Welcome to HIST 122-400

picture of Pam MackI'm Pam Mack, a history professor at Clemson.  I've been teaching HIST 122 for about 10 years--I developed it originally at the request of the engineering school as a course for freshman engineers.  Now that it meets the STS requirement, I get a different group of students, and I have changed the books and the organization of the course, but it is still a course about technology and how it affects our lives.  I teach it both in the classroom during the regular semester and online during the summer.

I'm a historian of technology--I have researched and written about the history of the U.S. space program, the history of women in astronomy and engineering, and the history of the Forest Service.  I'm also coordinator of the Science and Technology in Society program at Clemson.


The five most important things to keep in mind about this course:
  1. Five weeks is a short time to cover a semester's worth of material--keep up with the reading and assignments and ask questions right away if you don't understand something or don't know how to do it.
  2. Instead of spending time in class, there are a variety of different kinds of assignments to give you an opportunity to think through and and work with the material.  You are responsible for keeping track of getting all of those done.  I am not going to send you reminders.
  3. This is not a course that teaches you facts but rather a course that teaches you how to analyze in a more sophisticated way the two-way relationship between technology and society.
  4. I expect you to care about how technology is affecting your life and our world.
  5. At the end of this course I hope you will know more about what historians do and also be a better citizen, able to come to useful opinions about controversial issues about science and technology.

How to find your way around this course:
Goals of this course: