Jonathan Coopersmith
Biographic Data
| ID | 980244 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jonathan Coopersmith |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jonathan |
| FAMILY NAME | Coopersmith |
| SIGNATURE | COOPERSMITH J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Texas A&M University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 21 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Piketty amongst the historians: Introduction to a symposium on Thomas Piketty's Capital and Ideology
This essay introduces this forum on Thomas Piketty's Capitalism and Ideology. We outline the debates that emerge from a joint reading of the six contributions to the forum. In doing so we assess the importance of Piketty's contribution to historical debates on capitalism, ideology, and inequality and consider how historians might respond to the challenges Piketty presents
Ibm: The Rise and Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon
James W. Cortada is an unusual hybrid: an Ibm employee for thirty-eight years in field and staff positions and a business historian with numerous books and articles on the history of information processing. His long experience in sales and management and his access to Ibm personnel grounds this imposing and impressive history firmly in the lived experience of the company's American employees. Framing Ibm's history are continual technological chan…
Spectacular Flops: Game-Changing Technologies That Failed by Michael Brian Schiffer
Reviewed by: Spectacular Flops: Game-Changing Technologies That Failed by Michael Brian Schiffer Jonathan Coopersmith (bio) Spectacular Flops: Game-Changing Technologies That Failed By Michael Brian Schiffer. Clinton Corners: Eliot Werner Publications, Inc., 2019. Pp. 308. One reverse salient in the history of technology is its coverage of failure, or more precisely, its lack of coverage of failure. We tend to focus on success, if only because th…
Shifting Practices: Reflections on Technology, Practice, and Innovation by Giovan Francesco Lanzara
Reviewed by: Shifting Practices: Reflections on Technology, Practice, and Innovation by Giovan Francesco Lanzara Jonathan Coopersmith (bio) Shifting Practices: Reflections on Technology, Practice, and Innovation Giovan Francesco Lanzara. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016. Pp. 287. $39. In my history of technology classes, I run a class T-shirt project. To emulate the challenges of creating a new product, groups of students have to develop a design, …
Lisa Gitelman. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents
In Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents, Lisa Gitelman provides a provocative set of microhistories that expand our conceptualization (and confusion) of the history of physical and electronic documents. Five cases over two centuries broaden our understanding of the evolving, contested worlds of documents and offer a historical context for and explicit probing of digital humanities. The intended reader is not just the historian but…
Nikolai Krementsov. A Martian Stranded on Earth: Alexander Bogdanov, Blood Transfusions, and Proletarian Science
Journal Article Nikolai Krementsov. A Martian Stranded on Earth: Alexander Bogdanov, Blood Transfusions, and Proletarian Science. Get access Nikolai Krementsov. A Martian Stranded on Earth: Alexander Bogdanov, Blood Transfusions, and Proletarian Science.Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2011. Pp. xvi, 175. $35.00. Jonathan Coopersmith Jonathan Coopersmith Texas A&M University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Sc…
The History of Information Security: A Comprehensive Handbook (review)
Reviewed by: The History of Information Security: A Comprehensive Handbook Jonathan C. Coopersmith (bio) The History of Information Security: A Comprehensive Handbook. Edited by Karl de Leeuw and Jan Bergstra. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 2007. Pp. xi+887. $220. One indication that a new scholarly field is emerging is the appearance of conferences, journals, and books on that theme. Judged by these criteria, the history of information security st…
Does Your Mother Know What You Really Do? The Changing Nature and Image of Computer‐Based Pornography
Pornography has historically been closely connected with the rise of communication technologies, often providing male customers the justification to become early adopters. In recent decades, the digitalization of data, the Internet, and the World Wide Web have accelerated this trend. Cybersex—electronic pornography—has proved an early and profitable market for almost every new computer‐based service. As well as providing revenues, cybersex has al…
The Dog That Did Not Bark during the Night: The "Normalcy" of Russian, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Science and Technology Studies
The collapse of the Soviet Union let loose a flood of information about the history of the tsarist and Soviet periods. In the years since, scholars have produced much valuable work based on that new information, as the pages of Voprosi Istorii Estestvoznaniia i Tekhniki (Questions in the history of science and technology) attest. Cooperation and communication among researchers are far easier and faster than they were, aided immensely by the inter…
Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology (review)
Reviewed by: Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology Jonathan Coopersmith (bio) Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology. By Eric Brende. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Pp. 233. $24.95. Graduate students are the lowest of the low in academe, dependent on advisors and lacking status, security, and income. Should we be more impressed that so many of them survive to earn their doctorates or that so few have existential crises? In the case…
A Machine Named Ginger: Steve Kemper, Code Name Ginger
A Machine Named Ginger:Steve Kemper, Code Name Ginger Jonathan Coopersmith (bio) The first time I saw a Segway was at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dean Kamen described a robotics competition for high school students sponsored by FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) while effortlessly riding his computerized mechanical marvel back and forth. My second sighting was a photograph o…
Wireless Nation: The Frenzied Launch of the Cellular Revolution in America (review)
This is a player's fascinating account of the go-go years between 1982 and 1996 when the Federal Communications Commission gave and then auctioned away spectrum for cellular communications. It is not a tale for the fainthearted or quantitatively oriented researcher
Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination, from Amos 'n' Andy and Edward R. Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern (review)
If you have any doubt about the importance of race and gender to the history of technology, Susan Douglas will convince you in Listening In. In the process, you will learn a great deal about technology, advertising, bureaucracy, and consumption while recalling your own defining radio experiences. The personal is indeed the technological. [End Page 436]
Pretty Good Technologies and Visible Disasters
On the movie screen and in television commercials, technologies are usually portrayed as visions of perfection, their parts seamlessly functioning without a hitch. In real life, however, most technologies are only pretty good or, if excellent, achieve that performance only at great price. Two Florida-based technologies, the space shuttle, symbol of America's technological prowess, and the state's voting system, now an icon of technological dysfun…
From Lemons to Lemonade: The Development of AP Wirephoto
Additional informationNotes on contributorsJonathan CoopersmithJonathan Coopersmith is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Texas A&M University. He can be reached at: [email protected].
What Have We Learned about Science and Technology from the Russian Experience? Loren R. Graham
Pornography, videotape and the Internet
Pornography has had a significant role in the promotion and diffusion of new communication technologies. New technologies have also altered the nature of pornography in the last few decades. These technologies include VCRs, camcorders, Minitel, computers, and the Internet. Pornographic products have served to stimulate interest in these new technologies, despite their higher initial costs. The attractions include greater perceived privacy and eas…
Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies . David E. Nye
Industry, State, and Society in Stalin's Russia, 1926-1934
Texas Politics and the Fax Revolution
This article analyzes the adoption and use of the fax machine to illustrate how information technology has altered the organizing process and conduct of electoral and legislative politics in Texas. The major groups studied are election campaigns, political parties, the legislature, and lobbyists. Faxing allows campaigns to do more, stay more informed, and disseminate information far more quickly and accurately than before. Consequently, the polit…
Energy Choices in Russia
Electrifying Finland: The Transfer of a New Technology into a Late Industrialising Economy . Timo Myllyntaus
The Electrification of Russia, 1880-1926
Russia, 1880–1926 is the first full account of the widespread adoption of electricity in Russia, from the beginning in the 1880s to its early years as a state technology under Soviet rule. Jonathan Coopersmith has mined the archives for both the tsarist and the Soviet periods to examine a crucial element in the modernization of Russia. Coopersmith shows how the Communist Party forged an alliance with engineers to harness the socially transformati…
Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History
Preface Illustrations Introduction Part I. The Tsarist Period: 1. Russian science before 1800 2. Science in nineteenth-century Russia 3. Russian intellectuals and Darwinism Part II. Russian Science and a Marxist Revolution: 4. The Russian Revolution and the scientific community 5. The role of dialectical materialism: the authentic phase 6. Stalinist ideology and the Lysenko affair Part III. Science and Soviet Society: 7. Soviet attitudes towards …
The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union . Loren R. Graham
Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History
Preface Illustrations Introduction Part I. The Tsarist Period: 1. Russian science before 1800 2. Science in nineteenth-century Russia 3. Russian intellectuals and Darwinism Part II. Russian Science and a Marxist Revolution: 4. The Russian Revolution and the scientific community 5. The role of dialectical materialism: the authentic phase 6. Stalinist ideology and the Lysenko affair Part III. Science and Soviet Society: 7. Soviet attitudes towards …
The Dog That Did Not Bark during the Night: The "Normalcy" of Russian, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Science and Technology Studies
The collapse of the Soviet Union let loose a flood of information about the history of the tsarist and Soviet periods. In the years since, scholars have produced much valuable work based on that new information, as the pages of Voprosi Istorii Estestvoznaniia i Tekhniki (Questions in the history of science and technology) attest. Cooperation and communication among researchers are far easier and faster than they were, aided immensely by the inter…
The Electrification of Russia, 1880-1926
Russia, 1880–1926 is the first full account of the widespread adoption of electricity in Russia, from the beginning in the 1880s to its early years as a state technology under Soviet rule. Jonathan Coopersmith has mined the archives for both the tsarist and the Soviet periods to examine a crucial element in the modernization of Russia. Coopersmith shows how the Communist Party forged an alliance with engineers to harness the socially transformati…
Industrial Innovation in the Soviet Union
The Industrialization of the Continental Powers 1780-1914
The Politics of Industrial Mobilization in Russia, 1914-17: A Study of the War-Industries Committees
The First World War necessitated not only the mobilization of troops, but the industrial resources of all the Great Powers.This book analyses the political constraints and ramifications of industrial mobilization in Russia.It focuses on the War-Industries Committees, an organization founded in 1915 ostensibly to assist in the war effort but also incorporating the aspirations of the Russian industrial bourgeoisie for greater control over the admin…
Krzhizhanovsky. Vladimir Kartsev , Oleg Glebov
Soviet Science on the Edge of Reform . Harley D. Balzer
From the Titanic to the Challenger: An Annotated Bibliography on Technological Failures of the Twentieth Century by Susan Davis Herring
152 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE From the Titanic to the Challenger: An Annotated Bibliography on Technological Failures of the Twentieth Century. By Susan Davis Her ring. New York: Garland, 1989. Pp. xxv + 459; indexes. $54.00. One productive line of research in the history of technology is “what happens when things go wrong?” Thorough inquests into technological failures (or disasters, depending on one’s viewpoint) offer insight not onl…
From the Titanic to the Challenger: An Annotated Bibliography on Technological Failures of the Twentieth Century
Questions of Power: Electricity and Environment in Inter-war Britain by Bill Luckin
technology and culture Book Reviews 393 shape the content of these technologies and the overall direction of technical change. Westrum devotes an entire section to the users of technology, a group generally neglected by historians of technology. His discussion encompasses the nature of skills, the role of informal knowledge in the workplace, the modification of devices by end users, and the role of modern technology in increasing psychological di…
Questions of Power: Electricity and Environment in Inter-War Britain
Soviet electrification: The roads not taken
Drawing on material presented in greater detail in his book The Electrification of Russia, 1880-1926 (1992), the author discusses the history of electrification in Russia and details the formation of the State Committee for the Electrification of Russia (GOELRO). GOELRO's plan for using a network of regional stations controlled by the Soviet government is described. A discussion on why the Soviet state favored large-scale electrification instead …
Electrifying Finland: The Transfer of a New Technology into a Late Industrialising Economy . Timo Myllyntaus
The Electrification of Russia, 1880-1926
Russia, 1880–1926 is the first full account of the widespread adoption of electricity in Russia, from the beginning in the 1880s to its early years as a state technology under Soviet rule. Jonathan Coopersmith has mined the archives for both the tsarist and the Soviet periods to examine a crucial element in the modernization of Russia. Coopersmith shows how the Communist Party forged an alliance with engineers to harness the socially transformati…
Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History
Preface Illustrations Introduction Part I. The Tsarist Period: 1. Russian science before 1800 2. Science in nineteenth-century Russia 3. Russian intellectuals and Darwinism Part II. Russian Science and a Marxist Revolution: 4. The Russian Revolution and the scientific community 5. The role of dialectical materialism: the authentic phase 6. Stalinist ideology and the Lysenko affair Part III. Science and Soviet Society: 7. Soviet attitudes towards …
The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union . Loren R. Graham
The Electrification of Russia, 1880-1926
Texas Politics and the Fax Revolution
This article analyzes the adoption and use of the fax machine to illustrate how information technology has altered the organizing process and conduct of electoral and legislative politics in Texas. The major groups studied are election campaigns, political parties, the legislature, and lobbyists. Faxing allows campaigns to do more, stay more informed, and disseminate information far more quickly and accurately than before. Consequently, the polit…
Energy Choices in Russia
Industry, State, and Society in Stalin's Russia, 1926-1934
Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies . David E. Nye
From Lemons to Lemonade: The Development of AP Wirephoto
Additional informationNotes on contributorsJonathan CoopersmithJonathan Coopersmith is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Texas A&M University. He can be reached at: [email protected].
What Have We Learned about Science and Technology from the Russian Experience? Loren R. Graham
Pornography, videotape and the Internet
Pornography has had a significant role in the promotion and diffusion of new communication technologies. New technologies have also altered the nature of pornography in the last few decades. These technologies include VCRs, camcorders, Minitel, computers, and the Internet. Pornographic products have served to stimulate interest in these new technologies, despite their higher initial costs. The attractions include greater perceived privacy and eas…
Pretty Good Technologies and Visible Disasters
On the movie screen and in television commercials, technologies are usually portrayed as visions of perfection, their parts seamlessly functioning without a hitch. In real life, however, most technologies are only pretty good or, if excellent, achieve that performance only at great price. Two Florida-based technologies, the space shuttle, symbol of America's technological prowess, and the state's voting system, now an icon of technological dysfun…
Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination, from Amos 'n' Andy and Edward R. Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern (review)
If you have any doubt about the importance of race and gender to the history of technology, Susan Douglas will convince you in Listening In. In the process, you will learn a great deal about technology, advertising, bureaucracy, and consumption while recalling your own defining radio experiences. The personal is indeed the technological. [End Page 436]
Wireless Nation: The Frenzied Launch of the Cellular Revolution in America (review)
This is a player's fascinating account of the go-go years between 1982 and 1996 when the Federal Communications Commission gave and then auctioned away spectrum for cellular communications. It is not a tale for the fainthearted or quantitatively oriented researcher
Political science (29 works) · Computer Science (22 works) · Law (21 works) · History (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Business (9 works) · Economics (9 works) · Engineering (8 works) · Economic history (7 works)