Power Struggles

Power Struggles
Author: Michael B. Schiffer
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2008
Genre: Electric engineering
ISBN: 0262195828

Laying the foundation for Thomas Edison, the first electric generators were built in the 1830s, the earliest commercial lighting systems before 1860, and the first commercial application of generator-powered light in the early 1860s. This book examines some of these early applications of electricity.

Flowers, Guns, and Money

Flowers, Guns, and Money
Author: Lindsay Schakenbach Regele
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2023
Genre: Cabinet officers
ISBN: 0226829626

"Joel Roberts Poinsett is one of those figures who show up all across the expanding United States in the early nineteenth century. His career culminated as Secretary of War but also encompassed time as a secret agent in South America, ambassador to Mexico, South Carolina state legislator, and US Congressman-as well as as a naturalist and namesake of the poinsettia, which he stole from Mexico. While Poinsett was not an ideologue with a master plan, his consistently self-interested actions reveal an America defined by selfishness, cruelty, greed-and the use of federal power in support of them"--

Immeasurable Weather

Immeasurable Weather
Author: Sara J. Grossman
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2023-06-30
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1478027037

In Immeasurable Weather Sara J. Grossman explores how environmental data collection has been central to the larger project of settler colonialism in the United States. She draws on an extensive archive of historical and meteorological data spanning two centuries to show how American scientific institutions used information about the weather to establish and reinforce the foundations of a white patriarchal settler society. Grossman outlines the relationship between climate data and state power in key moments in the history of American weather science, from the nineteenth-century public data-gathering practices of settler farmers and teachers and the automation of weather data during the Dust Bowl to the role of meteorological satellites in data science’s integration into the militarized state. Throughout, Grossman shows that weather science reproduced the natural world as something to be measured, owned, and exploited. This data gathering, she contends, gave coherence to a national weather project and to a notion of the nation itself, demonstrating that weather science’s impact cannot be reduced to a set of quantifiable phenomena.