Power Lines

How high energy consumption transformed postwar Phoenix and deepened inequalities in the American Southwest In 1940, Phoenix was a small, agricultural city of sixty-five thousand, and the Navajo Reservation was an open landscape of scattered sheepherders. Forty years later, Phoenix had blossomed into a metropolis of 1.5 million people and the territory of the Navajo Nation was home to two of the largest strip mines in the world. Five coal-burning power plants surrounded the reservation, generating electricity for export to Phoenix, Los Angeles, and other cities. Exploring the postwar developments of these two very different landscapes, Power Lines tells the story of the far-reaching environmental and social inequalities of metropolitan growth, and the roots of the contemporary coal-fueled climate change crisis. Andrew Needham explains how inexpensive electricity became a requirement for modern life in Phoenix—driving assembly lines and cooling the oppressive heat. Navajo officials initially hoped energy development would improve their lands too, but as ash piles marked their landscape, air pollution filled the skies, and almost half of Navajo households remained without electricity, many Navajos came to view power lines as a sign of their subordination in the Southwest. Drawing together urban, environmental, and American Indian history, Needham demonstrates how power lines created unequal connections between distant landscapes and how environmental changes associated with suburbanization reached far beyond the metropolitan frontier. Needham also offers a new account of postwar inequality, arguing that residents of the metropolitan periphery suffered similar patterns of marginalization as those faced in America's inner cities. Telling how coal from Indian lands became the fuel of modernity in the Southwest, Power Lines explores the dramatic effects that this energy system has had on the people and environment of the region.

The only book containing a complete treatment on the construction of electric power lines. Reflecting the changing economic and technical environment of the industry, this publication introduces beginners to the full range of relevant topics of line design and implementation.

At once clear-eyed and compassionate, this incisive account of life in contemporary South Africa by Peace Corps volunteer and first-time author Jason Carter opens a rare window on a world racked with turmoil yet full of hope. 8-page color photo insert.

How electricity became a metaphor for modernity in the United States, inspiring authors from Mark Twain to Ralph Ellison. At the turn of the twentieth century, electricity emerged as a metaphor for modernity. Writers from Mark Twain to Ralph Ellison grappled with the idea of electricity as both life force (illumination) and death spark (electrocution). The idea that electrification created exclusively modern experiences took hold of Americans' imaginations, whether they welcomed or feared its adoption. In Power Lines, Jennifer Lieberman examines the apparently incompatible notions of electricity that coexisted in the American imagination, tracing how electricity became a common (though multifarious) symbol for modern life. Lieberman examines a series of moments of technical change when electricity accrued new social meanings, plotting both power lines and the power of narrative lines in American life and literature. While discussing the social construction of electrical systems, she offers a new interpretation of Twain's use of electricity as an organizing metaphor in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, describes the rhetoric surrounding the invention of electric execution, analyzes Charlotte Perkins Gilman's call for human connection in her utopian writing and in her little-known Human Work, considers the theme of electrical interconnection in Jack London's work, and shows how Ralph Ellison and Louis Mumford continued the literary tradition of electrical metaphor. Electrical power was a distinctive concept in American literary, cultural, and technological histories. For this reason, narratives about electricity were particularly evocative. Bridging the realistic and the romantic, the historical and the fantastic, these stories guide us to ask new questions about our enduring fascination with electricity and all it came to represent.

Helping readers understand the challenges and barriers faced by teens in urban communities, this one-of-a-kind resource offers real-world recommendations, case studies, and experience-based programmatic solutions for fostering crucial media literacy skills.

Overhead power lines are the only way to electrify many communities. Massive experience has been gained with electrification projects that can be used world-wide. This work presents the technology of overhead power lines, including sag, insulators, conductors, lightning, and grounding.

Like the complex systems of man-made power lines that transmit electricity and connect people and places, feminist alliances are elaborate networks that have the potential to provide access to institutional power and to transform relations. In Power Lines, Aimee Carrillo Rowe explores the formation and transformative possibilities of transracial feminist alliances. She draws on her conversations with twenty-eight self-defined academic feminists, who reflect on their academic careers, alliances, feminist struggles, and identifications. Based on those conversations and her own experiences as an Anglo-Chicana queer feminist researcher, Carrillo Rowe investigates when and under what conditions transracial feminist alliances in academia work or fail, and how close attention to their formation provides the theoretical and political groundwork for a collective vision of subjectivity. Combining theory, criticism, and narrative nonfiction, Carrillo Rowe develops a politics of relation that encourages the formation of feminist alliances across racial and other boundaries within academia. Such a politics of relation is founded on her belief that our subjectivities emerge in community; our affective investments inform and even create our political investments. Thus experience, consciousness, and agency must be understood as coalitional rather than individual endeavors. Carrillo Rowe’s conversations with academic feminists reveal that women who restrict their primary allies to women of their same race tend to have limited notions of feminism, whereas women who build transracial alliances cultivate more nuanced, intersectional, and politically transformative feminisms. For Carrillo Rowe, the institutionalization of feminism is not so much an achievement as an ongoing relational process. In Power Lines, she offers a set of critical, practical, and theoretical tools for building and maintaining transracial feminist alliances.

Carrier communication over power lines, like carrier traffic over postal lines, has a tradition of about 50 years. It has become a vital element in electric system operation. Being restricted to power networks, it has a comparatively limited scope. Nevertheless, great efforts are being ex to keep pace with the demands made pended on technical advancement of both power and communication engineering. As in previous editions of this book, it is endeavored in the fourth edition to familiarize the man in the field with the fundamental concepts on which this technique and its practical application are based. The physical and electrical characteristics of the equipment involved are de scribed in a general way. For the sake of clarity, the author has refrained from giving a detailed account or illustrations of special versions, espe cially as the differences between the equipment supplied by the various manufacturers are so small. This is due to the use of transistors instead of tubes and to the universally adopted plug-in module construction technique. In the load dispatching plants of power supply networks, tele metering systems are turning more and more to data engineering methods and equipment to lighten the task of network management. Consequently, at certain points in the text, topics concerning remote data processing are treated, emphasis being placed on transmission channels operating at a considerably higher speed than was usual 10 years ago.