Historian Thomas J. Misa’s sweeping history of the relationship between technology and society over the past 500 years reveals how technological innovations have shaped—and have been shaped by—the cultures in which they arose. Spanning the preindustrial past, the age of scientific, political, and industrial revolutions, as well as the more recent eras of imperialism, modernism, and global security, this compelling work evaluates what Misa calls “the question of technology.”

Misa brings his acclaimed text up to date by examining how today's unsustainable energy systems, insecure information networks, and vulnerable global shipping have helped foster geopolitical risks and instability. A masterful analysis of how technology and culture have influenced each other over five centuries, Leonardo to the Internet frames a history that illuminates modern-day problems and prospects faced by our technology-dependent world

Thomas J. Misa is director of the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota. His books include Managing Technology in Society; Modernity and Technology; Urban Machinery, Gender Codes: Why Women Are Leaving Computing; and the award-winning A Nation of Steel: The Making of Modern America, 1865–1925, the last also published by Johns Hopkins.