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American Lucifers - The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750-1865 (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R866
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American Lucifers - The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750-1865 (Hardcover)
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The myth of light and progress has blinded us. In our electric
world, we are everywhere surrounded by effortlessly glowing lights
that simply exist, as they should, seemingly clear and comforting
proof that human genius means the present will always be better
than the past, and the future better still. At best, this is half
the story. At worst, it is a lie. From whale oil to kerosene, from
the colonial period to the end of the U.S. Civil War, modern,
industrial lights brought wonderful improvements and incredible
wealth to some. But for most workers, free and unfree, human and
nonhuman, these lights were catastrophes. This book tells their
stories. The surprisingly violent struggle to produce, control, and
consume the changing means of illumination over the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries transformed slavery, industrial capitalism,
and urban families in profound, often hidden ways. Only by taking
the lives of whalers and enslaved turpentine makers,
match-manufacturing children and coal miners, night-working
seamstresses and the streetlamp-lit poor--those American
lucifers--as seriously as those of inventors and businessmen can
the full significance of the revolution of artificial light be
understood.
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