Leseprobe
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American Lucifers
Jeremy Zallen
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The University of North Carolina Press 
Belletristik / Hauptwerk vor 1945
Beschreibung
The myth of light and progress has blinded us. In our electric world, we are everywhere surrounded by effortlessly glowing lights that simply exist, as they should, seemingly clear and comforting proof that human genius means the present will always be better than the past, and the future better still. At best, this is half the story. At worst, it is a lie.
From whale oil to kerosene, from the colonial period to the end of the U.S. Civil War, modern, industrial lights brought wonderful improvements and incredible wealth to some. But for most workers, free and unfree, human and nonhuman, these lights were catastrophes. This book tells their stories. The surprisingly violent struggle to produce, control, and consume the changing means of illumination over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries transformed slavery, industrial capitalism, and urban families in profound, often hidden ways. Only by taking the lives of whalers and enslaved turpentine makers, match-manufacturing children and coal miners, night-working seamstresses and the streetlamp-lit poor—those American lucifers—as seriously as those of inventors and businessmen can the full significance of the revolution of artificial light be understood.
Kundenbewertungen
night work and enslavement in West Indian sugar mills, enslaved and free coal miners in Virginia, energy and labor in American whaling, coal mine explosions, enslaved laborers in the New Orleans gasworks, camphene lamps and outworking women, child labor in the lucifer match industry, phosphorus manufactories in England and France, the political lives of enslaved woodsmen in North Carolina turpentine camps, class and light in urban spaces, hog farming in the antebellum Ohio Valley, slaughterhouses and hog by-product industries in Cincinnati, Ohio, cattle and, lamp explosions, slave life insurance and industrial slavery, street lamps, class, and policing in London