This is a proposal to support one year of sabbatical research. It is to complete a book about technology and risk in American history. The project uses eight case studies to address the question "how did industrialization change the ways Americans have thought about and dealt with physical risk in their everyday lives?" The PI intends to complete chapters on pre-industrial risk, early 20th-century guns and gun culture, and product design and liability after World War II. Research for five other chapters on lightning rods, railroads, factories, the safety movement, and amusement parks is mostly complete. The project's research methodology involves techniques drawn from accepted practices in the fields of social history, history of technology, material culture studies, and legal history. The work plan calls for separate research questions and source materials for each proposed chapter. The pre-industrial chapter uses colonial newspapers such as the Pennsylvania Gazette, letters and diaries, records of almhouses and hospitals, and other sources to answer questions such as: what kinds of risks did 18th- and early 19th-century Americans confront? How did they manage those risks? What roles did ideas about religion, morality, and personal responsibility play in those choices? The chapter on guns also uses newspapers and magazines, as well as advertising, company records, and business ephemera. Research questions include: how did urbanization, cultural change, and new manufacturing techniques influence the ownership and use of guns? How did Americans manage gun risk, individually and collectively? The final chapter explores the effects of consumerist movements and legal liability on product design and marketing between the 1950s and 1980. It utilizes published legal literature, the papers of the Consumers Union and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and a variety of engineering books and journals. No broad study of risk in American history exists in print. Historical arguments are widely used in the social theory literature about risk, but these studies contain little actual content about the past. American historians have written about workplace safety, automobiles, railroads, urban fires, and a smattering of other topics, but no one has explained how these individual stories fit together into a larger historical process. This book will help bridge the social theory and history approaches to risk and will also add a much-needed technology studies perspective to the risk literature. In the field of history technology, this study represents a problem-driven approach that transcends studies of individual technologies for their own sake. It also implements new insights about the relationship between production and consumption and the agency of a wide variety of technological actors. Everyone has had experiences with technological risk: a car accident, a cut from a knife, the feeling of fear before stepping onto an airplane. Because this book is about a common set of experiences, it may attract a broader readership which wants to understand their own interactions with technology. For this audience, the message is that our current ways of handling risk have a history and are the product of specific human choices and values, not just some vague form of determinism.
