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

Where were you when the lights went out? At home during a thunderstorm?Preparing for air attack in World War II? In the Northeast in 1965, when the powerfailed from Toronto to the East coast? In New York City during a similar but morefrightening blackout in 1977? In California when rolling blackouts hit in 2000? In2003, when a cascading power failure left fifty million peo

Where were you when the lights went out? At home during a thunderstorm?Preparing for air attack in World War II? In the Northeast in 1965, when the powerfailed from Toronto to the East coast? In New York City during a similar but morefrightening blackout in 1977? In California when rolling blackouts hit in 2000? In2003, when a cascading power failure left fifty million people in Canada and in thenortheastern United States without electricity? We often remember vividly our timein the dark. In When the Lights Went Out, David Nye views power outages in Americafrom 1935 to the present not simply as technical failures but variously as militarytactic, social disruption, crisis in the networked city, outcome of political andeconomic decisions, sudden encounter with sublimity, and memories enshrined inphotographs. Our electrically lit-up life is so natural to us that when the lightsgo off, the darkness seems abnormal. Nye looks at America's development of itselectrical grid, which made large-scale power failures possible; military blackoutsbefore and during the Second World War ("The silence was the big surprise ofthe blackout, the darkness discounted," wrote Harold Ross in the New Yorker in1942); New York City's contrasting 1965 and 1977 blackout experiences (the firstcharacterized by cooperation, the second by looting and disorder); the growth inconsumer demand that led to rolling blackouts made worse by energy traders' marketmanipulations; blackouts caused by terrorist attacks and sabotage; and, finally, the"greenout" (exemplified by the new tradition of "Earth Hour"), the voluntary reduction organized by environmental organizations. Blackouts, writesNye, are breaks in the flow of social time that reveal much about the trajectory ofAmerican history. Each time one occurs, Americans confront their essentialcondition--not as isolated individuals, but as a community that increasingly bindsitself together with electrical wires and signals.