Merritt Roe Smith is Leverett and William Cutten Professor of the History of Technology.  His research focuses on the history of technological innovation and social change.   His publications include Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in History) and, most recently, Inventing America: A History of the United States (co-authored with Pauline Maier, Alex Keyssar, and Daniel Kevles). He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The following interview of Prof. Smith (MRS) by the Faculty Newsletter (FNL) was conducted on November 7, 2005.

FNL: Your new textbook is entitled Inventing America. A History of the United States. How did that come about?

MRS: The project started around 1991 when several colleagues in the history of technology and I were invited to visit the Sloan Foundation to discuss what it might do for the field of the history of technology. In the course of making my remarks about the need for graduate student support, I happened to mention how disappointed I was in general American history textbooks because they gave so little attention to science and technology. I finished my presentation and the conversation moved to other subjects. Then, about two weeks later, I got a call from a program officer at Sloan who told me that if I would like to put together a team of scholars to write the kind of American history textbook I felt was needed, the foundation would be willing to support it. I just about fell off my chair because that was the last thing I was expecting. But that's how the project came about. From there I put together a team that included a technological historian (me), an early American political historian (my MIT colleague Pauline Maier), a historian of science (Daniel Kevles of Yale), and a twentieth-century social/political historian (Alex Keyssar of the Kennedy School at Harvard). We began writing in 1996. It was a long, tedious, and difficult process, but we finished the manuscript in 2001 and saw finished books the following year.

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