Oil and Modern America

3 units

This course will provide a chronological and and thematic examination of the history of oil in modern America (emphasis on 1890s-present). The course will focus its attention on key personalities, tensions and debates, and periods of swift progress and destabilization in the long history of U.S. petroleum, and will flesh out oil's broader impact on American life as well as the effects of American political culture on the internal mechanisms of the oil industry.