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A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America. By James Delbourgo. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. xii, 367 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-674-02299-7.)
In this groundbreaking book, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders, James Delbourgo shows us how pervasively electricity coursed through the bodies, technologies, imaginations, and rhetorics of early America. Moving beyond the "lone figure of [Benjamin] Franklin," Delbourgo describes how Anglo-American science "came to life as a culture of experimental performance in a commercial [and religious] public sphere spanning the Atlantic Ocean" (p. 7).
Delbourgo begins by tracing the Atlantic circuits from which Franklins experimentation emerged. European science, flowing along lines of trade, included colonials but, according to Delbourgo, placed them on a lower rung on the hierarchy of knowledge production. When Franklin developed his theory that electricity sought an equilibrium of charge...