Steam-Powered Rhetoric

Abstract

This dissertation examines the complex and multifaceted life of steam in the context of nineteenth-century America. During this time, steam was a ubiquitous presence in public life. Steam powered the transcontinental railroad, made possible large-scale manufacturing and industrial production, and powered technological progress that defined the late-nineteenth century in America. Steam was also a natural resource, evidencing hydrothermal features in the nation’s first National Park at Yellowstone, and the potential of nature’s bounty and power. Given that steam existed in both natural and cultural contexts, I contend that steam must be treated as what Bruno Latour calls a quasi-object, something simultaneously natural and cultural, whose circulation and stabilization is made possible by rhetorical practices. By tracing rhetoric about steam, I index the numerous contexts in which it was made salient as either natural or cultural, and illustrate the implications of that salience for various aspects of public life in the late-nineteenth century: technological progress, the establishment of Yellowstone National Park, the completion of the transcontinental railroad, and fraught relationships with Native Americans. To trace steam in each of these contexts is to illuminate its rhetorical vibrancy, but also to illustrate its role in contributing to the establishment of ontological relationships between nature and culture, subject and object. To problematize the stability of steam, then, is to problematize the stability of these relationships; a project I contend is vital in considering our contemporary relationship to the environment in a moment of ecological crisis.