Kirkpatrick Sale
Lecture and Book Signing
Tuesday, May 14, 7 pm
"The Fire of His Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream"
By Kirkpatrick Sale, Free Press 2001
Author Kirkpatrick Sale will be at the Hudson River Maritime Museum to discuss
his recent biography of Robert Fulton on Tuesday May 14th, 7 pm. Admission
$3.00, Museum Members $2.00. For more information, call the Museum at 845-338-0071.
 |
The Fire of His Genius tells the story of Robert Fulton, an extraordinarily driven and ambitious inventor, probing into the undoubted genius of his mind but laying bare the darker side of the man—and the darker side of the American dream that inspired him.
None of the well-dressed crowd that gathered on the Hudson River side of Lower Manhattan on the hot afternoon of August 17, 1808, could have known the importance of the object they had come to see and, mostly, deride: Robert Fulton’s new steamboat.
But as Kirkpatrick Sale shows in his biography, Fulton’s successful four-day round-trip to Albany proved a technology that would transform nineteenth-century America, open up the interior to huge waves of settlers, create and sustain industrial and plantation economies in the nation’s heartland, and destroy the remaining Indian civilizations and most of the wild lands on which they depended. Fulton's four-day trip to Albany and back introduced the machines and culture that marked the birth of the Industrial Revolution in America.
All this is set against a brilliant portrait of a dynamic historical period filled with characters from Bonaparte to Jefferson, Cornelius Vanderbilt to Meriwether Lewis, Robert Livingston to Benjamin West, and events from the Lewis and Clark expedition to the War of 1812, the Louisiana Purchase to the bombing of Fort McHenry, the treason trial of Aaron Burr to the “Great Removal” of American Indians. Here are the “taming” of America’s rivers and the building of its great canals, the introduction to every body of water of Fulton’s “large, noisy, showy, fast, brash, exciting, powerful, and audacious” machine that was the very embodiment of America.
 | Kirkpatrick Sale is a contributing editor for The Nation and the author of nine previous books, including Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision, Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Conquest, and Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution. He is the secretary of the E. F. Schumacher Society. |
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