Though historians of technology generally work toward detailed case studies of individual machines or industries, a few voices have lately been raised in a call for broader perspectives. In a recent review essay, Josef W. Konvitz, Mark H. Rose and Joel A. Tarr urge an intellectual history of urban technologies. The discipline that treats the spinning jenny and the cotton gin must also equip itself to analyze the varied and complex technological systems present in the modern city. Only with such a broad vision will the relationships between technology and culture become clear. One helpful version of such an overview has been offered by Rosalind Williams's historical and literary meditations on underground technological environments. But Williams's focus upon nineteenth-century culture has led her to ignore the American experience almost entirely. Bound by Leo Marx's paradigmatic “machine in the garden,” Williams dismisses America in favor of Britain and France, where underground technology first entered the modern landscape. A twentieth-century focus, however, reveals a rich and complex intellectual history of urban technology within the American scene. The built environment of New York City, in particular, has dominated contemporary American expressions of the relationship between culture and technology.

More than sixty-five years after the Amalgamated Meat Cutters called off its strike in February 1922, the memory of defeat remained vivid in the minds of packinghouse workers who struggled through that long, desperate winter. Stephan Janko remembered reporting for work at Armour and Company after it became clear that the cause was lost. “When we went back inside of that plant it wasn't like men. It was more like a bunch of poor dogs that had been whipped for forgettin' who the master was.” A skilled butcher, Janko found himself at the mercy of a vengeful foreman who forced him to cart scraps at unskilled wages while a scab performed his job. “I never wanted to hear the word ‘union’ again in my life,” he recalled, “and I never wanted to stick my neck out for nothing. Just wanted to work and take home my pay.”

In the hundred years since Kate Chopin began to publish her stories, she has been praised for her achievements as a local colorist, reviled for her shocking portrayal of woman's consciousness, forgotten, rediscovered, and – in a crescendo of critical acclaim over the last quarter century -celebrated as the pre-eminent feminist in American fiction. But she has never received the credit she deserves as a writer who constantly addressed the most profoundly disturbing of all the questions that troubled Western thought during her time. Although her biographers and critics have long known that she read the new natural history, few have imagined that she took it seriously. In fact, her ten years' work was a prolonged and progressively troubled meditation on the meaning of humanity after the successive shocks of The Origin of Species (1859), The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), and The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872).

In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson, professing himself alarmed by the seemingly “endless growth of relief rolls,” declared “war” on poverty. Walter Heller, his chief economic adviser, had recently remarked that it would be quite possible to eliminate the symptoms of poverty by simply redistributing two percent of the national income. Johnson, however, preferred to attack the sources of deprivation, claiming that the range of rehabilitative services provided by his Economic Opportunity Act would allow the poor to engineer their own paths to affluence.

The Confederate Woman.… It took the civilization of an Old South to produce her — a civilization whose exquisite but fallen fabric now belongs to the Dust of Dreams. But we have not lost the blood royal of the ancient line; and in the veins of an infant Southland still ripples the heroic strain. The Confederate Woman, in her silent influence, in her eternal vigil, still bides.

Written in and for a patriarchal community that valued its solidarity, Anne Bradstreet's “Contemplations” does not try to render an accurate, realistic portrait of nature in the New World. Rather, it employs what Leo Marx calls “ecological images…displaying the essence of a system of value” and subordinates these images to the reformed Judeo-Christian myth. “Contemplations” argues that God is the source of order, meaning, and history, and that the natural world, whether beneficent or hostile, reflects His omnipotence. But in delineating a predominantly masculine world view, Bradstreet also sets aside her own aspirations as a woman poet. Although the song of the female bird Philomel represents a kind of art that is free of Puritanism's monolithic expectations, Bradstreet's speaker cannot liberate herself to sing with Philomel. Instead, she stifles her own song for a practical poetic craft that serves her struggling community.