American People After World War 2

The end of World War II brought thousands of young servicemen back to America to pick up their lives and start new families in new homes with new jobs. With an energy never before experienced, American industry expanded to meet peacetime needs. Americans began buying goods not available during the war, which created corporate expansion and jobs. Growth everywhere. The baby boom was underway...

Many historians of science argue not only that technology is an essential condition of advanced, industrial civilization but also that the rate of technological change has developed its own momentum in recent centuries. Innovations now seem to appear at a rate that increases geometrically, without respect to geographical limits or political systems. These innovations tend to transform traditional cultural systems, frequently with unexpected social consequences. Thus technology can be conceived as both a creative and a destructive process.

Technology has been a dialectical and cumulative process at the center of human experience. It is perhaps best understood in a historical context that traces the evolution of early humans from a period of very simple tools to the complex, large-scale networks that influence most of contemporary human life. For the sake of simplicity, the following account focuses primarily on developments in the Western world, but major contributions from other cultures are also indicated.

The earliest known human artifacts are roughly flaked stones used for chopping and scraping, found primarily in eastern Africa. Known as Oldowan tools, they date from about 2.3 million years before present, and serve to define the beginning of the Stone Age. The first toolmakers were nomadic groups of people who used the sharp edges of stone to process food. By about 40,000 years before present, humans