This collection started out as a special issue of the American Quarterly and consists of sixteen essays divided into the following groups: “Technologies of Transcendence,” “The Cultural Work of Technological Systems,” “Technology and Knowledge Systems,” “Technology, Mobility and the Body,” and “Viewing the Field.” It has a clear stated aim, namely to reassess the position of technology within American studies by demystifying many of the myths associated with it. As Joel Dinerstein states in the opening essay, technology is the USA's theology, often being crudely identified with progress. But whose progress? And how is it achieved?

These are typical questions posed throughout the volume by contributors' interrogations of different aspects of technology in American culture. The essays are very wide-ranging and repeatedly challenge supposed orthodoxies. Susan J. Douglas rejects Marshall McLuhan's notion of the global village to argue that new media technology has created a “fusion of ethnocentrism and narcissism” (66). Rayvon Fouche notes that African Americans have constantly fallen victim to technology but are making their own stylized appropriations. Caren Kaplan addresses a set of metaphors in marketing by comparing targeted promotion with the smart bombs used in the first Gulf War. Robert MacDougall finds a clear case of new technology impacting on narrative practice in the applications of the railway, telegraph and telephone in the “wire thrillers” at the end of the nineteenth century, with the then “new media” suggesting new ways of ordering space and also a new inflection to plots where the villains were usually masters of technology. In one of the most interesting and suggestive essays, Carma R. Gorman examines the fashion for streamlining between 1925 and 1950. In common with other contributors, she juxtaposes two elements – the body and the machine – to demonstrate that late 1920s design applied the clean lines of the human body to technological products. “Good form” became an ideal of industrial design and also of body posture. Thus body mechanics not only involved the redesigning of products, but also a new promotion of healthy posture and movement of the body itself. The best of these essays thus map out connections, suggesting new ways for us to conceive of the relation between humanity and technology.