| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

James Delbourgo. A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2006. Pp. 367. $29.95.
In this well-researched and engaging study of science in early America, James Delbourgo distinguishes between American and European enlightenment by focusing on investigations into the mysterious phenomenon of electricity. In eighteenth-century Europe, those investigations took as their goal the discovery of explanatory theories of nature. Reflecting established political and social hierarchies, scientific experimenters often were supported by institutions, such as the Royal Society; intellectual authority, therefore, was centralized. America, by contrast, championing social and political equality, welcomed evidence gleaned from individual experience, however modest or idiosyncratic. Scientific inquiry often was carried out by eccentric naturalists, whose goal was practical rather than theoretical knowledge.	1
Eighteenth-century America was characterized by daring and invention, political and scientific revolution, and also by superstition, nonrational fervor for wonders and miracles, and social and philosophical disorder. Fertile, crazy, contradictory: these adjectives certainly come to mind when thinking about the period, and Delbourgo helps us to understand just how they applied to scientific inquiry. His history of electricity features Benjamin Franklin, to be sure, but Delbourgo is interested in early American science beyond Franklin's laboratory: in theaters, in churches, and in the makeshift offices of itinerant physicians.	. . .

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