Content area
Full Text
American Technological Sublime. By David E. Nye. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994. xxii, 362 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-262-14056-X.)
David E. Nye has emerged as one of the most astute and interesting commenters on the place of technology in modern American social and cultural history. His works on electricity, particularly Electrifying America (1990), are remarkable studies of this interface, integrating a sensitivity for the nuances of the technology with a broadly based vision of why Americans responded to new technologies as they did. In his latest book, Nye approaches an even broader canvas; he sweeps over more than two centuries and over not simply responses to technology but also the place of natural and artificial wonders of all types in the American psyche.
Nye attempts to take control of his oversize subject through categories. Beginning with the "natural sublime," wonders of...