A richly illustrated study of how technical drawing shaped culture in the early United States.

With The Technology of Drawing, Elizabeth Bacon Eager explores the importance of manual skill and graphic literacy in the emergence of American industry, offering readers a new lens through which to view the visual culture of the early United States. Focused on questions of materiality and process, the book traces the development of drawing as a technology and argues for it as an embodied way of thinking and knowing, revealing the significance of such knowledge in the construction of both scientific and social authority. Through close analysis of materials, including construction drawings, mechanical treatises, cartographic surveys, and patent drawings, many of which have never been published before, Eager presents a history of American art focused on materiality and process through the view of the mechanic rather than the fine artist. 

Reaching beyond the traditional boundaries of art historical study to engage objects rarely considered as art, The Technology of Drawing treats the technical image as a site of extraordinary creativity, in which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans across the social spectrum negotiated critical concepts of identity, invention, and authorship with a remarkable degree of material intelligence and visual sophistication.