When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America (review)

David Nye provides us a much-needed historical review and cultural appraisal of “blackouts” in twentieth-century America, focused on the notable New York City experiences with the blackouts of 1965 and 1977 as well as the great Northeast blackout of 2003. Complementing his numerous earlier books on the presence of technologies in American culture, including his prizewinning Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940 (1990), this book considers the punctuated absence of electricity. Since blackouts are “breaks in the flow of social time,” as he suggests, examining a series of them “reveals much about the trajectory of history” (p. 3). He uses these notable and unpredictable events, much like a succession of world’s fairs, as a lens to consider the taken-for-granted quality of electricity in modern American society.

Unplanned disruptions to electricity service were common in the pioneering Edison era, as Nye reminds us. The construction of large, regional electricity grids created the possibility of a widespread, geographically extended, abrupt “blackout” (the term originated in 1947). Over time, Americans became more and more dependent on the reliable and continuous supply of electricity delivered at affordable prices. At the core of this technological vulnerability, then, rests Samuel Insull’s engineering and economic logic of wiring together diverse users and far-flung regions to counterbalance distinct load profiles and offset financial risks. Through the very process that enhanced operating and financial efficiencies, the electric grid also created the possibility of large-scale failures. Charles Perrow’s notion of “normal accidents” lurks in the text (pp. 32, 208).

For the most part, Nye structures his material chronologically, emphasizing the distinct experiences and varied causes of blackouts during World War II, the accident of the 1965 Northeast regional blackout, the ominous breakdown of social order during the 1977 New York City blackout, the rise of rolling blackouts during the 1990s, the troubled deregulation of California’s power system (which led Enron’s energy traders to great heights of shenanigans), and the rare instances of terrorists targeting electric grids since the 1990s. Indeed, at least initially, many people in the dark presumed that terrorists were behind the 2003 blackout that plunged much of the eastern third of the United States and Canada (linked by the Eastern Interconnection). Instead, mundane errors in equipment and management were the root cause of this latter failure. His final chapter—“Greenout?”—explores environmentalists’ strategic use of shutting off electricity. But he does not much consider the recent “smart grid” discussion that aims to dodge his “unavoidable choice” between blackout and greenout (p. 232).

Several of these episodes are treated in Richard Hirsh’s Power Loss: The Origins of Deregulation and Restructuring in the American Electric Utility System (1999) and Phillip F. Schewe’s The Grid (2006). Nye summarizes the complex “causes” for the key blackouts, but he does not attempt anything like the detailed technical and political analysis for the Europe-spanning November 2006 blackout presented by Erik van der Vleuten and Vincent Lagendijk in Energy Policy 38 (2010): 2042–62. What really distinguishes Nye’s book is his deep, yet never heavy-handed, engagement with cultural analysis and cultural theory.

Nye’s earlier books, especially Narratives and Spaces: Technology and the Construction of American Culture (1997), are justly acclaimed for mingling cultural theory with rigorous historical research. The same is true here. Neither does he mechanically “apply” theory nor simply use historical “examples” to support theory. Rather, he tells multilayered stories, first adding some wrinkle that challenges preconceptions, then deftly dropping in a nugget of Victor Turner on “liminal” space and time (pp. 82–84) or Michel Foucault on “heterotopia” (pp. 95–97) or J. B. Jackson on “vernacular landscapes” as the human-made spaces that serve as “infrastructure or background for our collective existence” (p. 130) that helps you think through the puzzle. There are also apposite quotations from films and works of...