How did electricity enter everyday life in America? Using Muncie, Indiana -- the Lynds' now iconic Middletown -- as a touchstone, David Nye explores how electricity seeped into and redefined American culture. With an eye for telling details from archival sources and a broad understanding of cultural and social history, he creates a thought-provoking panorama of a technology fundamental to modern life.
Emphasizing the experiences of ordinary men and women rather than the lives of inventors and entrepreneurs, Nye treats electrification as a set of technical possibilities that were...
How did electricity enter everyday life in America? Using Muncie, Indiana -- the Lynds' now iconic Middletown -- as a touchstone, David Nye explore...
How did the United States become the world's largest consumer of energy? David Nye shows that this is less a question about the development of technology than it is a question about the development of culture. In Consuming Power, Nye uses energy as a touchstone to examine the lives of ordinary people engaged in normal activities. He looks at how these activities changed as new energy systems were constructed, from colonial times to recent years. He also shows how, as Americans incorporated new machines and processes into their lives, they became ensnared in power systems that were...
How did the United States become the world's largest consumer of energy? David Nye shows that this is less a question about the development of tech...
Technology and landscape have long been understood as inherently antagonistic concepts, reflective of the encroachments of civilization on the natural world. Yet as the essays in this volume make clear, the tension between culture and nature is more apparent than real. Even in preindustrial societies, where the dominant technologies are agricultural, it would be impossible to envision a landscape unshaped by human contact. Drawing on evidence from Europe and America, and from the Renaissance to the present day, the contributors to this volume reconceive of the relationship between...
Technology and landscape have long been understood as inherently antagonistic concepts, reflective of the encroachments of civilization on the natu...
The mechanized assembly line was invented in 1913 and has been in continuous operation ever since. It is the most familiar form of mass production. Both praised as a boon to workers and condemned for exploiting them, it has been celebrated and satirized. (We can still picture Chaplin's little tramp trying to keep up with a factory conveyor belt.) In America's Assembly Line, David Nye examines the industrial innovation that made the United States productive and wealthy in the twentieth century.
The assembly line -- developed at the Ford Motor Company in 1913 for the mass...
The mechanized assembly line was invented in 1913 and has been in continuous operation ever since. It is the most familiar form of mass production....
