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.
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