UNIVAC, the Universal Automatic Computer, was first revealed to the public in 1951. Lepore’s survey of our post-WWII years addresses computing developments, polling, and political polarization. This failure of ours is what is most alarming about these years. The rest of this section provides little hope that the outpacing she writes of is narrowing. “Hiroshima marked the beginning of a new and differently unstable political era, in which technological change wildly outpaced the human capacity for moral reckoning.” We find these words near the beginning of “The Machine (1946-2016),” the last part (some 270 pages) of Jill Lepore’s lengthy and highly-praised These Truths: A History of the United States.
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