Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge explores paradoxes of technology over two centuries to underscore why things so often turn out—for worse but also for better—so differently from futurists’ forecasts. By celebrating the complexity of reality, it counters the cycles of utopianism and doomsaying so often provoked by technological change.

Spanning six continents—Europe, Australia, Africa, Asia, North America, and South America—this collection offers a transnational study of Holocaust and human rights museums that foregrounds the overlapping and often contested work these institutions do in narrating and memorializing histories of genocide and human rights abuses for the public.