Promotional Information

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 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. -- Denis Cosgrove, Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles 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

About the Author

David E. Nye, Professor of American Studies at Odense University in Denmark, is the author of Consuming Power (MIT Press, 1998), American Technological Sublime (MIT Press, 1998), Electrifying America (MIT Press, 1990), and Image Worlds (MIT Press, 1985).

Reviews

"Well imagined, meticulously researched, handsomely illustrated, and scrupulously fair." - New Scientist