America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings

by David E. Nye

Overview

An exploration of the dialogue that emerged after 1776 between different visions of what it meant to use new technologies to transform the land.

After 1776, the former American colonies began to reimagine themselves as a unified, self-created community. Technologies had an important role in the resulting national narratives, and a few technologies assumed particular prominence. Among these were the axe, the mill, the canal, the railroad, and the irrigation dam. In this book David Nye explores the stories that clustered around these technologies. In doing so, he rediscovers an American story of origins, with America conceived as a second creation built in harmony with God's first creation.

While mainstream Americans constructed technological foundation stories to explain their place in the New World, however, marginalized groups told other stories of destruction and loss. Native Americans protested the loss of their forests, fishermen resisted the construction of dams, and early environmentalists feared the exhaustionof resources. A water mill could be viewed as the kernel of a new community or as a new way to exploit labor. If passengers comprehended railways as part of a larger narrative about American expansion and progress, many farmers attacked railroad land grants. To explore these contradictions, Nye devotes alternating chapters to narratives of second creation and to narratives of those who rejected it. Nye draws on popular literature, speeches, advertisements, paintings, and many other media to create a history of American foundation stories. He shows how these stories were revised periodically, as social and economic conditions changed, without ever erasing the earlier stories entirely. The image of the isolated frontier family carving a homestead out of the wilderness with an axe persists to this day, alongside later images and narratives. In the book's conclusion, Nye considers the relation between these earlier stories and such later American developments as the conservation movement, narratives of environmental recovery, and the idealization of wilderness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262640596
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	09/17/2004
Series:	The MIT Press
Pages:	383
Product dimensions:	6.06(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.93(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

David E. Nye is Senior Research Fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute and the History of Science and Technology program at the University of Minnesota and Professor Emeritus of American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. His other books published by the MIT Press include Electrifying America and American Technological Sublime. He was awarded the Leonardo da Vinci Medal in 2005 and was knighted by the Queen of Denmark in 2013.

What People are Saying About This

Werner Sollors

The axe, the mill, the canal, and the railroad: From the grid to ecofeminism, David Nye's America as Second Creation offers a new, far-ranging, and detail-rich account of the changing technological foundation stories that have accompanied and helped shape US culture, and of the counternarratives that have challenged the dominant ideology.

Denis Cosgrove

America as Second Creation brilliantly reworks Leo Marx's Machine in the Garden thesis in the light of four decades of scholarship on technology, environment, and American culture. David Nye's dissection of America's foundation narratives—and their simultaneously elaborated counter-narratives—is masterly. Log cabin, mill, canal and railroad, irrigation, and river regulation: he shows how each technology has been mythologized to account for the triumph, or disaster, of American social and environmental making. Leo Marx's machine has been reassembled, his garden re-fertilized, their shared story re-energized.

Endorsement

Pathbreaking, richly researched—one cannot read America as Second Creation without seeing our history, and our present-day problems, with fresh eyes. Nye brilliantly deconstructs the long standing American belief that technology, from the humble woodsman's axe and water-powered mill to the transcontinental railroads and gigantic irrigation projects, wrought a 'second creation' and improved on God's original handiwork.

—Joseph J. Corn, Department of History, Stanford University

From the Publisher

The axe, the mill, the canal, and the railroad: From the grid to ecofeminism, David Nye's America as Second Creation offers a new, far-ranging, and detail-rich account of the changing technological foundation stories that have accompanied and helped shape US culture, and of the counternarratives that have challenged the dominant ideology.

—Werner Sollors, Harvard University, and author of Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture

A superb analysis of cultural icons too often mentioned or cited but almost never analyzed.

—John Stilgoe, Harvard University

John Stilgoe

A superb analysis of cultural icons too often mentioned or cited but almost never analyzed.

Joseph J. Corn

Pathbreaking, richly researched—one cannot read America as Second Creation without seeing our history, and our present-day problems, with fresh eyes. Nye brilliantly deconstructs the long standing American belief that technology, from the humble woodsman's axe and water-powered mill to the transcontinental railroads and gigantic irrigation projects, wrought a 'second creation' and improved on God's original handiwork.

Editorial Reviews

America as Second Creation is a thought-provoking, readable and vital addition to the literature of American studies.—Richard Haw, American Studies—

Mr. Nye [is] a remarkable chronicler of how technological change has impressed itself on the American character.

—E. Rothstein, The New York Times—

Well imagined, meticulously researched, handsomely illustrated, and scrupulously fair.

—Simon Ings, NewScientist—

From the Publisher

Well imagined, meticulously researched, handsomely illustrated, and scrupulously fair.

—Simon Ings, NewScientist

Reviews

Well imagined, meticulously researched, handsomely illustrated, and scrupulously fair.

NewScientist - Simon Ings

Mr. Nye [is] a remarkable chronicler of how technological change has impressed itself on the American character.

The New York Times - E. Rothstein

America as Second Creation is a thought-provoking, readable and vital addition to the literature of American studies.

American Studies - Richard Haw