The myth of light and progress has blinded us. In our electric world, we are everywhere surrounded by effortlessly glowing lights that simply exist, as they should, seemingly clear and comforting proof that human genius means the present will always be better than the past, and the future better still. At best, this is half the story. At worst, it is a lie. From whale oil to kerosene, from the colonial period to the end of the U.S. Civil War, modern, industrial lights brought wonderful improvements and incredible wealth to some. But for most workers, free and unfree, human and nonhuman, these lights were catastrophes. This book tells their stories. The surprisingly violent struggle to produce, control, and consume the changing means of illumination over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries transformed slavery, industrial capitalism, and urban families in profound, often hidden ways. Only by taking the lives of whalers and enslaved turpentine makers, match-manufacturing children and coal miners, night-working seamstresses and the streetlamp-lit poor—those American lucifers—as seriously as those of inventors and businessmen can the full significance of the revolution of artificial light be understood.

In its first edition Dictionary of Literary Pseudonyms established itself as a comprehensive dictionary of pseudonyms used by literary writers in English from the 16th century to the present day. This new Second Edition increases coverage by 35%! There are two sequences: Part I - which now includes more than 17,000 entries- is an alphabetical list of pseudonyms followed by the writer's real name. Part II is an alphabetical list of writers cited in Part I-more than 10,000 writers included-providing brief biographical details followed by pseudonyms used by the wrter and titles published under those pseudonyms. Dictionary or Literary Pseudonyms has now become a standard reference work on the subject for teachers, student, and public, high school, and college/universal librarians. The Second Edition will, we believe, consolidate that reputation.