Early American technology making and doing things from the colonial era to 1850 / edited by Judith A. McGaw.

Includes bibliographies and index.

Introduction: the experience of early American technology -- Technology in early America: a view from the 1990s -- The exhilaration of early American technology: an essay -- Lost, hidden, obstructed and repressed: contraceptive and abortive technology in the early Delaware Valley -- "Publick service" versus "Mans Properties": Dock Creek and the origins of urban technology in eighteenth-century Philadelphia -- Inconsiderable progress: commercial brewing in Philadelphia before 1840 -- Laying foods by: gender, dietary decisions, and the technology of food preservation in New England households, 1750-1850 -- Roads most traveled: turnpikes in Southeastern Pennsylvania in the early republic -- Custom and consequence: early nineteenth-century origins of the environmental and social costs of mining anthracite -- A patent transformation: woodworking mechanization in Philadelphia, 1830-1856 -- "So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow": agricultural tool ownership in the eighteenth-century Mid-Atlantic -- Books on early American technology, 1966-1991.

This collection of original essays documents technology's centrality to the history of early America. Unlike much previous scholarship, this volume emphasizes the quotidian rather than the exceptional: the farm household seeking to preserve food or acquire tools, the surveyor balancing economic and technical considerations while laying out a turnpike, the woman of child-bearing age employing herbal contraceptives, and the neighbors of a polluted urban stream debating issues of property, odor, and health. These cases and others drawn from brewing, mining, farming, and woodworking enable the authors to address recent historiographic concerns, including the environmental aspects of technological change and the gendered nature of technical knowledge. Brooke Hindle's classic 1966 essay on early American technology is also reprinted, and his view of the field is reassessed. A bibliographical essay and summary of Hindle's bibliographic findings conclude the volume.

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