Abstract
Across diverse industries and professions, speculations about the future of computers and information technologies have been joined by frequent invocations of the past. These efforts to look backwards and forwards find many uses for history. Yet the turn to a usable past has been unnecessarily limited in its device-centered focus, particularly in light of the growing interest in a much broader set of objects of analysis among professional historians. This essay uses the history of the junior republic movement to illustrate the broader opportunities for thinking with history that recent developments in computing and information history represent.
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Notes
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Light (forthcoming), which treats junior republics over a longer period, documents the shift from discourse of simulation to education and recreation. The subsequent evolution of these activities – for example, the shift of student government away from mirroring federal, state, and local agencies – is also part of this story.
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Light, J.S. (2019). Expanding the Usable Past. In: Aspray, W. (eds) Historical Studies in Computing, Information, and Society. History of Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18955-6_2
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