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Tools of HistoryUsing visual tools to present modern Japanese history is a signature of History Professor John Dower's academic and literary work. He teaches "World War II in Asia: Film, Fantasy, Fact" and served as executive producer of Hellfire: A Journey from Hiroshima, a documentary film on art about holocaust, which was nominated for an Academy Award. His most recent book, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, won numerous honors including the Pulitzer Prize. "We live in a world of spin and euphemism and, increasingly, plain anti-intellectualism, where people seem to be losing whatever capacity they may once have had for sympathetic imagination," Dower said in an openDOOR interview. "Visuals help break through this failure of sympathetic imagination." History courses attract more than 700 students each year-including artificial intelligence graduate student Arian Shahdadi, who won last year's history essay prize. Shahdadi said his parents, who both earned MIT PhDs in political science, taught him a love of history, which is important to his current studies. "History is very important in artificial intelligence," he said in an openDOOR interview. "Seeing how human society has developed and understanding how decisions have been made informs us about human intelligence." Historians, humanists, engineers, social scientists, and natural scientists work together to understand the human-built world through the History and Social Study of Science and Technology (HSSST) program. HSSST, begun in 1988, is a collaboration by the Program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS), the History Faculty, and the Anthropology Program. Another History-STS joint project, Inventing America, was recently published by History Professor Pauline R. Maier and Merritt Roe Smith, History of Technology Professor. The book puts science and technology in the forefront of American history. Inventing America demonstrates how invention has driven industry and the arts from the 18th century advent of the corporation to the creation of jazz. See the webcast of the authors@MIT discussion online (on the publisher's home page for the book in six segments). Where do readers go to learn about the MIT-designed Apollo Guidance Computer that first took Americans to the Moon? Or the start of bioinformatics? Or find the Materials Research Timeline? The History of Recent Science & Technology Web project at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology is a good start. The Dibner Institute hosts research fellows, conferences such as May 2003's Human Dimensions of Ecology, weekly colloquia, and the Burndy Library, which houses numerous postwar materials and notable collections such as works by and about Sir Isaac Newton. The History of the Concept of Race is a research topic at the MIT Center for the Study of Diversity in Science, Technology, and Medicine. The Center, created in 2000, addresses the lack of historical studies of the contributions by racial/ethnic minorities to science, medicine, and technology and the impact of diversity on these fields. The history of culture recently got a boost when the world's largest online resource on architecture, urbanism and landscape design was launched at MIT in September. ArchNet, an example of MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative, offers 600,000 images with a special focus on the history and culture of design in the Islamic world. go on to Part 2: Cultural Lenses
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Copyright ©2003 Massachusetts
Institute of Technology