American Technological Sublime

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American Technological Sublime

Author : David E. Nye
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 9780262640343
Total Pages : 388 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (43 download)

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Book Synopsis American Technological Sublime by : David E. Nye

Download or read book American Technological Sublime written by David E. Nye and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1996-02-28 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Technological Sublime continues the exploration of the social construction of technology that David Nye began in his award-winning book Electrifying America. Here Nye examines the continuing appeal of the "technological sublime" (a term coined by Perry Miller) as a key to the nation's history, using as examples the natural sites, architectural forms, and technological achievements that ordinary people have valued intensely. Technology has long played a central role in the formation of Americans' sense of selfhood. From the first canal systems through the moon landing, Americans have, for better or worse, derived unity from the common feeling of awe inspired by large-scale applications of technological prowess. American Technological Sublime continues the exploration of the social construction of technology that David Nye began in his award-winning book Electrifying America. Here Nye examines the continuing appeal of the "technological sublime" (a term coined by Perry Miller) as a key to the nation's history, using as examples the natural sites, architectural forms, and technological achievements that ordinary people have valued intensely. American Technological Sublime is a study of the politics of perception in industrial society. Arranged chronologically, it suggests that the sublime itself has a history - that sublime experiences are emotional configurations that emerge from new social and technological conditions, and that each new configuration to some extent undermines and displaces the older versions. After giving a short history of the sublime as an aesthetic category, Nye describes the reemergence and democratization of the concept in the early nineteenth century as an expression of the American sense of specialness. What has filled the American public with wonder, awe, even terror? David Nye selects the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, the Erie Canal, the first transcontinental railroad, Eads Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge, the major international expositions, the Hudson-Fulton Celebration of 1909, the Empire State Building, and Boulder Dam. He then looks at the atom bomb tests and the Apollo mission as examples of the increasing ambivalence of the technological sublime in the postwar world. The festivities surrounding the rededication of the Statue of Liberty in 1986 become a touchstone reflecting the transformation of the American experience of the sublime over two centuries. Nye concludes with a vision of the modern-day "consumer sublime" as manifested in the fantasy world of Las Vegas.

American Technological Sublime

Author : David E. Nye
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262640341
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (626 download)

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Book Synopsis American Technological Sublime by : David E. Nye

Download or read book American Technological Sublime written by David E. Nye and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1996-02-28 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Technological Sublime continues the exploration of the social construction of technology that David Nye began in his award-winning book Electrifying America. Here Nye examines the continuing appeal of the "technological sublime" (a term coined by Perry Miller) as a key to the nation's history, using as examples the natural sites, architectural forms, and technological achievements that ordinary people have valued intensely. Technology has long played a central role in the formation of Americans' sense of selfhood. From the first canal systems through the moon landing, Americans have, for better or worse, derived unity from the common feeling of awe inspired by large-scale applications of technological prowess. American Technological Sublime continues the exploration of the social construction of technology that David Nye began in his award-winning book Electrifying America. Here Nye examines the continuing appeal of the "technological sublime" (a term coined by Perry Miller) as a key to the nation's history, using as examples the natural sites, architectural forms, and technological achievements that ordinary people have valued intensely. American Technological Sublime is a study of the politics of perception in industrial society. Arranged chronologically, it suggests that the sublime itself has a history - that sublime experiences are emotional configurations that emerge from new social and technological conditions, and that each new configuration to some extent undermines and displaces the older versions. After giving a short history of the sublime as an aesthetic category, Nye describes the reemergence and democratization of the concept in the early nineteenth century as an expression of the American sense of specialness. What has filled the American public with wonder, awe, even terror? David Nye selects the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, the Erie Canal, the first transcontinental railroad, Eads Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge, the major international expositions, the Hudson-Fulton Celebration of 1909, the Empire State Building, and Boulder Dam. He then looks at the atom bomb tests and the Apollo mission as examples of the increasing ambivalence of the technological sublime in the postwar world. The festivities surrounding the rededication of the Statue of Liberty in 1986 become a touchstone reflecting the transformation of the American experience of the sublime over two centuries. Nye concludes with a vision of the modern-day "consumer sublime" as manifested in the fantasy world of Las Vegas.

Postmodern Sublime

Author : Joseph Tabbi
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501717642
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Postmodern Sublime by : Joseph Tabbi

Download or read book Postmodern Sublime written by Joseph Tabbi and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on works by Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Joseph McElroy, and Don DeLillo, Joseph Tabbi finds that a simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from technology has produced a powerful new mode of modern writing—the technological sublime.

America as Second Creation

Author : David E. Nye
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262263947
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (622 download)

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Book Synopsis America as Second Creation by : David E. Nye

Download or read book America as Second Creation written by David E. Nye and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004-09-17 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

America's Assembly Line

Author : David E. Nye
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262527596
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis America's Assembly Line by : David E. Nye

Download or read book America's Assembly Line written by David E. Nye and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-01-30 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Model T to today's "lean manufacturing": the assembly line as crucial, yet controversial, agent of social and economic transformation. The mechanized assembly line was invented in 1913 and has been in continuous operation ever since. It is the most familiar form of mass production. Both praised as a boon to workers and condemned for exploiting them, it has been celebrated and satirized. (We can still picture Chaplin's little tramp trying to keep up with a factory conveyor belt.) In America's Assembly Line, David Nye examines the industrial innovation that made the United States productive and wealthy in the twentieth century. The assembly line—developed at the Ford Motor Company in 1913 for the mass production of Model Ts—first created and then served an expanding mass market. It also transformed industrial labor. By 1980, Japan had reinvented the assembly line as a system of “lean manufacturing”; American industry reluctantly adopted the new approach. Nye describes this evolution and the new global landscape of increasingly automated factories, with fewer industrial jobs in America and questionable working conditions in developing countries. A century after Ford's pioneering innovation, the assembly line continues to evolve toward more sustainable manufacturing.

Consuming Power

Author : David E. Nye
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262261022
Total Pages : 501 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (622 download)

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Book Synopsis Consuming Power by : David E. Nye

Download or read book Consuming Power written by David E. Nye and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1999-02-18 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nye uses energy as a touchstone to examine the lives of ordinary people engaged in normal activities. How did the United States become the world's largest consumer of energy? David Nye shows that this is less a question about the development of technology than it is a question about the development of culture. In Consuming Power, Nye uses energy as a touchstone to examine the lives of ordinary people engaged in normal activities. He looks at how these activities changed as new energy systems were constructed, from colonial times to recent years. He also shows how, as Americans incorporated new machines and processes into their lives, they became ensnared in power systems that were not easily changed: they made choices about the conduct of their lives, and those choices accumulated to produce a consuming culture. Nye examines a sequence of large systems that acquired and then lost technological momentum over the course of American history, including water power, steam power, electricity, the internal-combustion engine, atomic power, and computerization. He shows how each system became part of a larger set of social constructions through its links to the home, the factory, and the city. The result is a social history of America as seen through the lens of energy consumption.

Electrifying America

Author : David E. Nye
Publisher : MIT Press (MA)
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 504 pages
Book Rating : 4.F/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis Electrifying America by : David E. Nye

Download or read book Electrifying America written by David E. Nye and published by MIT Press (MA). This book was released on 1990 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how electricity seeped into and redefined American culture, becoming fundamental to modern life.

Technology Matters

Author : David E. Nye
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262250748
Total Pages : 299 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (622 download)

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Book Synopsis Technology Matters by : David E. Nye

Download or read book Technology Matters written by David E. Nye and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2007-08-24 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses in nontechnical language ten central questions about technology that illuminate what technology is and why it matters. Technology matters, writes David Nye, because it is inseparable from being human. We have used tools for more than 100,000 years, and their central purpose has not always been to provide necessities. People excel at using old tools to solve new problems and at inventing new tools for more elegant solutions to old tasks. Perhaps this is because we are intimate with devices and machines from an early age—as children, we play with technological toys: trucks, cars, stoves, telephones, model railroads, Playstations. Through these machines we imagine ourselves into a creative relationship with the world. As adults, we retain this technological playfulness with gadgets and appliances—Blackberries, cell phones, GPS navigation systems in our cars. We use technology to shape our world, yet we think little about the choices we are making. In Technology Matters, Nye tackles ten central questions about our relationship to technology, integrating a half-century of ideas about technology into ten cogent and concise chapters, with wide-ranging historical examples from many societies. He asks: Can we define technology? Does technology shape us, or do we shape it? Is technology inevitable or unpredictable? (Why do experts often fail to get it right?)? How do historians understand it? Are we using modern technology to create cultural uniformity, or diversity? To create abundance, or an ecological crisis? To destroy jobs or create new opportunities? Should "the market" choose our technologies? Do advanced technologies make us more secure, or escalate dangers? Does ubiquitous technology expand our mental horizons, or encapsulate us in artifice? These large questions may have no final answers yet, but we need to wrestle with them—to live them, so that we may, as Rilke puts it, "live along some distant day into the answers."

Haunted Media

Author : Jeffrey Sconce
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780822325727
Total Pages : 276 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (257 download)

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Book Synopsis Haunted Media by : Jeffrey Sconce

Download or read book Haunted Media written by Jeffrey Sconce and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the repeated association of new electronic media with spiritual phenomena from the telegraph in the late 19th century to television.

American Illuminations

Author : David E. Nye
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262344793
Total Pages : 291 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (623 download)

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Book Synopsis American Illuminations by : David E. Nye

Download or read book American Illuminations written by David E. Nye and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Americans adapted European royal illuminations for patriotic celebrations, spectacular expositions, and intensely bright commercial lighting to create the world's most dazzling and glamorous cities. Illuminated fêtes and civic celebrations began in Renaissance Italy and spread through the courts of Europe. Their fireworks, torches, lamps, and special effects glorified the monarch, marked the birth of a prince, or celebrated military victory. Nineteenth-century Americans rejected such monarchial pomp and adapted spectacular lighting to their democratic, commercial culture. In American Illuminations, David Nye explains how they experimented with gas and electric light to create illuminated cityscapes far brighter and more dynamic than those of Europe, and how these illuminations became symbols of modernity and the conquest of nature. Americans used gaslight and electricity in parades, expositions, advertising, elections, and political spectacles. In the 1880s, cities erected powerful arc lights on towers to create artificial moonlight. By the 1890s they adopted more intensive, commercial lighting that defined distinct zones of light and glamorized the city's White Ways, skyscrapers, bridges, department stores, theaters, and dance halls. Poor and blighted areas disappeared into the shadows. American illuminations also became integral parts of national political campaigns, presidential inaugurations, and victory celebrations after the Spanish-American War and World War I.

Seven Sublimes

Author : David E. Nye
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 026204692X
Total Pages : 229 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (62 download)

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Book Synopsis Seven Sublimes by : David E. Nye

Download or read book Seven Sublimes written by David E. Nye and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-05-17 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reconception of the sublime to include experiences of disaster, war, outer space, virtual reality, and the Anthropocene. We experience the sublime—overwhelming amazement and exhilaration—in at least seven different forms. Gazing from the top of a mountain at a majestic vista is not the same thing as looking at a city from the observation deck of a skyscraper; looking at images constructed from Hubble Space Telescope data is not the same as living through a powerful earthquake. The varieties of sublime experience have increased during the last two centuries, and we need an expanded terminology to distinguish between them. In this book, David Nye delineates seven forms of the sublime: natural, technological, disastrous, martial, intangible, digital, and environmental, which express seven different relationships to space, time, and identity. These forms of the sublime can be experienced at historic sites, ruins, cities, national parks, or on the computer screen. We find them in beautiful landscapes and gigantic dams, in battle and on battlefields, in images of black holes and microscopic particles. The older forms are tangible, when we are physically present and our senses are fully engaged; increasingly, others are intangible, mediated through technology. Nye examines each of the seven sublimes, framed by philosophy but focused on historical examples.

When the Lights Went Out

Author : David E. Nye
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262288338
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (622 download)

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Book Synopsis When the Lights Went Out by : David E. Nye

Download or read book When the Lights Went Out written by David E. Nye and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2010-01-29 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blackouts—whether they result from military planning, network failure, human error, or terrorism—offer snapshots of electricity's increasingly central role in American society. Where were you when the lights went out? At home during a thunderstorm? During the Great Northeastern Blackout of 1965? In California when rolling blackouts hit in 2000? In 2003, when a cascading power failure left fifty million people without electricity? We often remember vividly our time in the dark. In When the Lights Went Out, David Nye views power outages in America from 1935 to the present not simply as technical failures but variously as military tactic, social disruption, crisis in the networked city, outcome of political and economic decisions, sudden encounter with sublimity, and memories enshrined in photographs. Our electrically lit-up life is so natural to us that when the lights go off, the darkness seems abnormal. Nye looks at America's development of its electrical grid, which made large-scale power failures possible and a series of blackouts from military blackouts to the “greenout” (exemplified by the new tradition of “Earth Hour”), a voluntary reduction organized by environmental organizations. Blackouts, writes Nye, are breaks in the flow of social time that reveal much about the trajectory of American history. Each time one occurs, Americans confront their essential condition—not as isolated individuals, but as a community that increasingly binds itself together with electrical wires and signals.

Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology

Author : Merritt Roe Smith
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780801491818
Total Pages : 372 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (918 download)

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Book Synopsis Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology by : Merritt Roe Smith

Download or read book Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology written by Merritt Roe Smith and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1980-04-30 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the day-to-day operations of the U.S. armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, between 1798 and 1861, reveals the impact of the then new technology of mechanized production on organization, management, and worker morale.

The Environmental Humanities

Author : Robert S. Emmett
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262342308
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (623 download)

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Book Synopsis The Environmental Humanities by : Robert S. Emmett

Download or read book The Environmental Humanities written by Robert S. Emmett and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-10-13 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A concise overview of this multidisciplinary field, presenting key concepts, central issues, and current research, along with concrete examples and case studies. The emergence of the environmental humanities as an academic discipline early in the twenty-first century reflects the growing conviction that environmental problems cannot be solved by science and technology alone. This book offers a concise overview of this new multidisciplinary field, presenting concepts, issues, current research, concrete examples, and case studies. Robert Emmett and David Nye show how humanists, by offering constructive knowledge as well as negative critique, can improve our understanding of such environmental problems as global warming, species extinction, and over-consumption of the earth's resources. They trace the genealogy of environmental humanities from European, Australian, and American initiatives, also showing its cross-pollination by postcolonial and feminist theories. Emmett and Nye consider a concept of place not synonymous with localism, the risks of ecotourism, and the cultivation of wild areas. They discuss the decoupling of energy use and progress, and point to OECD countries for examples of sustainable development. They explain the potential for science to do both good and harm, examine dark visions of planetary collapse, and describe more positive possibilities—alternative practices, including localization and degrowth. Finally, they examine the theoretical impact of new materialism, feminism, postcolonial criticism, animal studies, and queer ecology on the environmental humanities.

Conflicted American Landscapes

Author : David E. Nye
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780262363099
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (63 download)

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Book Synopsis Conflicted American Landscapes by : David E. Nye

Download or read book Conflicted American Landscapes written by David E. Nye and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Traces six contradictory American ideologies of nature from their emergence in the late eighteenth century to the present to explore how inconsistent conceptions of nature lead to conflict"--

How Outer Space Made America

Author : Dr Daniel Sage
Publisher : Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN 13 : 1472423666
Total Pages : 193 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (724 download)

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Book Synopsis How Outer Space Made America by : Dr Daniel Sage

Download or read book How Outer Space Made America written by Dr Daniel Sage and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2014-11-28 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this innovatory book Daniel Sage analyses how and why American space exploration reproduced and transformed American cultural and political imaginations by appealing to, and to an extent organizing, the transcendence of spatial and temporal frontiers. While largely engaging with the historical development of space exploration, it shows how contemporary cultural and social, and indeed geographical, research themes, including national identity, critical geopolitics, gender, technocracy, trauma and memory, can be informed by the study of space exploration.

Niagara Falls

Author : Elizabeth R. McKinsey
Publisher : Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521259019
Total Pages : 331 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (59 download)

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Book Synopsis Niagara Falls by : Elizabeth R. McKinsey

Download or read book Niagara Falls written by Elizabeth R. McKinsey and published by Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York : Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beth McKinsey has chronicled and examined the changing image of Niagara Falls between the seventeenth and twentieth century.