americans today often associate scientific and change with progress and personal well-being. Yet underneath our confident assumptions lie serious questions. In Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs? Amy Sue Bix locates the origins of this confusion in the Great Depression, when social and economic crisis forced many Americans to re-examine ideas about science, technology, and progress. Growing fear of technological unemployment-the idea that increasing…
Equipped for Life
In tracing the development of technical education in American colleges and universities, historians have tended, perhaps inevitably, to concentrate on engineering departments. Those programs tell an important story: the evolution of specialized disciplines from practical, shop-oriented learning to theoretical science. Also, engineering schools were (as many still are) dominated by male students and faculty, who often connected technical expertise…
Race on the Line
Selling Mrs. Consumer
Reviewed by: Selling Mrs. Consumer: Christine Frederick and the Rise of Household Efficiency Amy Bix (bio) Selling Mrs. Consumer: Christine Frederick and the Rise of Household Efficiency. By Janice Williams Rutherford. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003. Pp xx+283. $49.95/$22.95. There are few better places to examine where history of technology meets women's history than the subject of household equipment. The life of Christine Frederick …
From ?Engineeresses? to ?Girl Engineers? to ?Good Engineers
Throughout the first half of the 20th century and into the second, women studying or working in engineering were popularly perceived as oddities at best, outcasts at worst, defying traditional gender norms. To gain public recognition for women engineers, advocates celebrated their successes in the field. To improve the climate for women in education and employment, activists organized to call attention to problems and demanded change. To aid wome…
Hard Times in the New Economy
Book Review| October 01 2004 Hard Times in the New Economy Ursula Huws, The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003.Andrew Ross, No Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs;Behind the Myth of the New Office Utopia. New York: Basic Books,2003. Amy Sue Bix Amy Sue Bix Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Radical History Review (2004) 2004 (90): 79–86. https://doi.org…
The Rahmi M. Koc Museum, Istanbul
The past decade has witnessed the establishment, rapid growth, and gradual maturing of the Rahmi M. Koç Museum in Istanbul, Turkey's only museum of science, technology, and the history of technology. Its focus on transportation, industrial, and communications technologies is familiar to European and American visitors, but new for Turkish citizens. While the Koç Museum displays objects from all over Europe and the United States, it seeks to highli…
"Creating "Chicks Who Fix
Technology and Human Experience
As this issue of the OAH Magazine of History heads to press, the nation has turned its collective gaze to the unfolding disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Americans occupy a world saturated with technology. Many of us spend vast numbers of hours each day in front of electronic displays, or what we used to call screens. Our morning papers (what is left of them, anyway) regularly contain fullpage ads filled with the latest gadgetry, and a few of those…
Beyond Amelia Earhart
From the railroad to the atom bomb to the iPad, new technologies in the United States have repeatedly captured public attention. Historians of technology write about the novelty of such innovations in speed, power, and visual brilliance. But they also seek to understand how such inventions both reflect and affect the broader context of their particular time and place. Technology is not just about dazzling machines. It always needs to be understoo…
Trapped by Opportunity
This essay review analyzes The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes by Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder, and David Ashton. The book argues that technological changes and business trends have facilitated deskilling and marginalization of workers, fostering a worldwide economic race to the bottom and raising the intensity of high-pressure competition for individuals and nations alike
David E. Nye. America's Assembly Line
Journal Article David E. Nye. America's Assembly Line. Get access David E. Nye. America's Assembly Line. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013. Pp. xii, 338. $29.95. Amy Sue Bix Amy Sue Bix Iowa State University [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 119, Issue 4, October 2014, Pages 1288–1289, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/119.4.1288a Published: 03 October 2014
Molly Ladd-Taylor. Fixing the Poor
In Fixing the Poor, Molly Ladd-Taylor layers thought-provoking new levels of analysis to unpack links between American eugenics, social policy, and welfare practices. While other scholarship has traced extensive sterilization abuses in North Carolina, Virginia, and California, Ladd-Taylor offers Minnesota as a “relatively restrained” and thus important contrast (p.15). Early-twentieth-century Minnesota officials required guardians and often patie…
Disruptive Fixation
Reviewed by: Disruptive Fixation: School Reform and the Pitfalls of Techno-Idealism by Christo Sims Amy Sue Bix (bio) Disruptive Fixation: School Reform and the Pitfalls of Techno-Idealism. By Christo Sims. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Pp. 232. $27.95. Ethnographer Christo Sims addresses what he calls "the pitfalls of techno-idealism," specifically, the historically-repeated dream of improving K-12 education by introducing the lat…
Mastering the Hard Stuff
This article details the history of college engineering competitions, originating with student concrete-canoe racing in the 1970s, through today’s multi-million-dollar international multiplicity of challenges. Despite initial differences between engineering educators and industry supporters over the ultimate purpose of undergraduate competitions, these events thrived because they evolved to suit many needs of students, professors, schools, corpor…
Joy Lisi Rankin. A People's History of Computing in the United States. Cambridge
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Remember the Sabbath’
The relationship of Modern Orthodox Jewish communities to technology is mediated by the calendar, following requirements to keep the Sabbath holy. As nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twentyfirst-century inventions reshaped work, public spaces, and domestic living, rabbis intensely debated whether, how, and why observant Jewish people should avoid using electric switches, kitchen appliances, elevators, and other everyday devices on the Sabbath. To jus…
The Wider Context of Samuelson’s MIT Textbook—Depression-Era Discussions about the Value of Economics Education for American Engineers
Standard histories of economic thought portray Paul Samuelson’s 1948 Economics textbook as the first serious attempt at teaching economics to young engineers. In reality, many other professors, both in economics and engineering, had extensively addressed that issue before World War II. Throughout the 1930s, the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education, faculty, and engineering professionals analyzed the relevance of economics to their w…
Political science (20 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Law (16 works) · Engineering (11 works) · Art (6 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Economics (6 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · History (6 works) · Law (6 works)