Bench Grass

Bench Grass is a blog about the history of technology by the former student of a student of Lynn White. The main focus is a month-by-month retrospective series, covering the technology news, broadly construed, of seventy years ago, framed by fictional narrators. The author is Erik Lund, an "independent scholar" in Vancouver, British Columbia. Last post will be 24 July 2039.

Friday, April 29, 2011

Gather the Bones, 8: Congratulations to the Royal Couple

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Benjamin West (1738--1820) was the tenth child of a frontier innkeeper. Not the origins that you'd expect of a man exhibiting under Roya...
Sunday, April 24, 2011

Gather the Bones, 7: Rethinking Natty Bumppo, Because Mitt Romney is in the News.

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I mean, why not? He's only the archetypical American hero: You can put his epigones in the ultimate unspoiled wilderness of the Earth...

Running Away to the Air, 3: I Never Thought of That!

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I wasn't kidding when I said that I loved John Terraine's  Smoke and the Fire,   a book about the "myths and anti-myths" o...
Thursday, April 21, 2011

Gather the Bones, 6: "Ethnogenesis," James Fenimore Cooper, and Inequality

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So we're in a Canadian federal election campaign right now, the forty-first consecutive one in which national identity has become an iss...
Sunday, April 17, 2011

Running Away to the Air, II: Magic Planes

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The magic plane thesis is simply this: American builders achieved what the Air Staff couldn't even imagine: building a Very Long Range...
Thursday, April 14, 2011

Who the Hell Cares About George Croghan?

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Vineyards on the Naramata bench, facing Highway 97 across Okanagan Lake.  It looks like the profession is pretty much agreed that Genera...
Monday, April 11, 2011

The Spin Doctors at work: 1745.

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What do Adam Smith , Edward Gibbon , Henry Fielding , and David Hume have in common?
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Erik Lund
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