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By David E. Nye
After 1776, the previous American colonies started to reimagine themselves as a unified, self-created group. applied sciences had an enormous function within the ensuing nationwide narratives, and some applied sciences assumed specific prominence. between those have been the awl, the mill, the canal, the railroad, and the irrigation dam. during this publication David Nye explores the tales that clustered round those applied sciences. In doing so, he rediscovers an American tale of origins, with the United States conceived as a moment production in-built concord with God's first production. whereas mainstream american citizens developed technological origin tales to give an explanation for their position within the New global, even if, marginalized teams informed different tales of destruction and loss. local american citizens protested the lack of their forests, fishermen resisted the development of dams, and early environmentalists feared the exhaustion of assets. A water mill can be considered because the kernel of a brand new neighborhood or as a brand new method to take advantage of exertions. If passengers comprehended railways as a part of a bigger narrative approximately American growth and development, many farmers attacked railroad land supplies. To discover those contradictions, Nye devotes alternating chapters to narratives of moment construction and to narratives of these who rejected it. Nye attracts on well known literature, speeches, ads, work, and plenty of different media to create a historical past of yankee origin tales. He exhibits how those tales have been revised periodically, as social and monetary stipulations replaced, with out ever erasing the sooner tales completely. just like the remoted frontier kinfolk carving a home out of the wasteland with an awl persists to at the present time, along later photos and narratives. within the book's end, Nye considers the relation among those past tales and such later American advancements because the conservation move, narratives of environmental restoration, and the idealization of desert.
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Extra resources for America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings
Example text
Rather, in practice, the citizens of the new United States invented a paradox: an entrepreneurial agrarianism and a free-market industrial capitalism defended by neo-mercantilist tariffs. Though in theory such a formation might seem riven with contradictions, it seemed to work in practice as the United States rapidly industrialized and expanded westward. Smith had emphasized the importance of good roads and canals. Improvements in the arteries of transportation lowered the cost of shipping more than enough to cover the toll.
Together these four changes constituted a fundamental 22 Chapter 2 shift in consciousness. From the pre-Revolution perspective, the world had few regularities and many peculiarities. Supplies of goods were uncertain. Scarcities were recurrent. Space was idiosyncratic, with no piece of land identical to any other. The state was necessary to keep order. From the postRevolution perspective, spaces, prices, markets, and forces all obeyed natural laws and largely regulated themselves. The state’s proper role was reduced to maintaining the “normal” conditions of resource abundance, price competition in a free market, and accessible land divided impartially on the basis of the grid.
Some geographers have defended the system. “It may be the best system of land division ever invented,” John Fraser Hart recently argued. ”5 But if the National Survey made land transactions easily comprehensible to all, it also encouraged farmers to ignore the contours of the land. The grid dictated more than the layout of farms. It became the basis for a system of roads, counties, town plans, and eventually for telephone and power lines, all of which followed north-south or east-west boundary lines and defied the actual landscape of hills and valleys.