In This Edition

History and Culture

Part 1: Tools of History

Part 2: Cultural Lenses

Part 3: MIT's Historic Path

Questions & Answers

Professor John Dower Pulitzer Prize winning author who reexamines modern Japanese and US-Asian history.

Professor Philip S. Khoury Award winning political and social historian of the Middle East.

Arian Shahdadi '02 Won the History Prize for his essay "The Continued Violence of the New York City Draft Riots of 1863".

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History and Culture

• Trace the history of bioinformatics
• Probe how technology and science has shaped American history
• Ponder how children negotiate a media-saturated world
• Discover quirky passages in MIT history

These are journeys, undertaken by students and scholars of history and culture, that give depth and richness to an MIT education. Thousands at the Institute make these journeys. The strength of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), home base of cultural studies, balances the powerhouses of engineering and science, easily propelling MIT into the top tiers of research universities.

This month, OpenDOOR examines MIT's History & Culture treasury:

• Tools of History: Embracing Defeat; sympathetic imagination; history informs artificial intelligence; Inventing America; History of Recent Science and Technology; Dibner Institute; History of the Concept of Race; ArchNet, the history of Islamic design.
• Cultural Lenses: : Leadership training; cultural history of technology; teach-in on Technology, War and Terrorism; Retooling; The Object of Memory; Berliner sehen, On Track Japan; Globalization Study; Children's Culture; changing corporate cultures.
• MIT's Historic Path: What will be history?; Institute Archives' early maps; MIT Seal; MIT Museum; Flashes of Inspiration; Crop Circle Hack; Ask the Archives; 1949 Convocation; 50th anniversaries: Sloan School, Lincoln Lab, Research Lab of Electronics.

Poll: What do you think is MIT's most significant contribution to world history? 56 Nobel Prize Winners RadLab's role in winning WWII Mapping of the Human Genome Invention of public key cryptography Identifying the oncogene, a genetic link to cancer Innovations like Project Athena and OpenCourseWare