A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America

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Description

Benjamin Franklin’s invention of the lightning rod is the founding fable of American science, but Franklin used to be only one of the early Americans excited about electricity. As a dramatically new physical experience, electricity amazed individuals who dared to tame the lightning and set it coursing through their very own bodies. Thanks to its technological and medical utility, but additionally its surprising ability to defy rational experimental mastery, electricity used to be a powerful experience of enlightenment, at once social, intellectual, and non secular.

On this compelling book, James Delbourgo moves beyond Franklin to trace the path of electricity through early American culture, exploring how the relationship between human, natural, and divine powers used to be understood within the eighteenth century. By examining the lives and visions of natural philosophers, spectacular showmen, religious preachers, and medical therapists, he shows how electrical experiences of wonder, terror, and awe were connected to a broad array of cultural concerns that defined the American Enlightenment. The history of lightning rods, electrical demonstrations, electric eels, and medical electricity reveals how early American science, medicine, and technology were shaped by a culture of commercial performance, evangelical religion, and republican politics from mid-century to the early republic.

The first book to situate early American experimental science within the context of a transatlantic public sphere, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders offers an enchanting view of the origins of American science and the cultural meaning of the American Enlightenment. In a story of shocks and sparks from New England to the Caribbean, Delbourgo brilliantly illuminates a revolutionary New World of wonder.

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