STSC212 - SCIENCE TECHNOLGY & WAR

In this survey we explore the relationships between technical knowledge and war in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We attend particularly to the centrality of bodily injury in the history of war. Topics include changing interpretations of the machine gun as inhumane or acceptable; the cult of the battleship; banned weaponry; submarines and masculinity; industrialized war and total war; trench warfare andmental breakdown; the atomic bomb and Cold War; chemical warfarein Viet nam; and "television war" in the 1990s.