Read e-book online A Hammer in Their Hands: A Documentary History of Technology PDF

Scholars operating on the intersection of African-American background and the background of expertise are redefining the belief of expertise to incorporate the paintings of the expert artisan and the ingenuity of the self-taught inventor. even supposing denied entry via so much of yank historical past to many new applied sciences and to the privileged schooling of the engineer, African-Americans were engaged with a number applied sciences, as makers and as clients, because the colonial period. A Hammer of their fingers (the name comes from the well-known music approximately John Henry, "the steel-driving guy" who beat the steam drill) collects newspaper and journal articles, ads for runaway slaves, letters, folklore, excerpts from biography and fiction, criminal patents, protest pamphlets, and different fundamental assets to rfile the technological achievements of African-Americans.Included during this wealthy and sundry assortment are a letter from Cotton Mather describing an early approach to smallpox inoculation introduced from Africa via a slave; choices from Frederick Douglass's autobiography and Uncle Tom's Cabin; the accomplice Patent Act, which barred slaves from keeping patents; articles from 1904 via Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois, debating the problem of commercial schooling for African-Americans; a 1924 article from Negro international, "Automobiles and Jim Crow Regulations"; a photo of an all-black global battle II strive against squadron; and a 1998 presidential government order on environmental justice. A Hammer of their fingers and its spouse quantity of essays, expertise and the African-American event (MIT Press, 2004) should be crucial references in an rising quarter of study.