Leo Marx, a cultural historian whose landmark book, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, explores the pervasive intrusion of technology on nature and helped to define the field of American studies, died March 8 at his home in Boston. He was 102.

Professor Marx, who taught for many years at MIT, became a pioneer in an eclectic and still evolving quest to determine an American national identity — an amalgam of intellectual history, the history of ideas and literature, and portions of other disciplines, including philosophy, psychology and art history. Professor Marx added technology to the American studies mix.

The dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima crystallized his thinking about technology, politics, nature and literature. “Quite apart from its tragic consequences, no other event in my lifetime so effectively dramatized the nexus between science-based technological progress and the cumulative, long-term degradation of the environment,” Professor Marx wrote.