MAKING A WORLD FOR AMERICA: ELECTRIC COMMUNICATION, EXPANSIVE PROTESTANTISM, AND GLOBALIZATION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY ...

• Main Author: Supp-Montgomerie, Jenna
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 2013
• Subjects: Canada; Newfoundland
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.17615/3jsp-yc94; https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/concern/dissertations/f1881m14p?locale=en

On August 12, 1858, the Atlantic Telegraph Cable was laid across the ocean from the west coast of Ireland to Newfoundland, Canada. Claims that distance had been annihilated, peace was imminent, and the world would unite through this new medium for intercontinental communication took America by storm. These promises of unity were particularly strange because the cable failed after only twenty-three days, colonial conflict rocked the world, and the Civil War loomed. This study explores this early form of globalization in America at the advent of the first opportunity for Americans to communicate with Europe in a matter of hours rather than weeks. The world is not a given or natural entity. Americans in the mid-nineteenth century produced a modern global imaginary: a constellation of symbols, meanings, practices, and material objects that was structured and sustained in dynamic form by practices of variable affective investment that shaped how Americans conceived of and lived in the world. This study ...