The History of Energy in Modern American Life

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course will offer students a rigorous and lively encounter with multiple energy sources and their manifold effects on American society, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Recent political developments in the US offer plenty of reasons for a course of this sort, one that can contextualize contemporary debates over energy-related matters such as global warming, national security, federal regulation, and sustainability in broad sweeps of change over time. Yet the primary goal of this course will be to provide a history of energy on its own terms. One Cannot grasp the complexities and entanglements of modern life in its entirety without first coming to terms with the ways humans demand, consume, and interact with energy - and in turn, the ways it shapes and reshapes our social structures, realigns our lived and material infrastructures, and even dictates cultural values and trends. We will interrogate these values and structural outcomes with the help of path-breaking scholarship - books and articles about coal, petroleum, electricity, and nuclear energy that not only chart their development over time, but also reveal the ways in which, at key junctures in the nation's past, they forged new patterns of labor and race relations, corporate and community growth, state governance and land-use policy, gender and religion, regional growth and America's global reach. Moving from the Civil War to the present, from the oil patches of western Pennsylvania and West Texas to American petroleum sites in the Middle East - from the electrification of east-coast cities in the late nineteenth century to the damming of western rivers for hydropower in the early-twentieth, this course will give students the opportunity to ponder past and present energy systems within prisms of vast societal impact.