America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings (review)

"In the beginning there were no technological creation stories about the New World." Thus begins America as Second Creation, David E. Nye's masterful study of the relationship between technological narratives and the ongoing negotiation of national identity. The tone and scope of this opening line is entirely fitting, because Nye's saga of American foundation story creation is every bit as epic as the stories themselves. This confident, thorough, and engaging work will inspire scholarly discussion for years to come.

Nye begins with the assertion that Americans seeking to define their new position in the unpredictable post-revolutionary world often did so via the construction of "origin stories" that reinterpreted American history in order to give the country a unique identity. Four distinctly American technologies played central roles in these narratives: the American axe, waterpowered mills and factories, canal and railroad transportation systems, and western irrigation systems. These technologies redefined America as a "second creation," a constructed setting that harmoniously improved on the efficiency and productivity of the bountiful natural world, or "first" creation. Nye contends that these four technological narratives helped Americans make sense of their rapidly expanding society, dynamic culture, and changing material lives, while simultaneously serving as focal points for opposition.

After describing the cultural history and societal impacts of each technological system in great detail (with an emphasis on American adaptations of transferred European technologies), Nye explores how each technology also fed into broader American narratives of expansion, progress, and cultivation (civilization) of the wilderness. Americans imbued these technologies with novel symbolic meanings: the axe became an "instrument of peace" that converted wilderness into friendly homes for pioneer farmers (who then lived in log cabins, also imbued with symbolic virtue); waterpowered mills and factories allowed America to increase its productivity in a democratic manner conducive to the maintenance of rural culture; canals and railroads became sublime manifestations of America's increasing connectiveness, accessibility, and commercial expansion; and irrigation systems facilitated the transformation of barren wasteland into productive new communities. These narratives reinforced each other and borrowed recurring themes such as the portrayal of "dominant yet democratic, transformative yet conserving" (p. 6) technologies that brought inaccessible natural resources into productive societal use while also fostering community building.

After analyzing these four narratives, Nye explores how they became portions of larger dialogues between groups with different opinions of the settlement of America. Dissidents challenged some of the underlying assumptions of the narrative builders (such as trust in the free market or ever-abundant land and resources) and constructed a counternarrative to oppose each technological narrative, usually grounded in conflict, the undermining of traditional ways of life, and impacts on the natural environment or non-empowered groups such as Native Americans, exploited laborers, or small landowners. The clashes between narrative and counternarrative, thesis and antithesis, evolved over time in relation to America's continually renegotiated ideology and identity. Nye extends his analysis to the present day, hypothesizing about new venues for narrative creation such as computer environments, space exploration, tension between preservation and conservation, and eco-feminism. These and other new narratives continue to illustrate and define America's ideological and political positions and divisions.

Nye credits Leo Marx and John Kasson for the influence they had on his work, and, indeed, his nuanced approach recollects and augments their classic American cultural studies, particularly with respect to the analysis of technological progress ideology and the creation and celebration of the pastoral ideal. Nye's use of evidence is also foreshadowed in these earlier works, with frequent excerpts from literary and political figures such as Jefferson, Muir, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, and Twain, as well as a thoughtful analysis of many forms of evidence such as paintings, political speeches, fiction and nonfiction books, newspapers, advertisements, autobiographies, and historical works. The abundance and variety of evidence make Nye's claims truly compelling, not to mention colorful.

America as Second Creation is a rare work that can serve as a...