Discusses in nontechnical language ten central questions about technology that illuminate what technology is and why it matters.Technology matters, writes David Nye, because it is inseparable from being human. We have used tools for more than 100,000 years, and their central purpose has not always been to provide necessities. People excel at using old tools to solve new problems and at inventing new tools for more elegant solutions to old tasks. Perhaps this is bec...

How new forms of energy transformed every aspect of American life in a span of 50 years, from 1876 to 1929—and how it seeded our current polarization.The era of reform. The Gilded Age. The Progressive Era. What historians often divide into discrete eras was one period of profound change: a massive, multipronged energy transition. Oil, gas, and electricity were woven into a culture that had to heal sectional differences after the Civil War, absorb an enormous influx...

A reconception of the sublime to include experiences of disaster, war, outer space, virtual reality, and the Anthropocene.We experience the sublime—overwhelming amazement and exhilaration—in at least seven different forms. Gazing from the top of a mountain at a majestic vista is not the same thing as looking at a city from the observation deck of a skyscraper; looking at images constructed from Hubble Space Telescope data is not the same as living through a powerfu...

How conflicting ideas of nature threaten to fracture America's identity.Amber waves of grain, purple mountain majesties: American invest much of their national identity in sites of natural beauty. And yet American lands today are torn by conflicts over science, religion, identity, and politics. Creationists believe that the Biblical flood carved landscapes less than 10,000 years ago; environmentalists protest pipelines; Western states argue that the federal governm...

Nye uses energy as a touchstone to examine the lives of ordinary people engaged in normal activities.How did the United States become the world's largest consumer of energy? David Nye shows that this is less a question about the development of technology than it is a question about the development of culture. In Consuming Power, Nye uses energy as a touchstone to examine the lives of ordinary people engaged in normal activities. He looks at how these activ...

A concise overview of this multidisciplinary field, presenting key concepts, central issues, and current research, along with concrete examples and case studies.The emergence of the environmental humanities as an academic discipline early in the twenty-first century reflects the growing conviction that environmental problems cannot be solved by science and technology alone. This book offers a concise overview of this new multidisciplinary field, presenting concepts...

From the Model T to today's "lean manufacturing": the assembly line as crucial, yet controversial, agent of social and economic transformation.The mechanized assembly line was invented in 1913 and has been in continuous operation ever since. It is the most familiar form of mass production. Both praised as a boon to workers and condemned for exploiting them, it has been celebrated and satirized. (We can still picture Chaplin's little tramp trying to keep up with a f...

Blackouts—whether they result from military planning, network failure, human error, or terrorism—offer snapshots of electricity's increasingly central role in American society.Where were you when the lights went out? At home during a thunderstorm? During the Great Northeastern Blackout of 1965? In California when rolling blackouts hit in 2000? In 2003, when a cascading power failure left fifty million people without electricity? We often remember vividly our time i...