America's Information Wars
The Untold Story of Information Systems in America's Conflicts and Politics from World War II to the Internet Age
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5151500 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Edward A Goedeken (Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 105 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 1075-1076 |
| Publication date | 2019-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jaz130 |
| OpenAlex | W2917216275 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
Information is all around us, but the history of information, as an academic discipline, has only been a feature of the historical landscape for around twenty-five years. Colin B. Burke's America's Information Wars represents his latest excursion into the history of information men and machines in the twentieth century. In some respects this latest work is a continuation of his earlier studies: Information and Secrecy: Vannevar Bush, Ultra, and the Other Memex (1994) and Information and Intrigue: From Index Cards to Dewey Decimals to Alger Hiss (2014). This time, Burke takes his story from the period prior to World War II and carries it forward to the present. And what a tale it is, filled with brilliant, eccentric, and remarkable characters, some we know, but many more known only to those few intrepid scholars immersed in the somewhat arcane historical world of information retrieval machines of the mid-twentieth century. Burke's history covers the famous and the not so famous in the information technology pantheon. We are already quite familiar with the work of Vannevar Bush and his Rapid Selector and the other efforts of his wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development, which strove to coordinate defense-related scientific and technological research in universities. World War II accelerated the production of enormous amounts of information, a process that had begun in the late nineteenth century. Burke provides a smoothly written and detailed account of how creative individuals from academia (especially the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and the U.S. military and intelligence agencies (the Office of Strategic Services and later the Central Intelligence Agency) struggled to produce a machine that could efficiently manipulate data
Archaeology · Information Age · Political science · Politics · Secrecy · Spanish Civil War · World War II · Classics · History · Intelligence, Security, War Strategy · Law
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,43 |
| Citation span | 2019 - 2022 (4) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |