American Lucifers - by Jeremy Zallen (Paperback)

About the Book

"American lucifers tracks how struggles to produce light transformed American history, beginning with the rise of the American whale fishery in the 1750s and culminating in the emergence, around the Civil War, of the petroleum industry and its primary product, kerosene. Between this shift from oil harvested from whales to oil extracted from rocks, American light was substantially derived from a substance called camphene, a highly explosive liquid mixture of spirits of turpentine and highly distilled alcohol, generally extracted from North Carolina pines by enslaved workers. Over the course of this narrative, Jeremy Zallen reveals the centrality of slavery to labor in gasworks, coal mines, guano islands, and factories that made illumination possible. Moreover, though the lights they created may have offered a veneer of progress and convenience, they also made it possible for industry to extract workers' and slaves' labor around the clock. The availability of these illuminants extended men's working days to the point that women and children were expected to shoulder all domestic labor as a matter of course"--

Book Synopsis

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 poor--those American lucifers--as seriously as those of inventors and businessmen can the full significance of the revolution of artificial light be understood.

Review Quotes

"American Lucifers is a methodologically ingenious, elegantly written labor history of the light-generating industries that preceded the electric light. . . . Its incisive, empathetic investigation into the daily lives of the workers who bore the costs of technological innovation makes it a unique, revelatory, and highly memorable study of the profoundly transformative effects of lighting technologies."--Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"American Lucifers warrants great acclaim. . . . [For] the expert craft of Zallen's history, engaging writing, extremely thorough source work . . . and the message it so clearly delivers: that when we literally illuminate our own spaces of experience, we also illuminate a crucial opportunity to make the world's socioeconomic systems more equitable and more sustainable."--North Carolina Historical Review

"An ambitious book. . . . handsomely produced, with illustrations and maps, and will appeal principally to history buffs."--Library Journal

"As we face another great transition, from fossil fuels to alternative energies, Zallen's narrative is timely--echoing in the high human and environmental costs of dramas playing out in Nigerian oilfields and the smog of Indian cities."--David E. Nye, Nature

"Conventional histories of lighting celebrate technological progress, but Zallen's inspired and original study illuminates some darker corners of American history. . . . American Lucifers provides a powerful analysis through its copious information, but Zallen's imaginative and extensive use of primary sources makes it exceptionally captivating."--Ambix

"Readers of Jeremy Zallen's superb history of illumination will gain a new appreciation for the origins of artificial light. . . . Zallen uses clear, often poetic, prose to focus on the labor required to bring illumination into the modern era, with a healthy respect for the sweat and suffering that process required."--Journal of Southern History

"Written clearly, with dashes of literary flair. . . . The connections it draws . . . show lighting to be a useful frame within which to understand how global trade, regional commerce, and professional and domestic labor were coordinated in the century or so before electrification."--CHOICE

"Zallen has written a truly innovative book that will surely have scholars and lay readers alike burning the candle at both ends."--Technology and Culture

"Zallen writes beautifully. He tells his story through vividly worded, richly researched tales. . . . To remind us . . . that every part of economic life connects us to the work of others, and that work can be very grim and very dark indeed."--The New England Quarterly