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

Abstract

There is no more valuable or prolific student of the American experience with technology than David E. Nye. In When the Lights Went Out, Nye uses a particular kind of technological experience—actually, a negation of technology—to explore a host of themes, ranging from the web of dependencies that form modern society to the power of exceptional events to shed light on the essential character of social, political, and economic relations. Electric light and power are “normal” in modern societies, so their sudden (and typically surprising) absences are notable interruptions of daily experience. As such, they force (or encourage) people to interact in different ways, and Nye shows that these novel interactions—he calls them “breaks in social time”—are points at which we can see forces at work that are often hidden in the light of ordinary life (p. 95). While the sudden and relatively widespread cessation of electrical service, typically due to system breakdown from storms or device failure, is Nye's prototypical “blackout,” he points out that this is only one form of the phenomenon. In twentieth-century warfare, particularly after aerial bombardment became a real threat, the intentional blackout was a defensive strategy, one in which dark rather than light was considered the source of safety and security.