Reviewed by Sarah Rivett | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.4

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the WMQ online. About 493 words from this article are provided below; about 678 words remain.

If you are a individual subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you can:: • subscribe here.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the William and Mary Quarterly (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the William and Mary Quarterly.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

Reviewed by Sarah Rivett | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Sarah Rivett, Washington University in St. Louis

A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America. By James Delbourgo. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. 378 pages. $29.95 (cloth).
Moving beyond while not abandoning the story of Benjamin Franklin's discovery, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders presents electricity as the story of the American Enlightenment. Electricity exposes central intersections between reason and wonder, mind and body, God and nature, and the elite and "the masses" (10). What is electricity? In James Delbourgo's study, it is the Franklinian discovery that led to the formation and legitimization of powerful scientific centers in North America. Electricity is also a discourse-generating phenomenon that transformed a range of cultural practices. A rhetoric of electricity infused Methodist camp meetings, for example, and Thomas Jefferson described revolutionary resistance as "a shock of electricity" (135). Delbourgo's study shows that scientists, preachers, and politicians participated in a shared culture of rhetorical and phenomenological appropriation. Electricity illustrates the significance of science in popular culture (and vice versa) in the eighteenth century, much like Alison Winter's account of Victorian Britain's obsessions with the medical science of mesmerism.¹	1
Delbourgo brings together recent critical developments in Atlantic history and the history of science, a combination that has appealed to scholars including Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Susan Scott Parrish.² In recent years Enlightenment studies in particular have replaced a universal and national paradigm with explorations of the relationship between local specificities and transatlantic circulation, dovetailing with a parallel shift in Atlantic history. Both fields also give increased attention to how philosophical and cultural developments map along class and gender lines as well as across different publics.	2
In place of the "misguided" notion that "early modern knowledgemaking is essentially an asocial, elite history of ideas" (7), Delbourgo shows that electricity's rhetorical and experimental practices were intimately linked to modes of sociability and cultural life. Nonelite practitioners found new links between self, society, and nation, establishing a connection with people such as Franklin while "refashion[ing] his methods and principles to their own ends" (10). A chapter on "Wonderful Recreations" explains how Ebenezer Kinnersley learned from Franklin in Philadelphia and then taught audiences from New England to the West Indies to experience embodied electricity as an avenue to rational contemplation, pious practice, and polite sociability.	3
Dependent on an embodied experience of "sensory disorientation," electricity registered the limitations of empiricism while challenging Cartesian dualism. Since its inception in Baconian observational practices, empiricism had both affirmed the human capacity to base rational judgments on sensory information and exposed the failure of the senses to convey accurate information about the external world. Delbourgo argues that electrical experiments exaggerated this double bind, given that sensory disorientation is a primary condition of the electrified body. Additionally, besides demonstrating empiricism's limitations, electrical experiments violated Cartesian dualism by recentering the body as a space of experiential and epistemological information.	. . .

There are about 678 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.