Rob MacDougall

Assistant Professor, Department of History
Associate Director, Centre for American Studies
PhD, Harvard University (2004)

I study the human history of technology and business and the strange history of America.

What do I mean by the "human" history of technology and business?

I mean that corporations and other machines are human creations, no matter how powerful or indispensable they become. The technological and commercial systems that structure our lives were never pre-ordained by some inherent logic of technology or the market. They are the products of human activity and choice.

What do I mean by the "strange" history of America?

I mean that I am committed to the idea that history is weirder than you think. I am drawn to the back roads of American history, to its oddities and strange enthusiasms, to the pasts we do not immediately recognize as the United States we know.

Work in Progress

The People's Telephone

My first book manuscript tells the story of two intertwined technologies that rose to prominence in the late nineteenth century: the long-distance telephone and the nation-spanning corporation. Neither was inevitable. Neither was welcomed by all. And fierce debates about the scale of economic and social life—big corporations versus small ones, national markets versus local identities—were embodied in the era's duelling networks of poles and wires.

The Gilded Age Internet

Beyond the telephone, I am interested in the information networks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—not only the telephone, telegraph, and postal system, but everything from wire services, financial markets, and intellectual property law to vaudeville circuits, spiritualist seances, and alleged hobo signs. How did information and intelligence become commodities? How did Americans describe and imagine webs or flows of information? How did the expanding scale of such networks transform American life?

King Crank

The late nineteenth century was the golden age of the American crank. Literally, a crank is a piece of machinery; figuratively, a crank is an eccentric individual obsessed with a single idea. Gilded Age America was rich in both. My research explores the interplay of technology and democracy in the self-taught scientists, attic inventors, and other eccentrics who proposed mechanical solutions to America's political and spiritual woes.

Selected Publications

“The Wire Devils: Pulp Thrillers, the Telephone, and Action at a Distance in the Wiring of a Nation,” American Quarterly 57:3 (September 2006), 715-741. [This article was short-listed for the Constance M. Rourke Prize for the best article published in American Quarterly in 2006.]

“Long Lines: AT&T’s Long-Distance Network as an Organizational and Political Strategy,” Business History Review 80:2 (Summer 2006), 297-327.

“The All-Red Dream: Technological Nationalism and the Trans-Canada Telephone System,” chapter in Canadas of the Mind: The Making and Unmaking of Canadian Nationalisms in the Twentieth Century, Adam Chapnick and Norman Hillmer, eds., Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007, 46-62.

“The People’s Telephone: The Politics of Telephony in the United States and Canada,” Enterprise and Society, 6:4 (December 2005), 581-587.

“Strange Enthusiasms: A History of American Pseudoscience,” 21stC 3:4 (Winter 1999)

Teaching

In 2007-08, I am teaching History 444: The United States in the Twentieth Century. The course website and syllabus are here. My previous courses include History 411: Technology and Society, and American Studies 200: Advanced American Studies.

I advise a number of graduate students, and I welcome inquiries from MA and PhD students interested in U.S. history or the history of technology, particularly in topics that overlap with any of my interests listed above.

In 2007-08, I am also coordinating, with Professor Eli Nathans, the Professional Development Seminar for history graduate students established by Professor Francine McKenzie last year. This seminar offers advice and instruction on the nuts and bolts of the historical profession: lecturing, leading discussions, marking assignments, giving conference papers, publishing articles and books, and applying for grants and jobs.

Also from this web page:

Current Courses