Can the history of the "secret of stealth" teach us anything about innovation and technology policies? Peter Westwick makes a remarkable effort to present and analyze the competition between American companies to invent undetectable aircraft, introducing stealth technology. The secret Stealth program reflects America's national determination to make long-term investments in uncertain ventures. Aerospace archives, interviews, and local stories of interesting characters help describe the social construction of this technology during the Cold War arms race and the role of stealth as an alternative to nuclear weapons strategy. Westwick starts by combining a literature analysis and detailed empirical research on historical sources to examine the policies developed by the U.S. military-industrial complex. He shows that the struggle for military technological dominance has not proved the superiority of America's free enterprise versus a command economy. Stealth was not a product of an unfettered free market but of a vast integration of the state and the private sector. The main power of this book is in demonstrating the state-corporate entanglement between companies like Northrop and Lockheed and the U.S. authorities' attempts to protect and expand national interests.

For over four decades, Cold War politics shaped technology and business developments in European and North American military-industrial businesses. Historians of technology, business, and politics continue to debate the nature of these dynamics and their societal implications, and Saara Matala brings a fresh perspective to these discussions with her novel study of Cold War Finnish shipbuilding. She argues that Cold War politics had a decisive influence on Finnish shipbuilders, despite the fact that they specialized in icebreakers and passenger ships—not naval vessels. She also finds that shipbuilding played a central role in Finland's transformation from a fragile, low-cost, agrarian economy in Europe's periphery into a high-cost but competitive European industrial economy with high social stability.

This very interesting work gives us a solid history of air-conditioning in a broad sense. A timely and urgent work in our doom-laden age of climate change, it encompasses not only the air-conditioning of discrete spaces and rooms but also that of climate-controlled shelters and atmospheric control on a geographic scale. The terms "climate" and "media" as applied in the title do not have the limited meanings generally assumed. Instead, the author analyzes the science and ideas behind air cooling and offers a range of perspectives on how air is controlled, including the chemical and technological conditioning of indoor and outdoor atmospheres. Although the meaning of "climatic media" is not clearly defined—especially the concept of "media," which is rather broad and confusing to outsiders of media studies—the book depicts the history of the air-conditioning of spaces, from narrow rooms to zone shelters to a more extended scale. Therefore, this book is worth reading for historians of science and technology.

The strength of this edited volume, which grew out of a series of interdisciplinary workshops organized by the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge and the Royal Society of London, lies in its comprehensiveness. The book's twenty contributors, representing a wide range of disciplines, mostly in the humanities, consider an impressive spectrum of technologies and time periods. Part 1 ("Antiquity to Modernity") covers clockwork, self-regulated automata, and early robots in Europe from Ancient Greece to the industrial revolutions of [End Page 223] the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Part 2 ("Modern and Contemporary") focuses on the electronic computer systems, including neural-net machine learning, that came to be known as "artificial intelligence" in the United States and Europe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The variety of narratives is equally impressive. Part 1 deals with a wide range of texts, from Homeric epics to books on natural magic and experimental science in the Renaissance and early modern period, and from Victorian fiction to Karel Čapek's classic play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which premiered in 1921. Part 2, organized by themes, focuses on the rise of modern science fiction in books, films, and television, often contrasting that with futuristic predictions, both utopian and critical, made by AI practitioners.

Inspired and provoked by Shoshona Zuboff's Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the creators of this volume situate contemporary surveillance techniques and institutional imperatives in a history ranging from Caribbean slave plantations to the now ubiquitous digital trackers innocuously called cookies. Challenging Zuboff's origin story that surveillance capitalism started with Google, editors Josh Lauer and Kenneth Lipartito and the other contributors discuss earlier examples of operational methods, economic imperatives, the collection of information, and efforts to control workers, customers, and public opinion. In a telling rebuttal of Adam Smith's "invisible hand," Lauer and Lipartito state that surveillance provides [End Page 230] the market's "eyes and ears" (p. 5). The diverse technologies, bureaucratic processes, and information collection discussed in the chapters that follow their illuminating introduction raise expectations about scope that cannot be fully met in an introduction, nine interventions into a history that spans three centuries, and a brief afterword by Sarah E. Igo. As the editors admit in their introduction's conclusion, the volume marks a "starting point" and an invitation for additional research rather than providing a comprehensive history of capitalist surveillance in America (p. 26).

The words "Agent Orange" often conjure up images of the "ecocide" in Vietnam, where, from 1962 to 1971, the U.S. military sprayed over 11 million gallons of the chemical herbicide under the auspices of Operation Ranch Hand. The goal, from the U.S. military perspective, was to remove the lush tropical vegetation in order to track enemy movements. Immediately and over time, the fallout from this spray campaign had pronounced health, environmental, and political impacts that would call into question the use of the chemical compounds 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, which, when combined in equal quantities, produced Agent Orange.

An unremarkable photograph of a grandstand offers insight into how horse racetrack planners thought about audiences, venues, and documentation. Accounting for not only what the photograph reveals but also how it acts as a specific kind of historical evidence, shows how the history of technology can be enriched by further considering photographic and other kinds of visual and nontextual primary sources.

The invention of the printing press has generally been described as an unambiguous boon for the development of early science and scholarship. Scholars themselves, however, were often less sure about the benefits of the new invention. A scholarly work typically was not written for all and sundry, but printing meant that it went public. This introduced the possibility of corrupt editions and misunderstanding, thereby damaging the author's reputation.

Although it is still difficult to speak of it as a fully consolidated field, environmental history of Eastern Europe has been making considerable progress in recent years. A New Ecological Order provides a good example of ongoing efforts to draw scholarly attention to this part of the continent and thus to come closer to a fuller picture of European environmental history. The volume covers not only a wide area encompassing large parts of the former Eastern bloc but also quite a large chronology, spanning a period of more than 150 years from roughly the 1850s to the post-1989 era. While attempts at integrated transnational studies of ecological problems and environmentalism in the region are not completely new (see for instance Olšáková, In the Name of the Great Work, 2016), the emphasis put [End Page 286] on searching for continuities and ruptures between the pre-1918, interwar, and Cold War periods—all of which were characterized by ambitious projects of state-led modernization—is a methodological innovation that makes the book an original contribution to the field.

This article reconsiders the production of tropical forest commodities during the industrial age. It argues that writing the global history of jungle commodities requires combining an analysis of local production with larger histories of trans-local interaction and exchange. To that end, this article exposes the nineteenth- and twentieth-century production connections between jungle frontiers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and industries and research laboratories in Europe and North America. While tropical forests are usually seen as places of basic raw material extraction, this article alternatively presents them as complex technological landscapes, where production is entangled with chemical, consumer, electrical, and pharmaceutical industries. Significant accounts of tropical forest labor activities shed light on what techniques and skills were required for producing vital global commodities and how these changed over time.