Publications

Book

Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America (University of Chicago Press, 2017).

Articles & Book Chapters

“Predictive Knowledge Infrastructures and Future-related Expertise Before the Cold War,” The American Sociologist (forthcoming; accepted May 23, 2023).

“The Case of the Competing Pinkertons: Managing Reputation through the Paperwork and Bureaucracy of Surveillance,” in Surveillance Capitalism in America: From Slavery to Social Media, ed. Josh Lauer and Kenneth Lipartito (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 65-83.

“The Information Economy,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, ed. Jon Butler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014—. Article published May 26, 2021).

“Forecasting,” in Information: A Historical Companion, ed. Ann Blair, Paul Duguid, Anja Goeing, and Anthony Grafton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), 452-57.

“‘A Tornado is Coming!’: Counterfeiting and Commercializing Weather Forecasts from the Gilded Age to the New Era,” Journal of American History 105, no. 3 (2018): 538-62.

“Hurricanes, Crops, and Capital: The Meteorological Infrastructure of American Empire in the West Indies,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 15, no. 4 (2016): 418-45.

*Awarded Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Best Article Prize (2018)

“‘Cotton Guessers’: Crop Forecasters and the Rationalizing of Uncertainty in American Cotton Markets, 1890-1905,” in The Rise of Marketing and Market Research, ed. Hartmut Berghoff and Uwe Spiekermann (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 49-72.

“U.S. Weather Bureau Chief Willis Moore and the Reimagination of Uncertainty in Long-Range Forecasting,” Environment and History 17 (2011): 79-105.

Reviews & Review Essays

Review of Jill Lepore, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future (New York: Liveright, 2020), Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 58, no. 2 (2022): 247-50.

Review of Emily Pawley, The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), Business History Review 95, no. 2 (2021): 349-51.

Review of Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene, ed. Gregg Mitman, Marco Armiero, Robert S. Emmett (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), Environmental History (Oct. 2018).

“Gilded Age Redux,” review of Daniel Czitrom, New York Exposed: The Gilded Age Police Scandal that Launched the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016) and Leon Fink, The Long Gilded Age: American Capitalism and the Lessons of a New World Order (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), Reviews in American History 45, no. 3 (2017): 457-63.

Review of Ian Klaus, Forging Capitalism: Rogues, Swindlers, Frauds and the Rise of Modern Finance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014) in Business History Review 89, no. 3 (2015): 580-83.

“Redemptive Suffering,” review of Frances M. Clarke, War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), Reviews in American History 42, no. 1 (2014): 104-09.

Review of Robert Casey, The Model T: A Centennial History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2008) in IEEE Technology and Society 29, no. 4 (2010): 12-13.

Review of A. J. Angulo, William Barton Rogers and the Idea of MIT (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2009) in Review of Higher Education 33, no. 3 (2010): 426-28.

Review of Lynda Walsh, Sins against Science: The Scientific Media Hoaxes of Poe, Twain, and Others (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006) in Journal of Popular Culture 41, no. 3 (June 2008): 552-54.

Review of Vaclav Smil, Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact (New York: Oxford UP, 2005) in IEEE Technology and Society 26 (Fall 2007): 9-10.