Includes bibliographical references (pages 265-277).
Contents
VMI : challenging the Northern story of antebellum engineering -- Education and white manhood in the struggle for political power -- Creating the "West Point of the South" -- Engineering knowledge and the struggle for authority in higher education -- Engineering as a profession of service to the progress of Virginia -- The necessary white manhood of engineering -- Secession : realigning identity and power.
Summary
It is not an accident that American engineering is so disproportionately male and white; it took and takes work to create and sustain this situation. Engineering Manhood: Race and the Antebellum Virginia Military Institute examines the process by which engineers of the antebellum Virginia Military Institute cultivated whiteness, manhood, and other intersecting identities as essential to an engineering professional identity. VMI opened in 1839 to provide one of the earliest and most thorough engineering educations available in antebellum America. The officers of the school saw engineering work as intimately linked to being a particular type of person, one that excluded women or black men. This particular white manhood they crafted drew upon a growing middle-class culture. These precedents impacted engineering education broadly in this country and we continue to see their legacy today.
Funding
Sponsored by Lever Press
Note
Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivatives International https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
