American Lucifers

Jeremy Zallen is assistant professor of history at Lafayette College.
For more information about Jeremy Zallen, visit the Author Page.

"As we face another great transition, from fossil fuels to alternative energies, Zallen's narrative is timely—echoing in the high human and environmental costs of dramas playing out in Nigerian oilfields and the smog of Indian cities."—David E. Nye, Nature

"Zallen has written a truly innovative book that will surely have scholars and lay readers alike burning the candle at both ends."—Technology and Culture

"Zallen writes beautifully. He tells his story through vividly worded, richly researched tales. . . . To remind us . . . that every part of economic life connects us to the work of others, and that work can be very grim and very dark indeed."—The New England Quarterly

"Written clearly, with dashes of literary flair. . . . The connections it draws . . . show lighting to be a useful frame within which to understand how global trade, regional commerce, and professional and domestic labor were coordinated in the century or so before electrification."—Choice

"American Lucifers is a methodologically ingenious, elegantly written labor history of the light-generating industries that preceded the electric light. . . . Its incisive, empathetic investigation into the daily lives of the workers who bore the costs of technological innovation makes it a unique, revelatory, and highly memorable study of the profoundly transformative effects of lighting technologies."—Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"Readers of Jeremy Zallen's superb history of illumination will gain a new appreciation for the origins of artificial light. . . . Zallen uses clear, often poetic, prose to focus on the labor required to bring illumination into the modern era, with a healthy respect for the sweat and suffering that process required."—Journal of Southern History