Merritt Roe Smith

Merritt Roe Smith (1940) is an American historian. He is the Leverett and William Cutten Professor of the History of Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Life

Smith graduated from Georgetown University, and Pennsylvania State University with a Ph.D. His research focuses on the history of technological innovation and social change. He is currently writing a monograph on technology and the American Civil War. Smith is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he is past president of the Society for the History of Technology.

Awards

• Nominated for the 1977 Pulitzer Prize in History.
• Leonardo da Vinci Medal, from Society for the History of Technology
• 1977 Frederick Jackson Turner Award

Works

• "Technology, Industrialization, and the Idea of Progress in America"
• "Industry, Technology, and the 'Labor Question' in 19th-Century America"

• (reprint 1980)
• Major Problems in the History of American Technology (1998), co-edited with Gregory Clancey
• (reprint 2006)