American Illuminations: Urban Lighting, 1800-1920

摘要

David Nye is widely regarded as a preeminent historian of technology in the United States, having published numerous and frequently cited studies on electrification, blackouts, and the technological sublime. In this latest addition to an impressive corpus, Nye tackles the question of urban lighting in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, arguing that the illuminations city dwellers now take for granted were, despite their appearances, anything but inevitable. They are "social constructions that express political and social values," he suggests (p. 5), launching into a concise, readable, and well-researched account of the culturally shaped choices underpinning technologies that have radically reshaped the city and its inhabitants' experiences of it.