Julie A. Cohn has written what she describes as a biography of the electric power grid in the United States, “the largest interconnected machine in the world” (p. 1). The “grid” developed in the United States over the course of more than a century and consisted of “thousands of entities—large and small, economically interdependent and autonomous, investor owned and government owned” (p. 40). Yet, over time, these disparate elements “led to the construction of America's tightly coordinated machines of electrification” (p. 11). In fact, as the author explains, today's grid is made up of four networks, and that as late as 1939, there were “many small interconnected systems serv[ing] various regions of the country” (p. 129). Unlike in Europe, where centralized governments legislated the coordination necessary to achieve a unified system, the United States depended mostly on investor-owned companies that voluntarily adopted standard practices and equipment. Cohn focuses on the process of building the interconnections that produced the “grid” because other historians have tended to emphasize other aspects of the history of electrification—such as inventors, dams, environmental struggles, geography, and political battles. Unheralded but crucial parts of the story include the thousands of engineers, system operators, manufacturers, and academics (including the author's father, Nathan Cohn) who created and disseminated the knowledge and expertise that produced the electrical system the United States has today.

Foreword by Daniel M. Fox and Samuel L. Milbank Preface Acknowledgments Introduction 1. September 11 and the Shifting Priorities of Public and Population Health in New York City 2. Emergency Preparedness, Bioterrorism, and the States 3. Emergency Preparedness, Bioterrorism, and the CDC: Federal Involvement before and after 9/11 Conclusion: What Lessons Have We Learned? Notes Index

The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 and the Workers Right to Know laws later in that decade were signature moments in the history of occupational safety and health. We have examined how and why industry leaders came to accept that it was the obligation of business to provide information about the dangers to health of the materials that workers encountered. Informing workers about the hazards of the job had plagued labor-management relations and fed labor disputes, strikes, and even pitched battles during the turn of the century decades. Industry's rhetorical embrace of the responsibility to inform was part of its argument that government regulation of the workplace was not necessary because private corporations were doing it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous articleNext article No AccessBOOK REVIEWSThe Invention of Ecocide: Agent Orange, Vietnam, and the Scientists Who Changed the Way We Think about the Environment. By David Zierler. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011. xii + 245 pp. Illustrations, figures, notes, bibliography, and index. Paper $24.95.Gerald MarkowitzGerald Markowitz City University of New York Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 17, Number 2April 2012 Published for the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society Views: 23Total views on this site Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1093/envhis/ems016 Views: 23Total views on this site © 2012 The Author. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.