Groups audience:
Dear Members of the Technology Working Group:
Please join us shortly (today, Tuesday, April 16, 1-2:30 eastern time US) to discuss Sean Seyer's paper, "Battle Lines Drawn: The Postwar Continuation of the Air Trust Narrative". Sean Seyer is Verville Fellow, National Air and Space Museum, and Associate Professor of History, University of Kansas. The paper may be downloaded from the Technology Working Group page of the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. https://www.chstm.org/content/history-technology
Interesting material here, and a discussion of how to bring together research into a book.
We do hope you will join us.
Thanks,
Jennifer and Ben
Jennifer Alexander and Ben Gross, co-conveners of the Technology Working Group.
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Sean Seyer, "Battle Lines Drawn: The Postwar Continuation of the Air Trust Narrative"
Abstract:
Thank you so much for taking the time to read and provide comments on the draft chapter.
This is the third chapter in a manuscript I am currently working on that analyses the development and impact of the aircraft trust narrative on American aviation policy from its World War I origins through the early Cold War. I define the aircraft trust narrative as an interwar-era belief that a nefarious cabal of financiers, industrialists, and procurement officers sought to monopolize and control aviation to the determent of independent inventors and national security. As the tension between securing cutting-edge aircraft for the national defense clashed with the rights of patent holders, aggrieved individuals and their allies came to believe that a vast plot existed to monopolize the aircraft industry at their expense. The existence of this conspiracy theory has received cursory mentions in several scholarly works on the development of the American aircraft industry, procurement policy, and the pre-Cold War antecedents to the Military Industrial Complex. This book will not only provide an important addition to these various literatures but hopefully offer an engaging story centered on an interesting assortment of marginalized or unknown characters that furthers our understanding of the impact of conspiracy theories on American politics and culture. The book is arranged chronologically with chapters that interweave the various key players central to the creation and spread of the aircraft trust narrative. The following brief chapter breakdown will hopefully contextualize how the attached chapter fits within the overall project and provide some of the necessary background information.