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Richard Lindstrom

Visiting Assistant Professor
Ph.D., Purdue University
20th Century U.S. Social History, Technology and Society, and U.S. Environmental History

My research focuses on the intersection of popular notions of science, social identity and labor in the twentieth-century United States. I show how technological enthusiasm and essentialist assumptions about human identity allowed those who promoted the movement for scientific management in the early twentieth century to claim an authority for their work that did not match its success in actual practice. Such claims seemed convincing because of many Americans' willingness to accept both the naturalization of human identity and the power of science over their lives, despite experiences that should have problematized both those notions. The project on which I am now working extends this interest in the way that ordinary people receive, use, and manipulate ideas in the area of environmental history, and in particular the idea of wilderness, by focusing on how law, tourism, and cultural expectation led to the creation of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota.

Recent or current undergraduate courses:

• Modern American Civilization
• Reform in the United States, 1880-1920
• United States Environmental History
  

Recent or current graduate courses:

• Popular Uses of History
  

Significant Publications

• "'They all believe they are undiscovered Mary Pickfords': Workers, Photography, and Scientific Management," Technology and Culture 41 (October 2000), 725-51.
• "'It would break my heart to see you behind a counter!': Business and Reform at L.S. Ayres and Company in the Early Twentieth Century," Indiana Magazine of History XCIII (December 1997), 345-76.
• "'Not from the Land Side, But from the Flag Side': Native American Responses to the Wanamaker Expedition of 1913," Journal of Social History 30 (Fall 1996), 209-27.