The course will meet on Thursday afternoons, 2:00 to 4:50, from August 25 to December 1 in Verna and Peter Dauterive Hall room 107. It will be a discussion-based seminar, though I will punctuate it with occasional presentations. I will be available for office hours on Wednesdays from 3:00 to 5:00 in Social Sciences Building room 281, and encourage you to come by and talk.

Assignments

As a seminar, this course is primarily based on learning by discussing the required readings (listed below), so it’s essential that you read and think about them before each class meeting. Each week I will expect you post a short reaction to the reading the day before class using Blackboard’s blog feature. You can use this as an opportunity to raise questions, to comment on arguments you found particularly surprising or compelling, or to suggest ways the reading might relate to previous readings or forthcoming assignments.

Your first larger assignment will be to develop your own analysis of a film in the context of the Cold War, and to present it in a short paper of about five pages. Your second assignment will be a contribution to an online exhibit on America in the Cold War that we’ll produce together as a class. A final assignment will require you to develop your own historical analysis of an event, person, or cultural or political phenomenon, and to present an argument about how your subject shaped, and was shaped by, America in the Cold War world. That final project, which may build on your work for either of the earlier two assignments, may take the form of a traditional research paper of 15–20 pages, or you may speak with me about presenting it in another medium; in either case, you will have the opportunities to get feedback on a short proposal and a brief presentation as you work on your project. Your grade for the course will be based 20% on your film analysis, 20% on your contribution to the online guide, 30% on your final project, and 30% on your reading responses and engaged and insightful participation in discussions.

Reading

Please purchase the following three books, or plan to borrow them from Leavey Library’s circulation desk, where they will be on reserve. The first two are available at the USC Bookstores; The Culture of the Cold War is out of print, so please seek out a used or library copy.

• Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction (2003).
• Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente (2003).
• Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, second edition (1996, revised from 1991 original).

All other readings will be available through links below. If you prefer print to reading off a screen, though, you may still want to buy or borrow a few more books. The ones we’ll be reading substantial chunks of, which will also be available on reserve at Leavey, include:

• Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (2001).
• Michael D. Gordin, Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War (2007).
• Van Gosse, Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretive History (2005).
• Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, revised edition (2008, revised from 1988 original).
• Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (2002).
• Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (2005).

Boxes like this one contain suggestions for additional reading. You might want to read beyond the assigned reading based on your curiosity, as research for an assignment, or ideally for both reasons, as you use an assignment to pursue your own interests.

Schedule

• August 25: Introduction

  • In class: George Orwell, “You and the Atomic Bomb” (1945), Harry Truman, “Statement by the President of the United States” (1945), and Stanley Kubrick, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).

• September 1: The Atomic Age

  • Eric Schlosser, “Almost Everything in Dr. Strangelove Was True,” New Yorker (2014).
  • Michael D. Gordin, Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War (2007), chapters 1, 3, and 6–7.
  • Naomi Oreskes, “Science in the Origins of the Cold War,” in Science and Technology in the Global Cold War, edited by Naomi Oreskes and John Krige (2014).
  • Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (1985), chapters 1 and 26–27, and epilogue.
  • For more on Cold War science, see Audra J. Wolfe, Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America (2013) and its bibliography. On nuclear weapons in the context of the U.S. military, see Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (2013), and Alex Wellerstein’s blog Restricted Data.

• September 8: Soviet and American Systems

  • Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction (2003), chapters 1–2.
  • Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (2005), introduction and chapters 1–2.
  • Raymond Williams, “Capitalism,” “Communism,” “Democracy,” “Imperialism,” “Liberal,” and “Socialist,” in Keywords: A Vocabulary for Culture and Society, revised edition (1983, revised from 1976 original).
  • David F. Ruccio, “Capitalism,” in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler (2014).
  • Nikhil Pal Singh, “Liberalism,” in Burgett and Hendler, Keywords for American Cultural Studies.
  • John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (2005) is a standard history of the Cold War as a bipolar conflict. The Cambridge History of the Cold War, edited by Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (2010), is an extensive, three-volume collection of essays. For more on the cultural Cold War, see Audra J. Wolfe’s introductory bibliography.

• September 15: Anticommunism and the Domestic Cold War

  • Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, second edition (1996, revised from 1991 original), chapters 1–2, 4, 6, and 8–9.
  • Starting places for additional reading include Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (1998); Thomas Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (2003); and David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (2004).

• September 22: Nuclear Families

  • Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985), chapters 13–14.
  • Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, revised edition (2008, revised from 1988 original), introduction and chapters 1, 4, and 6–7.
  • For more on redlining and segregation, see chapter 11 of Crabgrass Frontier and Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations” (2014). Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Home is Where the Hatred Is” (2014) is a bibliography. On how experts changed cities during the Cold War, see Jennifer S. Light, From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (2003).

• September 29: The Global Cold War

  • McMahon, Cold War, chapters 3–5.
  • Westad, Global Cold War, chapter 3.
  • Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (2004), preface and introduction.
  • Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (2013), chapter 6.
  • There are many directions to go for additional reading, but for samples of recent essays see Environmental Histories of the Cold War, edited by J. R. McNeill and Corinna R. Unger (2010), and The Cold War in the Third World, edited by Robert J. McMahon (2013). The Korean War is conspicuously absent from cultural histories of the Cold War, but for diplomatic and military history see Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History (2010); Wada Haruki, The Korean War: An International History, translated by Frank Baldwin (2014); and Allan R. Millett, The Korean War, The Essential Bibliography Series (2007).

• Monday, October 3: Paper due contextualizing a film

• October 6: Black Liberation Movements I

  • Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (2001), prologue and chapters 2–4.

• October 13: Black Liberation Movements II

  • Borstelmann, Cold War and the Color Line, chapters 5–6, and epilogue.
  • Van Gosse, Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretive History (2005), chapter 9.
  • Ryan J. Kirkby, “‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’: Community Activism and the Black Panther Party, 1966–1971,” Canadian Review of American Studies (2011).
  • Chapters 4 and 9 of the bibliography of Rethinking the New Left are important starting points for further reading, as is the #blackpanthersyllabus, compiled by Keisha N. Blain, Ashley Farmer, and Dara Vance (2016). Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (2012) is a detailed narrative history of the BPP.

• October 20: The Vietnam War

  • Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente (2003), introduction and chapters 4–5.
  • Christian G. Appy, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (2015), introduction and chapter 5.
  • Gosse, Rethinking the New Left, chapter 8.
  • Even without leaving campus you can find hundreds of books on the Vietnam War, as you can see for yourself by browsing DS557 to DS559 in Doheny Library. Starting places for further reading include the rest of American Reckoning; Mark Atwood Lawrence, The Vietnam War: A Concise International History (2008); and A Vietnam War Reader: A Documentary History from American and Vietnamese Perspectives, edited by Michael H. Hunt (2010).

• October 27: Detente and New Radicalisms

  • McMahon, Cold War, chapter 7.
  • Suri, Power and Protest, chapter 6 and conclusion.
  • Gosse, Rethinking the New Left, chapters 10–13.
  • Again, the bibliography of Rethinking the New Left is a good starting point for further reading.

• Monday, October 31: Contribution due to online exhibit

• November 3: New Conservatisms I

  • Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (2002), introduction and chapters 2–4.

• November 10: New Conservatisms II

  • McGirr, Suburban Warriors, chapters 5–6, and epilogue.
  • Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (2011), pages 3–17.
  • Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (2011), prologue and chapter 1.
  • Other starting places for reading on Cold War conservatism include Rick Perlstein’s trilogy Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001), Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008), and The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (2014), as well as Trump Syllabus 2.0, compiled by N. D. B. Connolly and Keisha N. Blain (2016), and Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (2008).

• Monday, November 14: Final project proposal due

• November 17: Ends of the Cold War and Beyond

  • McMahon, Cold War, chapter 8.
  • Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” National Interest, Summer 1989.
  • John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (1997), chapter 10.
  • Jon Wiener, How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey across America (2012), introduction, chapters 1 and 21, conclusion, and epilogue.
  • Appy, American Reckoning, chapter 11.
  • Few historians have yet written extensively about the 1980s and beyond, though Age of Fracture and The Age of Reagan are important exceptions. For more historiography of the Cold War, see Cold War Triumphalism: The Misuse of History after the Fall of Communism, edited by Ellen Schrecker (2004), and Uncertain Empire: American History and the Idea of the Cold War, edited by Joel Isaac and Duncan Bell (2012).

• November 24: No class for Thanksgiving

• December 1: Final project presentations

• December 8: Final project due

As Aaron Bady points out, the LRAD brings together violence and speech. “To ask the question of whether an LRAD is designed to hurt people or designed to communicate across long distances with people,” writes Bady, “is to mystify its central design function: It is a technology whose purpose is to FORCE you to listen and obey, and one which is less interested in the difference than you’d think.” The LRAD makes it impossible to think of policing—particularly the iconic “order to disperse” delivered to political demonstrators from Chicago in 1886 to Pittsburgh in 2009 (shown above)—as a process in which orders come first and force follows only in the case of disobedience. The medium through which orders are communicated is itself forceful; the LRAD is a weapon, which is why the LRAD Corporation sells it, according to their fact sheet, “only to qualified government agencies and commercial entities that are fully trained in the device’s operation.” Bady concludes, then, that the LRAD demonstrates policing is “simply about power. Communication is a means of making you obey,” and, from the perspective of the LRAD, nothing more.

The LRAD conflates communication and force not only conceptually but materially: The same sound serves both purposes. It thus taps into a deep seam in twentieth century science and philosophy that is concerned precisely with the relationship between communication and action. It could be interpreted, for instance, in terms of speech act theory: A loud LRAD order to disperse is both a threatening speech act and itself an act of force.

Since the use of violence to establish control is intrinsic to the LRAD, though, its collapsing of communication and force resonates less with speech acts than the mid-century science of cybernetics. As MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener subtitled his 1948 book in which he named the discipline, cybernetics involved the study of “control and communication in the animal and machine.” The field developed in the late 1940s through collaborations between scientists interested in understanding minds, societies, and machines in the same terms—collaborations such as the Macy Conferences—and cyberneticians conflated control and communication in part to establish parallels between these different entities. This collapsing of categories also owed something, though, to the origins of cybernetics in military research.

Wiener did much of his thinking about analogies between humans and mechanical control systems during World War II while designing an “antiaircraft predictor,” designed to aim a gun in order to shoot down a maneuvering plane. Such a predictor was necessary because during the twenty seconds a shell took to reach its target, the pilot would maneuver, apparently unpredictably. In his article “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision” and a followup interview in Cabinet, historian of science Peter Galison argues that Wiener conceived of the enemy pilot as essentially mechanical, and his predictor as a machine that mirrored its behavior. “With no access to anything in the enemy plane,” he says, “Wiener simply treated the pilot-plane assembly as a complex machine—a servomechanism—that once characterized could be simulated in order to predict what it would do. And then it could be blown out of the sky.”

Although Wiener’s work stood in a long tradition of control engineering—since his goal was simply to control a gun—his system also relied on interpreting the plane’s motions as communication to the predictor, which then “learned” its patterns by observing with radar. Even though, “because of the antagonistic relationship between attacker and defender, the anti-aircraft operator was obviously in no position to talk to or even see the pilot,” the latter’s movements still revealed—communicated—his intentions. From Wiener’s perspective as an engineer, though, there was no distinction between control and communication in this system; both were simply messages. There were messages conveyed by the pilot to the plane (through a joystick, say), from the plane to the predictor (through radar), from the predictor to the gun (through a mechanical connection), and from the gun to the plane (through a shell), but each relationship was one of both control and communication, of both force and speech.

The U.S. military also embraced this conflation. During the decades after World War II “command and control,” previously two competing models of military management, became a single practice. Command traditionally involved an officer giving an order which was then interpreted and implemented by those below him in a hierarchy, often as more specific commands to their subordinates. It involved the ambiguity we expect from human communication, if not the dialogue. Control, on the other hand, was direct and (at least ideally) unambiguous. Nuclear weapons, which had to be deployed rapidly and only upon the decision of senior commanders, were subject to control rather than command. This distinction collapsed, though, as nuclear weapons were integrated into conventional military tactics. “By the early 1960s,” writes historian of technology Paul Edwards in The Closed World, “military parlance treated the two as virtually identical. A decade later, ‘command, control, communications, and information’ (C³I) had become a single unified process.”

It is from this postwar military ideology that the LRAD and its inventor Elwood Norris emerged. According to his speaking bio, Norris served in the Air Force as a nuclear weapons specialist in the 1950s before becoming an independent inventor. He was hired by the Navy to design the LRAD in 2000 after the U.S.S. Cole bombing, and the original purpose of the device was to deter guerrillas from U.S. warships. It has since been used to deter Somali pirates from commercial ships and “to blast a series of Arabic phrases, such as ‘Go away or we will kill you,’” in Baghdad and Fallujah.

The LRAD, then, is a military technology that has come home to U.S. soil as a command-and-control system for conveying both orders and force from police to civilians. Its erasure of the distinction between control and communication is not a unique phenomenon that emerges when you build a very loud speaker; rather, its inventor designed a speaker loud enough to “influence behavior and create safety zones” because he and his employers already conflated force and speech.

If you’ve come here after asking yourself (or Google) what cybernetics is, I recommend starting with Bernard Geoghegan and Benjamin Peters’ entry “Cybernetics,” from the International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy, and Geoffrey Bowker’s “How to Be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies, 1943–70.” Ronald Kline’s The Cybernetics Moment is the synthetic history the field has been waiting for. William Aspray’s “The Scientific Conceptualization of Information: A Survey” places cybernetics in the context of developments in computing and information theory, while Peter Galison’s “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision” is a classic account of the field’s military origins. The texts listed below survey the many forms cybernetics took in the decades that followed.

This bibliography is limited in three ways: It includes only books and articles which focus on cybernetics rather than the related histories of cyborgs and information theory; it includes only texts in English, though there are also substantial literatures on the subject in other languages; and it excludes articles and dissertations that have been superseded by books by the same authors. Within these limitations, I welcome references to additional books and articles. I last updated this list in February 2026.

The Big Picture (but mostly Anglo-American)

1. A. A. Verveen, “In Search of Processes: The Early History of Cybernetics,” Mathematical Biosciences 11 (1971).
2. Michael Apter, “Cybernetics: A Case Study of a Scientific Subject-Complex,” in The Sociology of Science, edited by Paul Halmos (University of Keele, 1972).
3. Robert Lilienfeld, The Rise of Systems Theory: An Ideological Analysis (Wiley, 1978).
4. Geoffrey Bowker, “How to Be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies, 1943–70,” Social Studies of Science 23 (1993).
5. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (University of Chicago Press, 1999).
6. Charles François, “Systemics and Cybernetics in a Historical Perspective,” Systems Research and Behavioral Science 16 (1999).
7. Debora Hammond, The Science of Synthesis: Exploring the Social Implications of General Systems Theory (University Press of Colorado, 2003).
8. Geoffrey Bowker, “The Empty Archive: Cybernetics and the 1960s,” in Memory Practices in the Sciences (MIT Press, 2006).
9. Bernard Geoghegan, “The Historiographic Conceptualization of Information: A Critical Survey,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 30 (2008).
10. John Johnston, The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the New AI (MIT Press, 2008).
11. Philipp Aumann, “The Distinctiveness of a Unifying Science: Cybernetics’ Way to West Germany” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 33 (2011).
12. Orit Halpern, “Cybernetic Sense,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 37 (2012).
13. Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Duke University Press, 2014).
14. Ronald Kline, The Cybernetics Moment; or, Why We Call Our Age the Information Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).
15. Claus Pias, “The Age of Cybernetics,” in Cybernetics: The Macy Conferences, 1946–1954; The Complete Transactions (diaphanes, 2016).
16. Thomas Rid, Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History (Norton, 2016).
17. Bernard Geoghegan and Benjamin Peters, “Cybernetics,” International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy (2016).
18. Elizabeth Petrick, “Building the Black Box: Cyberneticians and Complex Systems,” Science, Technology, and Human Values (2019).

Origins

1. Otto Mayr, The Origins of Feedback Control (MIT Press, 1970).
2. William Aspray, “The Scientific Conceptualization of Information: A Survey,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 7 (1985).
3. David Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

United States

1. Peter Galison, “The Americanization of Unity,” Daedalus 127 (1998).
2. Peter Krieg, “The Human Face of Cybernetics: Heinz von Foerster and the History of a Movement That Failed,” Kybernetes 34 (2005).
3. Stuart Umpleby, “A History of the Cybernetics Movement in the United States,” Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences 91 (2005).
4. Christopher Johnson, “Analogue Apollo: Cybernetics and the Space Age,” Paragraph 31 (2008).

Norbert Wiener

1. Steve Heims, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death (MIT Press, 1982).
2. Pesi Masani, Norbert Wiener, 1894–1964 (Birkhauser, 1990).
3. Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21 (1994).
4. Felix Geyer and Johannes van der Zouwen, “Norbert Wiener and the Social Sciences,” Kybernetes 23 (1994).
5. David Jerison and Daniel Stroock, “Norbert Wiener,” The Legacy of Norbert Wiener: A Centennial Symposium (1997).
6. Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics (Basic Books, 2004).
7. Mara Mills, “On Disability and Cybernetics: Helen Keller, Norbert Wiener, and the Hearing Glove,” differences 22 (2011).
8. Benjamin Peters, “Toward a Genealogy of a Cold War Communication Science: The Strange Loops of Leo and Norbert Wiener,” Russian Journal of Communication 5 (2013).
9. Henning Schmidgen, “Cybernetic Times: Norbert Wiener, John Stroud, and the ‘Brain Clock’ Hypothesis,” History of the Human Sciences 33 (2020).

Soviet and Comparative Studies

1. David Holloway, “Innovation in Science—The Case of Cybernetics in the Soviet Union,” Science Studies 4 (1974).
2. Peter Elias, “The Rise and Fall of Cybernetics in the US and the USSR,” The Legacy of Norbert Wiener: A Centennial Symposium (1997).
3. Slava Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (MIT Press, 2002).
4. David Mindell, Jérôme Segal, and Slava Gerovitch, “From Communications Engineering to Communications Science: Cybernetics and Information Theory in the United States, France, and the Soviet Union,” in Science and Ideology: A Comparative History, edited by Mark Walker (Routledge, 2003).
5. Benjamin Peters, “Betrothal and Betrayal: The Soviet Translation of Norbert Wiener’s Early Cybernetics,” International Journal of Communications 2 (2008).
6. Benjamin Peters, How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (MIT Press, 2016).
7. Adam Leeds, “Dreams in Cybernetic Fugue: Cold War Technoscience, the Intelligentsia, and the Birth of Soviet Mathematical Economics,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 46 (2016).
8. Diana Kurkovsky West, “Cybernetics for the Command Economy: Foregrounding Entropy in Late Soviet Planning,” History of the Human Sciences 33 (2020).
9. Joshua Sanborn, “Cybernetics and Surveillance: The Secret Police Enter the Computer Age,” Kritika 23 (2022).

France and “French Theory”

1. Céline Lafontaine, “The Cybernetic Matrix of ‘French Theory,’” Theory, Culture & Society 24 (2007).
2. Lydia Liu, “The Cybernetic Unconscious: Rethinking Lacan, Poe, and French Theory,” Critical Inquiry 36 (2010).
3. Jacob Krell, “What is the ‘Cybernetic’ in the ‘History of Cybernetics’? A French Case, 1968 to the Present,” History of the Human Sciences 33 (2020).
4. Vincent August, “Network Concepts in Social Theory: Foucault and Cybernetics,” European Journal of Social Theory 24 (2021).
5. Bernard Geoghegan, Code: From Information Theory to French Theory (Duke University Press, 2023)

Chile

1. Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (MIT Press, 2011).
2. Martin Collins, introduction to forum on Cybernetic Revolutionaries, History and Technology 28 (2012).
3. Michael Dennis, “Scientific and Technical Knowledge and the Making of Political Order,” History and Technology 28 (2012).
4. Ronald Kline, “Beyond the Closed World,” History and Technology 28 (2012).
5. Tiago Saraiva, “The History of Cybernetics in McOndo,” History and Technology 28 (2012).
6. Eden Medina, author response to forum on Cybernetic Revolutionaries, History and Technology 28 (2012).

Biology

1. Donna Haraway, “The Biological Enterprise: Sex, Mind, and Profit from Human Engineering to Sociobiology,” Radical History Review no. 20 (1979).
2. Donna Haraway, “The High Cost of Information in Post World War II Evolutionary Biology: Ergonomics, Semiotics, and the Sociobiology of Communications Systems,” Philosophical Forum 13 (1981–2).
3. Donna Haraway, “Signs of Dominance: From a Physiology to a Cybernetics of Primate Society, C.R. Carpenter, 1930–1970,” in Studies in History of Biology 6, edited by William Coleman and Camille Limoges (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).
4. Donna Haraway, “A Semiotics of the Naturalistic Field, from C.R. Carpenter to S.A. Altmann, 1930–55,” in Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (Routledge, 1989).
5. Evelyn Fox Keller, “The Body of a New Machine: Situating the Organism between Telegraphs and Computers,” in Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology (Columbia University Press, 1995).
6. Lily Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code (Stanford University Press, 2000).
7. Evelyn Fox Keller, “Taming the Cybernetic Metaphor” in Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines (Harvard University Press, 2002).
8. Warwick Anderson and Ian MacKay, “The Science of Self,” in Intolerant Bodies: A Short History of Autoimmunity (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).

Ecology

1. Peter Taylor, “Technocratic Optimism, H.T. Odum, and the Partial Transformation of Ecological Metaphor after World War II,” Journal of the History of Biology 21 (1988).
2. Sharon Kingsland, “Defining the Ecosystem,” in The Evolution of American Ecology, 1890–2000 (John Hopkins University Press, 2005).
3. William Bryant, “Whole System, Whole Earth: The Convergence of Technology and Ecology in Twentieth-Century American Culture” (doctoral dissertation, University of Iowa, 2006).
4. Bruce Clarke, “Neocybernetics of Gaia: The Emergence of Second-Order Gaia Theory,” in Gaia in Turmoil: Climate Change, Biodepletion, and Earth Ethics in an Age of Crisis, edited by Eileen Crist and H. Bruce Rinker (MIT Press, 2010).
5. Nancy Slack, “Good Friends: Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson” in G. Evelyn Hutchinson and the Invention of Modern Ecology (Yale University Press, 2010).
6. Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Feedback: Ecological Thinking in ’70s America (University of Chicago Press, 2019).

Social Sciences

1. Steve Heims, Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America: The Cybernetics Group, 1946–1953 (MIT Press, 1991).
2. George Richardson, Feedback Thought in Social Science and Systems Theory (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).
3. Esther-Mirjam Sent, “Herbert A. Simon as a Cyborg Scientist,” Perspectives on Science 8 (2000).
4. Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
5. Hunter Crowther-Heyck, Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason in Modern America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
6. Hunter Heyck, Age of System: Understanding the Development of Modern Social Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).
7. Stefanos Geroulanos and Leif Weatherby, “Cybernetics and the Human Sciences” special issue introduction, History of the Human Sciences 33 (2020).
8. Ronald Kline, “How Disunity Matters to the History of Cybernetics in the Human Sciences in the United States, 1940–80,” History of the Human Sciences 33 (2020).
9. Poornima Paidipaty, “‘Tortoises All the Way Down’: Geertz, Cybernetics and ‘Culture’ at the End of the Cold War,” Anthropological Theory 20 (2020).

Gregory Bateson

1. David Lipset, Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist (Prentice Hall, 1980).
2. John Tresch, “Heredity is an Open System: Gregory Bateson as Descendant and Ancestor,” Anthropology Today 14 (1998).
3. Leone Montagnini, “Looking for ‘Scientific’ Social Science: The Macy Conferences on Cybernetics in Bateson’s Itinerary,” Kybernetes 36 (2007).
4. Frank Thomas, Rebekah Waits, and Gail Hartsfield, “The Influence of Gregory Bateson: Legacy or Vestige?” Kybernetes 36 (2007).
5. William Kaizen, “Steps to an Ecology of Communication: Radical Software, Dan Graham, and the Legacy of Gregory Bateson,” Art Journal 67 (2008).
6. Erik Peterson, “Finding Mind, Form, Organism, and Person in a Reductionist Age: The Challenge of Gregory Bateson and C. H. Waddington to Biological and Anthropological Orthodoxy, 1924–1980” (doctoral dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 2010).
7. Orit Halpern, “Schizophrenic Techniques: Cybernetics, the Human Sciences, and the Double Bind,” S&F Online 10 (2012).
8. Peter Harries-Jones, Upside-Down Gods: Gregory Bateson’s World of Difference (Fordham University Press, 2016).
9. Anthony Chaney, Runaway: Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of Ecological Consciousness (University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

Sciences of Mind

1. Geir Kirkebøen, “From a Naked Emperor to Just Clothes: The Rise and Fall of Cybernetic Family Therapy,” Social Science Information 34 (1995).
2. James Anderson and Edward Rosenfeld, Talking Nets: An Oral History of Neural Networks (MIT Press, 1998).
3. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The Mechanization of the Mind: The Origins of Cognitive Science, translated by M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton University Press, 2000).
4. Roberto Cordeschi, The Discovery of the Artificial: Behavior, Mind and Machines Before and Beyond Cybernetics (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002).
5. Tara Abraham, “From Theory to Data: Representing Neurons in the 1940s,” Biology and Philosophy 18 (2003).
6. Tara Abraham, “Cybernetics and Theoretical Approaches in 20th-Century Brain and Behavior Sciences,” Biological Theory 1 (2006).
7. Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (University of Chicago Press, 2010).
8. Rebecca Lemov, “Running Amok in Labyrinthine Systems: The Cyber-Behaviorist Origins of Soft Torture,” Limn 1 (2011).
9. Deborah Weinstein, “‘Systems Everywhere’: Schizophrenia, Cybernetics, and the Double Bind,” in The Pathological Family: Postwar America and the Rise of Family Therapy (Cornell University Press, 2013).
10. John Shiga, “Of Other Networks: Closed-World and Green-World Networks in the Work of John C. Lilly,” Amodern 2 (2013).
11. Chen-Pang Yeang, “From Modernizing the Chinese Language to Information Science: Chao Yuen Ren’s Route to Cybernetics,” Isis 108 (2017).
12. Danielle Judith Zola Carr, “‘Ghastly Marionettes’ and the Political Metaphysics of Cognitive Literalism: Anti-Behaviourism, Language, and the Origins of Totalitarianism,” History of the Human Sciences 33 (2020).
13. Christina Vagt, “Design as Aesthetic Education: On the Politics and Aesthetics of Learning Environments,” History of the Human Sciences 33 (2020).
14. Katja Guenther, “The Dancing Robot: Grey Walter’s Cybernetic Mirror,” in The Mirror and the Mind: A History of Self-Recognition in the Human Sciences (Princeton University Press, 2022).

Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts

1. Michael Arbib, “Warren McCulloch’s Search for the Logic of the Nervous System,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 43 (2000).
2. Neil Smalheiser, “Walter Pitts,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 43 (2000).
3. Lily Kay, “From Logical Neurons to Poetic Embodiments of Mind: Warren S. McCulloch’s Project in Neuroscience,” Science in Context 14 (2001).
4. Tara Abraham, “Integrating Mind and Brain: Warren S. McCulloch, Cerebral Localization, and Experimental Epistemology,” Endeavour 27 (2003).
5. Kenneth Aizawa, “Warren McCulloch’s Turn to Cybernetics: What Walter Pitts Contributed,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 37 (2012).
6. Phil Husbands and Owen Holland, “Warren McCulloch and the British Cyberneticians,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 37 (2012).
7. Alan Collins, “An Asymmetric Relationship: The Spirit of Kenneth Craik and the Work of Warren McCulloch,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 37 (2012).
8. Tara Abraham, Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life in Science (MIT Press, 2016).

Politics and Planning

1. Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (MIT Press, 1996).
2. Jennifer Light, From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
3. Jennifer Light, “Taking Games Seriously,” Technology and Culture 49 (2008).
4. Antoine Bousquet, “Cyberneticizing the American War Machine: Science and Computers in the Cold War,” Cold War History 8 (2008).
5. Brian Holmes, Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society (Van Abbemuseum, 2009).
6. Matthew Ferish, “The Cybernetic Continent: North America as Defense Laboratory,” in The Contours of America’s Cold War (University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
7. John Duda, “Cybernetics, Anarchism and Self-Organisation,” Anarchist Studies 21 (2013).
8. David Bates, “The Political Theology of Entropy: A Katechon for the Cybernetic Age,” History of the Human Sciences 33 (2020).
9. Nicolas Guilhot, “Automatic Leviathan: Cybernetics and Politics in Carl Schmitt’s Postwar Writings,” History of the Human Sciences 33 (2020).
10. Joakim Parslow, “The Mechanical Atatürk: Cybernetics and State Violence in the Second Turkish Republic,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 53 (2021).

Popular Culture and Counterculture

1. Ron Eglash, “Cybernetics in American Youth Subculture,” Cultural Studies 12 (1998).
2. Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006).
3. Bruce Clarke, “From Information to Cognition: The Systems Counterculture, Heinz von Foerster’s Pedagogy, and Second-Order Cybernetics,” Constructivist Foundations 7 (2012).
4. Hugh Dubberly and Paul Pangaro, “How Cybernetics Connects Computing, Counterculture, and Design,” in Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, edited by Andrew Blauvelt (2015).

Art

1. Mary Louise Lobsinger, “Cybernetic Theory and the Architecture of Performance: Cedric Price’s Fun Palace,” in Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture (Canadian Center for Architecture, 2000).
2. Edward Shanken, “Cybernetics and Art: Cultural Convergence in the 1960s,” in From Energy to Information, edited by Bruce Clarke and Linda Henderson (Stanford University Press, 2002).
3. Maria Fernandez, “Gordon Pask: Cybernetic Polymath,” Leonardo 41 (2008).
4. Maria Fernandez, “Detached from HiStory: Jasia Reichardt and Cybernetic Serendipity,” Art Journal 67 (2008).
5. Etan J. Ilfeld, “Contemporary Art and Cybernetics: Waves of Cybernetic Discourse within Conceptual, Video and New Media Art,” Leonardo 45 (2012).
6. Etienne Benson, “Environment between System and Nature: Alan Sonfist and the Art of the Cybernetic Environment,” communication +1 3 (2014).

Film and Video

1. David Joselit, Feedback: Television Against Democracy (MIT Press, 2007).
2. Zabet Patterson, “From the Gun Controller to the Mandala: The Cybernetic Cinema of John and James Whitney,” Grey Room no. 36 (2009).
3. Andrew Syder, ““Shaken Out of the Ruts of Ordinary Perception”: Vision, Culture and Technology in the Psychedelic Sixties” (doctoral dissertation, University of Southern California, 2009).
4. Kris Paulsen, “Half Inch Revolution: The Guerilla Video Tape Network,” Amodern 2 (2013).
5. Carolyn Kane, “The Tragedy of Radical Subjectivity: From Radical Software to Proprietary Subjects,” Leonardo 47, no. 5 (2014).
6. Peter Sachs Collopy, “The Revolution Will Be Videotaped: Making a Technology of Consciousness in the Long 1960s” (doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2015).
7. Ute Holl, Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics (Amsterdam University Press, 2017).

Sound and Music

1. Christina Dunbar-Hester, “Listening to Cybernetics: Music, Machines, and Nervous Systems, 1950–1980,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 35 (2010).
2. Jonathan Sterne, “Nature Builds No Telephones” and “Perceptual Coding and the Domestication of Noise,” in MP3: The Meaning of a Format (2013).
3. Christopher Haworth, “Music and Cybernetics in Historical Perspective: Introduction to the Special Issue,” Resonance 2 (2021).
4. Deirdre Loughridge, “Daphne Oram: Cyberneticist?” Resonance 2 (2021).
5. Eamonn Bell, “Cybernetics, Listening, and Sound-Studio Phenomenotechnique in Abraham Moles’s Théorie de l’information et perception esthétique (1958),” Resonance 2 (2021).
6. Clara Latham, “The Sound Machine in the Body: Cybernetics and the Theremin,” Resonance 2 (2021).
7. Eric Drott, “Music and the Cybernetic Mundane,” Resonance 2 (2021).
8. Theodore Gordon, “‘Androgynous Music’: Pauline Oliveros’s Early Cybernetic Improvisation,” Contemporary Music Review 40 (2022).