American Energy History offers a critical framework to understand present-day conflicts over energy and climate change. The course explores how changes to energy systems are not simply economic or technological, but rather involve profound social, political, and cultural transformations. Using the lens of energy history and engaging a diverse set of historical source materials, American Energy History invites participants to consider how the struggle to control and deploy energy shaped United States history, and the ways that social forces, in turn, determined energy systems. The course ranges widely across American history to consider different sources of energy, forms of consumption, and critical themes in energy studies. American Energy History is designed as a five-session, discussion-oriented seminar that meets weekly for 60 minutes. Prior to each discussion session, participants are asked to watch one or two 10-15 minute video presentations that introduce and contextualize each session’s themes. Participants also are expected to read short scholarly essays and to examine historical primary sources relevant to that week’s discussion. Reading questions guide each set of assignments. Our seminar meetings will be active, participatory conversations that seek to connect the readings and primary sources to broader historical themes and to consider the relationship between the history of energy.

Click here for a PDF of the Syllabus

Click here to view the Pre-Lecture Videos and Slides

Week One: Energy History and Energy Transitions

Topics: Historical approaches to energy, conceptualizing “energy transitions,” small dams and the transition to capitalism

Reading:

Aaron Sachs, “Energy in American History,” Oxford Encyclopedia, 2015.

Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast, 1-43

Primary Sources: 

• "Water Power, Industrial Manufacturing, and Environmental Transformation"
• “Animal Power”

Week Two: Energy and Power in the Fossil Fuel Era

Topics: Conflicts between labor and capital in coal; monopoly and antitrust in oil; energy systems and democracy

Reading:

Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 12-42.

Thomas Andrews, Killing for Coal, 122-156.

Primary Sources: 

• "The Rise of Coal"
• "Coal Mining and Labor Conflict"
• "Antitrust and Monopoly"

Week Three: Electrifying America

Topics: Public vs. private power systems; gender, technology, and labor; the big dam era

Reading:

David E. Nye, Electrifying America, Chapter 6, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Hearth” and Chapter 7, “Rural Lines.”

Primary Sources: 

• “Electricity Consumption and Gender”
• "The Big Dam Era"
• "The End of the Big Dam Era"

Week Four: Rise, Fall, and Possible Return of Nuclear Power

Topics: Managing and comparing risks; trusting experts; confronting technological disaster

Reading:

Alfred Crosby, Children of the Sun (New York: Norton, 2006), Chapter 7, “Fission.”

J. Samuel Walker, “The Nuclear Power Debate of the 1970s,” in Robert Lifset, ed., American Energy Policy in the 1970s. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014, 221-254.

Watch: “Nuclear Power’s Promise and Peril” (13 minutes)

Primary Sources: 

• “Nuclear Energy, the Environment, and Debating the Costs of Progress”

Week Five: The 1970s and Their Legacies

Topics: Disruption and continuities in the energy system; predicting technological change and resource availability; climate politics; environmental justice

Reading:

Paul Sabin, “Crisis and Continuity in U.S. Oil Politics, 1965–1980.” Journal of American History 99, no. 1 (June 1, 2012): 177–86. 

Neela Banerjee, Lisa Song, and David Hasemyer, "Exxon's Own Research Confirmed Fossil Fuels' Role in Global Warming Decades Ago" InsideClimate News, September 16, 2015.

Paul Voosen, "Atomic bombs and oil addiction herald Earth’s new epoch: The Anthropocene" Science, August 24, 2016.

Primary Sources: 

• "Oil Shocks of the 1970s"
• "Solar Architecture and Solar Design, 1930s-1950s"

First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, “Principles of Environmental Justice,” 1991.

Prolific the Rapper, “A Tribe Called Red” video; lyrics.