Electric City: The Lost History of Ford and Edison's American Utopia

When Henry Ford and Thomas Edison proposed to transform one of the country’s poorest regions into a dream technological metropolis by attempting to create an electric-powered city of tomorrow on the Tennessee River—the “Detroit of the South”—Southerners rallied to support them. But while some saw it as a way to conjure the future and reinvent the South, others saw it as one of the biggest land swindles of all time. They were all true. Electric City is a rich chronicle of an extraordinary, unknown story of American history. It offers a fresh look at the lives of the two men who almost saw an audacious and ambitious project to fruition, the forces that came to oppose them, and what rose in its stead: a new kind of public corporation called the Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the greatest achievements of the New Deal.

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