Early career, 1933–1943 White began his teaching career as an instructor at Princeton, remaining there from 1933 to 1937. At Princeton, he read the works of
Richard Lefebvre des Noëttes,
Franz Maria Feldhaus, and
Marc Bloch.'' Noettes was a retired French cavalry officer who made his hobby the history of horses. He wrote that the utilization of animals in
Classical antiquity was inefficient due to limitations of the technologies of their period, particularly the lack of
horseshoes and a bad
horse harness design. White expanded Noettes’ conclusions into a thesis of his own that encompassed the relationship of the newly realized efficient horse and the agricultural revolution of the time. White pointed to new methods of
crop rotation and
plowing and tied them to the rise of
manorialist collective farming and the shift in European prosperity and power from the
Mediterranean to
Northern Europe. White also touched on the
stirrup, the
lateen sail, the
wheel barrow, the
spinning wheel, the
hand crank,
water-driven mills and
wind mills. He concluded: "The chief glory of the later Middle Ages was not its cathedrals or its epics or its scholasticism: it was the building for the first time in history of a complex civilization which rested not on the backs of sweating slaves or coolies but primarily on non-human power" and he credited this as well as Western primacy in technology to Western theology's "activist" tradition and "implicit assumption of the infinite worth of even the most degraded human personality" and its "repugnance towards subjecting any man to monotonous drudgery." White moved back to Stanford University, his alma mater, as an assistant professor in 1937, and he taught there until 1943, rising to the rank of full professor.
President of Mills College, 1943–1957 In 1943, as the US entered
World War II, White left Stanford to accept the presidency of
Mills College, a small
liberal arts college for women in
Oakland, California. Articles White published on education and women included "Women's Colleges and the Male Dominance" (1947), "Unfitting Women for Life" (1949), "Educating Women in a Man's World" (1950), and "The Future of Women's Education" (1953). White collected essays of the early part of this period in the book
Educating Our Daughters (1950) and those of the later part in
Frontiers of Knowledge in the Study of Man (1956).''
Before doing so, he gave a set of lectures in 1957 at the University of Virginia titled "Medieval Technology and Social Change," During this time, in 1958, he was awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship. This book revisited almost all the themes from "Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages" 22 years earlier, but also included a controversial theory about the
stirrup. White contended in the first section of the book that the stirrup made
shock combat possible, and therefore had a crucial role in shaping the
feudal system. He believed this motivated
Charles Martel to accelerate confiscation of church-held lands to distribute to his knights, who could then bear the cost of expensive horses themselves to support him in battle. Critics have claimed this theory was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how stirrups aid riders. However, White stood by his claims based on personal experience, saying, referring to his military academy training, "I learned to ride bareback and have detested horses ever since. My enthusiasm for the stirrup was confirmed by the more advanced stages of cavalry training. Since the spear was never widely used in North American armies, I am no lancer. I am, however, probably the only living American medievalist who has ever taken part in a charge at full gallop by a line of cavalry with sabers bared." In the third part of the book, he examined medieval machines that converted motion and energy. The most notable was the
compound crank. White dedicated
Medieval Technology and Social Change to the memory of French historian
Marc Bloch and it represented the influences of his
Annales school. In the book's preface, White posited that "Since, until recent centuries, technology was chiefly the concern of groups which wrote little, the role which technological development plays in human affairs has been neglected," and further that "If historians are to attempt to write the history of mankind, and not simply the history of mankind as it was viewed by the small and specialized segments of our race which have had the habit of scribbling, they must take a fresh view of the records, ask new questions of them, and use all the resources of archaeology, iconography, and etymology to find answers when no answers can be discovered in contemporary writings." The work elicited over 30 reviews, many of which were hostile, though it also won the
History of Science Society's highest award for a single work in the history of science in English in the past three years, the
Pfizer Award, for 1963.
P. H. Sawyer and
R. H. Hilton wrote the most scathing of the early reviews, beginning with: "Technical determinism in historical studies has often been combined with adventurous speculations particularly attractive to those who like to have complex developments explained by simple causes. The technical determinism of Professor Lynn White Jr., however, is peculiar in that, instead of building new and provocative theories about general historical development on the basis of technical studies, he gives a misleadingly adventurist cast to old-fashioned platitudes by supporting them with a chain of obscure and dubious deductions from scanty evidence about the progress of technology." By contrast,
Joseph Needham called it "the most stimulating book of the century on the history of technology." In any case, the book remains in print and still stands as a seminal work in the field. In this period, White also contributed to the founding of the
Society for the History of Technology (founded 1958) and he served as one of its early presidents from 1960 to 1962. He served as founding director of UCLA's Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies from 1964 to 1970. He won the
Dexter Prize from the Society for the History of Technology for
Machina ex Deo in 1970 and was named a Commendatore nell'Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana the same year. He was president of the History of Science Society from 1971 to 1972, of the
Medieval Academy of America from 1972–1973, and of the
American Historical Association in 1973. through his "Dynamo and Virgin Reconsidered" of 1958, to his
Medieval Technology and Social Change, his work had contested assumptions that the Middle Ages were too preoccupied with theology and/or chivalry to concern themselves with technology, the assumption behind
Henry Adams' antitheses of Virgin vs. Dynamo, but widespread elsewhere as well, for instance as described in
The Communist Manifesto. In 1967, White conjectured that the Christian influences in the Middle Ages were at the root of
ecological crisis in the 20th century. because: • The Bible asserts man's dominion over nature and establishes a trend of
anthropocentrism. • Christianity makes a distinction between man (formed in God's image) and the rest of creation, which has no "soul" or "reason" and is thus inferior. He posited that these beliefs have led to an indifference towards nature which continues to impact in an industrial, "
post-Christian" world. He concludes that applying more science and technology to the problem will not help, that it is humanity's fundamental ideas about nature that must change; we must abandon "superior, contemptuous" attitudes that makes us "willing to use it [the earth] for our slightest whim." White suggests adopting St.
Francis of Assisi as a model in imagining a "democracy" of creation in which all creatures are respected and man's rule over creation is delimited. White's ideas set off an extended debate about the role of religion in creating and sustaining the West's destructive attitude towards the exploitation of the natural world. It also galvanized interest in the relationship between history, nature and the evolution of ideas, thus stimulating new fields of study like
environmental history and
ecotheology. Many saw his argument as a direct attack on Christianity and other commentators think his analysis of the impact of the Bible, and especially Genesis is misguided. They argue that
Genesis provides man with a model of "
stewardship" rather than dominion, and asks man to take care of the world's environment. Others, such as Lewis W. Moncrief, argue that our relation to the environment has been influenced by many more varied and complex cultural/historical phenomena, and that the result we see today cannot simply be reduced to the influence of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Later responses to his article include criticism not just of the central argument but also of the validity of his suggestion "I propose Francis as a patron saint for ecologists." Jan J. Boersema's article "Why is St Francis of Assisi the patron saint of ecologists?" argues that the historical evidence for Francis's status as such a patron saint is weak both in Francis' own writings and in the reliable sources about his life. == Family and death ==