Steven Lubar, a museum curator, and Brooke Hindle, former director of the museum and now historian emeritus, prepared Engines of Change, which is accompanied by a small catalog written by Lubar and a larger, handsomely prepared textbook co-authored by Hindle and Lubar and published by the Smithsonian Institution Press. The exhibit and publications reflect meticulous attention to the latest historical scholarship on American technology and industrialization.
Herein, however, lies the exhibit's greatest weakness. In each of its six areas, the exhibit curtsies noticeably to recent books and articles without really departing from an older, highly nationalistic interpretation of the development of technology in the United States.
The exhibit's opening and closing demonstrations clearly illustrate this point. Visitors enter Engines of Change through a striking replica of the exhibits at the first world's fair, the London Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851. Here, we are told, the world acknowledged "American technological achievements." ...
