The myth of Light and progress has blinded us.
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..
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.
This book tells their stories.
But for most workers, free and unfree, human and nonhuman, these lights were catastrophes.
Civil War, modern, industrial lights brought wonderful improvements and incredible wealth to some.
From whale oil to kerosene, from the colonial period to the end of the U.
S.
At worst, it is a lie.
At best, this is half the story.
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.
The myth of Light and progress has blinded us
