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 55, no. 2 (2024): 90-104.

“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

“On Data: How We Got to Where We Are, and What—If Anything—We Can Do About It,” review of Melanie Feinberg, Everyday Adventures with Unruly Data (MIT Press, 2022) and Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. Jones, How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms (Norton, 2023), Critical AI 4, no. 1 (2026).

“Temporalities of Speculation and Discounting in the Twentieth Century,” review of Paul Crosthwaite, Speculative Time: American Literature in an Age of Crisis (Oxford University Press, 2024) and Liliana Doganova, Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology (Zone Books, 2024), Finance and Society 10, no. 3 (2024): 287-96.

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 University Press, 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 University Press, 2009) in The 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 (2008): 552-54.

Review of Vaclav Smil, Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) in IEEE Technology and Society 26, no. 3 (2007): 9-10.