After the American Century
A few months ago, MIT Press singled out my Electrifying America as one of 50 books to celebrate as part of an anniversary event. I was asked to prepare a short reflection on the book, which appears below.
The late 1980s was a good time to reflect on and
analyze electrification, a process that had begun in the 1880s and been completed
in my childhood. When I took up the subject, electricity had become "natural"
but it was not difficult to recover its recent novelty. I was also experienced
enough, with three previous books (on Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and General
Electric), to realize that this was a wonderful subject and to know how
fortunate I was to start work with the encouragement of a contract from MIT
Press.
I researched Electrifying
America when there was still no email or Internet, although I proudly wrote
on a new word processor (with no hard disk). Most documents had to be gathered in
libraries and archives, which was less a hardship than a pleasure. Where could
I better get a sense of the early electric light than at the Edison National
Historic Site? I did research in Muncie Indiana (better known as Middletown) to
understand how it had adopted electricity. Likewise, I studied the electricity-mad
Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, where it had been held in 1901. Such
experiences gave me an invaluable grounding in the material culture of my
subject.
That grounding stretched back to my childhood. I
often visited my grandparents’ New Hampshire farm, which, when I first was
there, lacked electricity. I also glimpsed the pre-electric world among the
Amish and Mennonites whom I encountered while growing up in central
Pennsylvania. During summers in Boston, I delighted in streetcars, and pestered my
father to take me for rides, demanding to know how the system worked. A
mechanical engineer who had co-authored a book about steam-power plants, he explained
to me elementary mechanics and electrical machinery. Decades later he was still
teaching me when we discussed sections of Electrifying
America in draft form. By then, I was also teaching him some social and
cultural history. They are at the center of the book, which fuses my education
in American Studies with an understanding of technical details and an immersion
in specific places. It proved to be the longest and perhaps the best of
the eight books I have written for MIT Press, though an author always likes to think the next book will be the best one. (My America's Assembly Line will appear with MIT Press in spring, 2013.)
Electrifying
America: Social Meanings of a New Technology received a full-page
review in the New York Times Sunday Book
Review in September, 1991, and that December it was named a Times Notable Book for the year.
It won the 1991 Abel Woolman Award from the Public Works History
Association, and in 1993 it received the Dexter Prize from the Society for the
History of Technology. It is still in print.
