America as Second Creation ─ Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings

After 1776, the former American colonies began to reimagine themselves as a unified,self-created community. Technologies had an important role in the resulting national narratives, anda few technologies assumed particular prominence. Among these were the axe, the mill, the canal, therailroad, and the irrigation dam. In this book David Nye explores the stories that clustered aroundthese technologies. In doing so, he rediscovers an American story of origins, with America conceivedas a second creation built in harmony with God's first creation.While mainstream Americansconstructed technological foundation stories to explain their place in the New World, however,marginalized groups told other stories of destruction and loss. Native Americans protested the lossof their forests, fishermen resisted the construction of dams, and early environmentalists fearedthe exhaustionof resources. A water mill could be viewed as the kernel of a new community or as anew way to exploit labor. If passengers comprehended railways as part of a larger narrative aboutAmerican expansion and progress, many farmers attacked railroad land grants. To explore thesecontradictions, Nye devotes alternating chapters to narratives of second creation and to narrativesof those who rejected it.Nye draws on popular literature, speeches, advertisements, paintings, andmany other media to create a history of American foundation stories. He shows how these stories wererevised periodically, as social and economic conditions changed, without ever erasing the earlierstories entirely. The image of the isolated frontier family carving a homestead out of thewilderness with an axe persists to this day, alongside later images and narratives. In the book'sconclusion, Nye considers the relation between these earlier stories and such later Americandevelopments as the conservation movement, narratives of environmental recovery, and theidealization of wilderness.