Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction. Technical Knowledge in American Culture: An Analysis -- PART ONE: THE RISE OF DEMOCRATIC CULTURE, 1800-1870 -- I. The Ohio Mechanic's Institute: The Challenge of Incivility in the Democratic Republic -- 2. The American Career of Jane Marcet's Conversations on Chemistry, 1806-1853 -- 3. From Individual Practitioner to Regular Physician: Cincinnati Medical Societies and the Problem of Definition among Mid-Nineteenth-Century Americans -- PART TWO: THE AGE OF HIERARCHY, 1870-1920 -- 4. Diagnosing Unnatural Motherhood: Nineteenth-Century Physicians and "Puerperal Insanity" -- 5· The Inventor of the Mustache Cup: James Emerson and Populist Technology, 1870-1900 -- 6. Race-ism and the City: The Young Du Bois and the Role of Place in Social Theory, 1893-1901 -- 7· The German-American Science of Racial Nutrition, 1870-1920 -- PART THREE: TOWARD AN INFINITY OF DIMENSIONS -- 8. The Case of the Manufactured Morons: Science and Social Policy in Two Eras, 1934-1966 -- 9· Responding to the Airplane: Urban Rivalry, Metropolitan Regionalism, and Airport Development in Dallas, 1927-1965 -- 10. Unanticipated Aftertaste: Cancer, the Role of Science, and the Question of DES Beef in Late Twentieth-Century American Culture -- Afterword -- Notes -- Contributors -- Index.