Economic historians and historians of technology can learn much from David E. Nye. His latest work, America as Second Creation, traces the use of the “technological foundation stories” through which many Americans viewed their place in the postrevolutionary era. For Nye, “the second-creation story asserted that the original perfection of the world could be enhanced with new technologies”(p. 283).

His discussion of the narratives by which Americans embraced the axe, mill, canal, railroad, and irrigation systems as bearers of prosperity and civilization offers keen insight into how these Americans came to understand their place in the world. These narratives viewed technology to be as much a part of America's Manifest Destiny as was westward expansion.

The basic narrative unfolds as follows: technologies such as those mentioned above were instruments of a new creation. These technologies provided the opportunity for economic self-improvement while fostering the development of new communities, and bringing civilization to seemingly undeveloped land. Such benevolent effects were often viewed as divinely inspired, perhaps even ordained. Nye grounds these narratives in four key shifts in perceptions that took root after the revolution. The shifts—both psychological and political—include the division of land into “abstract grids,” the rise of a “free-market ideology,” and beliefs in “natural abundance” and in a world of “… clear, quantifiable causes and effects” (p. 21).

The book is much more an addition to the history of American thought than to the literature on technological change. Nye underscores the extent to which nineteenth-century Americans such as Whitman, Emerson, Webster, and Lincoln were optimists in rejecting the focus of Ricardian and Malthusian political economy on scarcity. These Americans, and many others like them, embraced a view that abundance was the norm to be achieved through technological change.

Nye uses literature, news accounts, periodicals, and art to demonstrate that many Americans readily welcomed a succession of technologies, and the institutional prerequisites of capitalism. These same media are used to document Americans' pervasive and persistent debate about the consequences of technological change. Although the dominant narrative viewed invention as a crucial force in transforming the natural world for human advancement, a darker vision of technology's effects grew up alongside, or in reaction to, this foundation narrative.

Alternating chapters juxtapose the mainstream technological narrative with a counter-narrative that emphasizes the impact of technology on the land, indigenous tribes, the homesteader and the ecological system. These counter-narratives contradict the optimistic assumptions of freely available land, harmonious development, and a bountiful but untapped natural environment enhanced by white settlers. Nye embraces these counter-narratives while recognizing that such views were specific, localized, and personal.

The counter-narratives include critiques of the second creation story from populist, labor, environmental, and Native American perspectives, but display few uniting principles. The accuracy of these alternative views does not diminish the ideological or practical significance of the axe, mill, canal, railroad, or dam in America's development. Indeed, despite increasingly complex social relations and the growth of state power, each successive technological narrative retained its key assumptions and a basic form that endured until at least the twentieth century.

Nye does not seek to add to our understanding of the forces that lead to the invention, improvement and application of these technologies. He shows convincingly, however, that these technologies both practically and ideologically underpinned the settlement of the west, and suggests that various accounts of America's economic development would scarcely be possible in the absence of ever more complex technologies.

The final two chapters update Nye's account with a clear demonstration that scientific advances did not diminish the fundamental tensions between second creation stories and the counter-narratives. His conclusion identifies a new “recovery narrative”—a synthesis that informs contemporary environmental thought and legislation. It accepts much of the critique offered by later counter-narratives even as it depends on science and technology as antidotes to the environmental degradation that earlier technologies made possible.

Nye wants us to understand that these narratives were more about Americans trying to understand their world than about technology per se. One might argue that the key political and psychological shifts identified by the author were at least as important as these technologies. Some versions of these narratives suggest as much. In some instances, the narratives are as concerned with explaining and justifying the unfolding society of newly settled areas as with the application of technology.

More frustrating is that Nye's focus on a critical dissection of these narratives occurs at the expense of any consistent effort to discern their real impact on decisions, public and private. Economic historians, however, should acknowledge that these narratives reflect an institutional and intellectual environment that fed the appetite of some Americans for technological solutions, and reinforced other Americans' distaste for new technologies.