When the Lights Went Out - 9780262525077

Where were you when the lights went out? At home during a thunderstorm? During theGreat Northeastern Blackout of 1965? In California when rolling blackouts hit in 2000? In 2003, whena cascading power failure left fifty million people without electricity? We often remember vividlyour time in the dark. In When the Lights Went Out, David Nye views power outages in America from1935 to the present not simply as technical failures but variously as military tactic, socialdisruption, crisis in the networked city, outcome of political and economic decisions, suddenencounter with sublimity, and memories enshrined in photographs. Our electrically lit-up life is sonatural to us that when the lights go off, the darkness seems abnormal.

Nye looksat America's development of its electrical grid, which made large-scale power failures possible anda series of blackouts from military blackouts to the "greenout" (exemplified by the newtradition of "Earth Hour"), a voluntary reduction organized by environmentalorganizations.

Blackouts, writes Nye, are breaks in the flow of social time thatreveal much about the trajectory of American history. Each time one occurs, Americans confront theiressential condition -- not as isolated individuals, but as a community that increasingly bindsitself together with electrical wires and signals.