American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750–1865

The myth of light and progress has blinded us. 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. At best this is half the story. At worst it is a lie. From whale oil to kerosene from the colonial period to the end of the U.S. Civil War modern industrial lights brought wonderful improvements and incredible wealth to some. But for most workers free and unfree human and nonhuman these lights were catastrophes. This book tells their stories. 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. Only by taking the lives of whalers and enslaved turpentine makers match-manufacturing children and coal miners night-working seamstresses and the streetlamp-lit poorthose American lucifersas seriously as those of inventors and businessmen can the full significance of the revolution of artificial light be understood.