America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New BeginningsMIT Press, 17 de set. de 2004 - 383 páginas 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. |
De dentro do livro
Resultados 1-5 de 61
... transform these spaces into familiar landscapes . Every society constructs narratives to make sense of its existence , to explain how its people came to live in a particular place . Native Ameri- cans ' stories of origin provide an ...
... transformation of settlers who experienced " regeneration through violence . " 5 Such stories defined the self ... transformed a wilderness into a prosperous and egalitarian society . Their dramatic action focuses on transforming an ...
... transformation possible . Second - creation stories depict not heroic founders so much as generic first settlers . They express in secular form the beginnings of a new social world , and they establish the ideal ground rules of the ...
... transform the space of America — to drain lands if they were wet , to water them if they were dry , to log them if they were wooded , to plow and to plant new crops . 12 The axe , the mill , the canal , the railroad , and the dam stand ...
... transform the land while establishing communities similar to those they had known before . In these progressive narratives ... transformation of the United States so that it seemed an inevitable and harmonious process leading to a second ...
Conteúdo
Narrating the Assimilation of Nature | 9 |
Surveying the Ground | 21 |
Axe Clearing Cabin | 43 |
The Nurturing Forest | 71 |
The Mill or Natural Power | 91 |
Pollution and Class Conflict | 117 |
Let Us Conquer Space | 147 |
The Route of Superior Desolation | 175 |
Conquered Rivers Are Better Servants than Wild Clouds | 205 |
Water Monopoly Federal Irrigation and Factories in the Field | 233 |
Progress or Entropy? | 261 |
Second Creation Conservation and Wilderness | 283 |
Notes | 303 |
Bibliography | 345 |
365 | |
Outras edições - Ver todos
America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings David E. Nye Visualização parcial - 2004 |
America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings David E. Nye Visualização parcial - 2004 |
America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings David E. Nye Prévia não disponível - 2004 |