American Illuminations

American Illuminations PDF Author: David E. Nye
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262546647
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
How Americans adapted European royal illuminations for patriotic celebrations, spectacular expositions, and intensely bright commercial lighting to create the world's most dazzling and glamorous cities. Illuminated fĂȘtes and civic celebrations began in Renaissance Italy and spread through the courts of Europe. Their fireworks, torches, lamps, and special effects glorified the monarch, marked the birth of a prince, or celebrated military victory. Nineteenth-century Americans rejected such monarchial pomp and adapted spectacular lighting to their democratic, commercial culture. In American Illuminations, David Nye explains how they experimented with gas and electric light to create illuminated cityscapes far brighter and more dynamic than those of Europe, and how these illuminations became symbols of modernity and the conquest of nature. Americans used gaslight and electricity in parades, expositions, advertising, elections, and political spectacles. In the 1880s, cities erected powerful arc lights on towers to create artificial moonlight. By the 1890s they adopted more intensive, commercial lighting that defined distinct zones of light and glamorized the city's White Ways, skyscrapers, bridges, department stores, theaters, and dance halls. Poor and blighted areas disappeared into the shadows. American illuminations also became integral parts of national political campaigns, presidential inaugurations, and victory celebrations after the Spanish-American War and World War I.

American Illuminations

American Illuminations PDF Author: David E. Nye
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262546647
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
How Americans adapted European royal illuminations for patriotic celebrations, spectacular expositions, and intensely bright commercial lighting to create the world's most dazzling and glamorous cities. Illuminated fĂȘtes and civic celebrations began in Renaissance Italy and spread through the courts of Europe. Their fireworks, torches, lamps, and special effects glorified the monarch, marked the birth of a prince, or celebrated military victory. Nineteenth-century Americans rejected such monarchial pomp and adapted spectacular lighting to their democratic, commercial culture. In American Illuminations, David Nye explains how they experimented with gas and electric light to create illuminated cityscapes far brighter and more dynamic than those of Europe, and how these illuminations became symbols of modernity and the conquest of nature. Americans used gaslight and electricity in parades, expositions, advertising, elections, and political spectacles. In the 1880s, cities erected powerful arc lights on towers to create artificial moonlight. By the 1890s they adopted more intensive, commercial lighting that defined distinct zones of light and glamorized the city's White Ways, skyscrapers, bridges, department stores, theaters, and dance halls. Poor and blighted areas disappeared into the shadows. American illuminations also became integral parts of national political campaigns, presidential inaugurations, and victory celebrations after the Spanish-American War and World War I.

Flash-lights on American History

Flash-lights on American History PDF Author: Dawsey Cope Murphy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description


Baseball Under the Lights

Baseball Under the Lights PDF Author: Charlie Bevis
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 147664232X
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Night games transformed the business of professional baseball, as the smaller, demographically narrower audiences able to attend daytime games gave way to larger, more diversified crowds of nighttime spectators. Many ball club owners were initially conflicted about artificial lighting and later actually resisted expanding the number of night games during the sport's struggle to balance ballpark attendance and television viewership in the 1950s. This first-ever comprehensive history of night baseball examines the factors, obstacles and trends that shaped this dramatic change in both the minor and major leagues between 1930 and 1990.

Electrographic Architecture

Electrographic Architecture PDF Author: Carolyn L. Kane
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520392604
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
"By bridging histories of technology, media studies, and aesthetics, Electrographic Architecture: New York Color, Las Vegas Light, and America's White Imaginary weaves a critical narrative of the ways in which illuminated light and color play key roles in the formation of America's white imaginary over the course of the last century. The book sheds light on the central question to which media scholars, architects, and historians of technology repeatedly turn: how can we use and speak about light and color in ways that are productive and commemorative, while remaining critical of the systems of white power undergirding them? Electrographic Architecture: New York Color, Las Vegas Light, and America's White Imaginary analyzes the history of electric light technologies in the aesthetic development of Times Square and Las Vegas. The book charts the rise of America's white walls, light empires, and neoclassical buildings in the early twentieth century, through the construction of polychromatic electrographic spectacles by midcentury, and their eclipse by informatically intense, invisible algorithms at the beginning of the new millennium. Drawing from histories of technology, media, and aesthetics, the book shows how the formation of America's electrographic surround runs isomorphic to a new world ethos of power, property, and possession. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and visual analysis, Electrographic Architecture's introduction, six core chapters, and conclusion illustrate how Times Square's polychromatic surround serves as a complex symbol of America's deep-seated dreams of utopic transcendence on the one hand, coupled with fears of loss and obsolescence on the other. In America's twentieth-century imaginary, whiteness aims to become everything but itself: colorful, lit, vibrant, and vital"--

The American Gas Light Journal

The American Gas Light Journal PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Gas manufacture and works
Languages : en
Pages : 1000

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American Gas-light Journal and Chemical Repertory

American Gas-light Journal and Chemical Repertory PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Gas manufacture and works
Languages : en
Pages : 876

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American Illustrated Magazine

American Illustrated Magazine PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 786

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The Publishers' Trade List Annual

The Publishers' Trade List Annual PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literature
Languages : en
Pages : 2186

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American Journal of Archaeology

American Journal of Archaeology PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 686

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Catalogue of Title Entries of Books and Other Articles Entered in the Office of the Register of Copyrights, Library of Congress, at Washington, D.C.

Catalogue of Title Entries of Books and Other Articles Entered in the Office of the Register of Copyrights, Library of Congress, at Washington, D.C. PDF Author: Library of Congress. Copyright Office
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Copyright
Languages : en
Pages : 1572

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Book Description