This is an elective course focusing on the history and development of science and technology. Specifically, cadets will study how science and technology have interacted with cultural, social, political, and military institutions. This course will examine two episodes considered crucial in the making of the modern world: the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, which established the most important features of present-day science (experiments, laboratories, and mathematical and mechanistic ways of explanation), and the Industrial Revolution of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which created modern industrial society (labor relations, consumer products, classes, politics etc.). Cadets will evaluate the dangers of determinism, both in scientific and technical fields, as they analyze the military-industrial-scientific complex of the late twentieth-century. The final lessons will require cadets to combine the knowledge acquired during this and other courses to assess some of the present and future scientific and technical challenges the U.S. Army and other American institutions face.
