Silicon Valley in American History

Date
Mon November 13th 2017, 4:30 - 6:30pm
Event Sponsor
Stanford University Libraries, Bill Lane Center for the American West
Location
New location:
Cemex Auditorium
Graduate School of Business
641 Knight Way
Stanford University
Silicon Valley in American History

Join us for a discussion on Silicon Valley in American History with David M. Kennedy, the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, Emeritus, and Leslie Berlin, Project Historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford. Featuring the launch of Berlin's latest book, Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age.

About the Book

The richly told narrative of the Silicon Valley generation that launched five major high-tech industries in seven years, laying the foundation for today’s technology-driven world.

At a time when the five most valuable companies on the planet are high-tech firms and nearly half of Americans say they cannot live without their cell phones, Troublemakers reveals the untold story of how we got here. This is the gripping tale of seven exceptional men and women, pioneers of Silicon Valley in the 1970s and early 1980s. Together, they worked across generations, industries, and companies to bring technology from Pentagon offices and university laboratories to the rest of us. In doing so, they changed the world.

Fortune Magazine hails Troublemakers :

Berlin’s book, Troublemakers , is particularly essential reading at a time when the U.S. tech industry is facing an unprecedented crisis over sexism, declining political clout, and social media platforms run amok.

Troublemakers will be available for purchase and signing at the event.

About David M. Kennedy

Reflecting his interdisciplinary training in American Studies, which combined the fields of history, literature, and economics, Professor Kennedy's scholarship is notable for its integration of economic and cultural analysis with social and political history. His 1970 book, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger, embraced the medical, legal, political, and religious dimensions of the subject and helped to pioneer the emerging field of women's history. Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980) used the history of American involvement in World War I to analyze the American political system, economy, and culture in the early twentieth century. Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War (1999) recounts the history of the United States in the two great crises of the Great Depression and World War II.

About Leslie Berlin

Leslie Berlin is Project Historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University. She has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences and served on the advisory committee to the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Leslie was a “Prototype” columnist for The New York Times and has commented on Silicon Valley for the Wall Street Journal, NPR, PBS, The Atlantic and Wired.

Former Google chairman Eric Schmidt called publication of Troublemakers, her book exploring how Silicon Valley during the 1970s set the stage for our modern high-tech world, “a landmark event.” The Washington Post said that The Man Behind the Microchip, her definitive biography of microchip co-inventor and Intel co-founder Robert Noyce, “should be required reading for today’s entrepreneurs and executives.”

Berlin received her PhD in History from Stanford and her BA in American Studies from Yale. She has two college-age children and lives in Silicon Valley with her husband, whom she has known since they were both twelve years old.

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