Nantucket is famous for its quaintness: salt gray shingled houses, cobblestoned streets, antique lighthouses, and even the old candle factory that became the Whaling Museum. It might seem like Nantucket has always been quaint-but Nantucket quaintness has a distinct and surprising history. In this talk, Jamie Jones explains how Nantucketers and the first waves of summer visitors made the island quaint as a response to the massive energy transitions of the 19th century. Nantucket quaintness as at least as much to do with coal, oil, and fossil-fueled modernity as it does with the island’s history of whale oil and whaling. Drawing on research she conducted on island for her recent book, Jones explores the history of quaintness, and the ramifications of energy transition on Nantucket: past, present, and future.
This program is part of the Nantucket Historical Association's Spring Lecture Series at the Nantucket Whaling Museum.
Jamie L. Jones is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies at Harvard University. Her research explores the energy transitions of the nineteenth century, when whale oil and other organic energy sources gave way to fossil fuels. Jones considers the way that U.S. literature, art, and popular culture represented that energy transition, and her research finds that those cultural representations in turn have shaped environmental change, our practices of energy extraction and consumption, and our imagination of the world’s oceans. Her first book, Rendered Obsolete: Energy Culture and the Afterlife of U.S. Whaling, is out now from the University of North Carolina Press. Her research has been published in several scholarly journals, as well as in The Los Angeles Review of Books and The New York Times. She has also made several media appearances on the BBC World News, the BackStory history podcast, and several other podcasts.