The role of National Socialism in the development of German society remains a central question of historical inquiry. This study presents original answers by examining the politics of inventing, a crucial but long ignored problem at the intersection of the history of technology, legal, political, and business history. The analysis of conflicts over the rights of inventors and the meaning of inventing from the 1920s to the 1950s reveals a deep chasm, reaching back to the late nineteenth century, between the forces of capital and big business on one hand and the exponents of intellectual capital -- inventors, engineers, industrial scientists -- on the other.

The role of National Socialism in the development of German society remains a central question of historical inquiry. This study presents original answers by examining the politics of inventing, a crucial but long ignored problem at the intersection of the history of technology, legal, political, and business history. The analysis of conflicts over the rights of inventors and the meaning of inventing from the 1920s to the 1950s reveals a deep chasm, reaching back to the late nineteenth century, between the forces of capital and big business on one hand and the exponents of intellectual capital -- inventors, engineers, industrial scientists -- on the other.

New Profession, Old Order is an exploration of the creative tension between modern technology and preindustrial Germany. It concentrates on the social and educational history of engineers as a microcosm of the larger society between 1815 and 1914, and asks why this new occupation, so successful in transforming the physical world, did not achieve the professional power, cohesion and prestige that its technological accomplishments would seem to have warranted. The author proposes answers that center on the historical situation in which the engineering profession found itself. He develops his thesis through careful consideration of the strategies, organization, and development of technical education in nineteenth-century Prussia, the educational struggles and political debates of German engineers and their various associations, changing career prospects, and the relations between engineering management, salaried employees, professionalizers, and government. The result is a study that demonstrates the seamless links between Germany's long-term socioeconomic modernization and its temporary political traumatization.

New Profession, Old Order explores the creative tension between modern technology and preindustrial Germany. It offers an explanation of why the engineering profession is so successful in transforming the physical world, did not achieve the professional power, cohesion, and prestige that its technological accomplishments would seem to have warranted. On the one hand, engineers were agents of modern instrumental rationality, specialization, practical knowledge, and entrepreneurial capitalism - forces antiasthetical to the quasi-aristocratic world of Bildung and bureaucracy that was the life blood of the preindustrial social hierarchy. On the other hand, it was this latter universe in which engineers had to survive and by whose standards they were judged for membership in the educated middle class or for access to prestigious careers. The result was an orientation that combined the old and the new in ways that were at once uniquely German and paradigmatic for modern industrial society.

What made the American South different? This ever-fascinating question is approached from a new angle in this engaging collection of essays originally presented in 1989 at the University of Mississippi in the Chancellor's Symposium lectures.

By comparing the South with other cultures and by placing the southern experience in the broad context of world history, this volume brings into sharp focus the contours of southern peculiarity. Reconciling the incongruities became a formative experience for the American South, as well as a feat by which the South produced its own unique, contradictory culture.

Engineers, often perceived as central agents of industrial capitalism, are thought to be the same in all capitalist societies, occupying roughly the same social status and performing similar functions in the capitalist enterprise. What the essays in this volume reveal, however, is that engineers are trained and organized quite distinctly in different national contexts. The book includes case studies of engineers in six major industrial economies: Japan, France, Germany, Sweden, Britain and the United States. Through a comparison of these six cases, the authors develop an approach to national differences which both retains the place of historical diversity in the experience of capitalism and accommodates the forces of convergence from increasing globalisation and economic integration. Contributions from: Boel Berner, Stephen Crawford, Kees Gispen, Kevin McCormick and Peter Whalley.