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Alex Sayf Cummings reveals the significance of North Carolina's Research Triangle Park to the emergence of the high-tech economy in a postindustrial United States. Brain Magnet pinpoints how it sheds new light on the origins of today's urban landscape, in which innovation is lauded as the engine of economic growth against a backdrop of inequality.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Preface: RTP Donuts
Introduction: From Textiles and Tobacco to the City of Ideas
1. Imagining the Triangle: The Unlikely Origins of the Creative City in the Cold War South
2. “Not a Second Ruhr”: Building a Postindustrial Economy in the 1960s
3. Welcome to Parkwood: Newcomers Find Their Way in the Emerging Triangle
Interlude: Sweet Gums, Traffic Jams, and Cilantro
4. “The Greatest Concentration of PhDs in the Country”: The Idea Economy Comes of Age in the Triangle
5. Cary, SAS, and the Search for the Good Life
Interlude: The Islamic School in Parkwood
6. “We Think a Lot”: The Triangle in the Age of Gentrification
Epilogue: The Figure of the Knowledge Worker
Notes
Index
About the author
Alex Sayf Cummings is associate professor of history at Georgia State University. She is the author of Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century (2013).
Summary
Alex Sayf Cummings reveals the significance of North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park to the emergence of the high-tech economy in a postindustrial United States. Brain Magnet pinpoints how it sheds new light on the origins of today’s urban landscape, in which innovation is lauded as the engine of economic growth against a backdrop of inequality.
Additional text
A stellar contribution to multiple historical subfields, Brain Magnet exemplifies the best of the History of Capitalism. Demystifying the rhetoric of boosters and underscoring the uneven outcomes of postindustrial capitalism, the book adds to the growing urban history literature on the high tech economy,
