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Other Recent Publications

David Nye, in America as Second Creation: Technolog y and Narratives of New Beginnings, discusses a series of technologically based narratives that account for the origins and subsequent development of America. These foundation stories first appeared a generation or so after 1776, told of the creation of a new nation, and featured a central material artifact—first the axe, then the mill, the canal, the railroad, and the irrigation dam. Thus the narratives cover the growth of theUnited States from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century. The central narratives of Nye’s book announce a ‘‘second creation.’’ The first creation was God’s, whose works were displayed in the wild landscape that settlers encountered when they arrived in the New World. But God’s creation was left in an unfinished state. In order to establish their place in the new land, settlers were obliged to use key technologies and engage in a second creation, one that transformed God’s land into a livable and egalitarian country. The job of establishing communities, farmlands, transportation systems, and industries called for technologies appropriate to the tasks at hand. European settlers tamed nature and brought progress and civilization to a place where wild creatures had roamed in dim forests. Second-creation narratives caught on so quickly that they became the first myths of America’s origins. The stories appeared in folklore as well as history books. They were influential and widely accepted despite a crucial missing ingredient: Native Americans. These peoples were part of the New World and told their own creation stories. They, however, had not transformed nature as the settlers would soon do; hence, they were doomed to obscurity as the white population progressed and proliferated with the technological solutions they had devised. As forests, lakes, mountains, hills, valleys, rivers, and marshes became part of second-creation narratives, native inhabitants were forgotten or pushed aside in the name of progress. Although widespread, the popular acceptance of the second-creation narrative was not without bounds. As technologies flourished and forests were cleared, the natural landscape evolved into farms, towns, cities, and industrial sites. However, not everyone was satisfied with this state of affairs. Dissidents who were not allotted their fair share of the riches extracted from nature and Americans who preferred a leafy forest and a turbulent stream to clear-cut land and a quiet miller’s dam produced counternarratives that challenged the myth of a second creation. Such narratives did not achieve immediate acceptance, but in the hands of talented literary figures, artists, politicians, and union leaders, they did take their place alongside the original foundation narratives. Before recounting the details of secondcreation narratives, it is necessary to understand what they all took for granted about the structure of the world in which they were situated. After the Revolution, Americans invented a new sense of space, a sense that differed from the one they had brought with them from Europe. The new sense had its antecedents, but only Americans developed