Technology: A World History (New Oxford World History)

Today technology has created a world of dazzling progress, growing disparities of wealth and poverty, and looming threats to the environment. Technology: A World History offers an illuminating backdrop to our present moment--a brilliant history of invention around the globe. Historian Daniel R. Headrick ranges from the Stone Age and the beginnings of agriculture to the Industrial Revolution and the electronic revolution of the recent past. In tracing the growing power of humans over nature through increasingly powerful innovations, he compares the evolution of technology in different parts of the world, providing a much broader account than is found in other histories of technology. We also discover how small changes sometimes have dramatic results--how, for instance, the stirrup revolutionized war and gave the Mongols a deadly advantage over the Chinese. And how the nailed horseshoe was a pivotal breakthrough for western farmers. Enlivened with many illustrations, Technology offers a fascinating look at the spread of inventions around the world, both as boons for humanity and as weapons of destruction.

• Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand-Year History
• The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union (Russian Research Center Studies)
• Leonardo to the Internet: Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology)
• Innovation: A Very Short Introduction
• Society, Ethics, and Technology
• Engineering and the Mind's Eye (The MIT Press)
• Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood
• The Age of Genomes: Tales from the Front Lines of Genetic Medicine
• The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945
• A Short History of Technology: From the Earliest Times to A.D. 1900