Abstract
Extract
The history of artificial light is often told as a story of progress: candles giving way to gaslights, gas yielding to electric lightbulbs, each innovation improving on the safety and convenience of its predecessor. Yet this narrative obscures what Jeremy Zallen calls a “dark history” of “struggles among the makers and owners” of light (p. 3). American Lucifers, a labor and environmental history of artificial light in the century before the Civil War, addresses electrification in an epilogue, but it centers on a less heralded set of illuminants, from spermaceti to kerosene, and the work regimes they engendered. The production and consumption of light bound far-flung ecologies together and tied incipient industrial modernities to systems of unfree labor. Zallen's wide-ranging research and vivid prose reveal the exploitation latent in every strike of a match.
Each chapter in American Lucifers examines a commodity used for lighting: whale oil, hog lard,...
The history of artificial light is often told as a story of progress: candles giving way to gaslights, gas yielding to electric lightbulbs, each innovation improving on the safety and convenience of its predecessor. Yet this narrative obscures what Jeremy Zallen calls a “dark history” of “struggles among the makers and owners” of light (p. 3). American Lucifers, a labor and environmental history of artificial light in the century before the Civil War, addresses electrification in an epilogue, but it centers on a less heralded set of illuminants, from spermaceti to kerosene, and the work regimes they engendered. The production and consumption of light bound far-flung ecologies together and tied incipient industrial modernities to systems of unfree labor. Zallen's wide-ranging research and vivid prose reveal the exploitation latent in every strike of a match.
Each chapter in American Lucifers examines a commodity used for lighting: whale oil, hog lard,...
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 823-824 |
Number of pages | 2 |
Journal | Journal of American History |
Volume | 108 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Mar 2022 |