Energy History

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The Energy History Working Group will provide a showcase for works-in-progress within the field of energy history, globally conceived. There is strong interest for a dedicated group to discuss proposals, workshop papers, and share ideas within the field. Along with papers published in the Journal of Energy History, energy history papers and panels feature prominently at conferences such as American Society for Environmental History, Society for the History of Technology, Labor and Working Class History Association, and others. However, despite over two decades of growing interest, there are few dedicated venues for energy historians to gather and share work. This Working Group will help to fill this gap.

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Respectful Behavior Policy

Participants at Consortium activities will treat each other with respect and consideration to create a collegial, inclusive, and professional environment that is free from any form of discrimination, harassment, or retaliation.

Participants will avoid any inappropriate actions or statements based on individual characteristics such as age, race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, nationality, political affiliation, ability status, educational background, or any other characteristic protected by law. Disruptive or harassing behavior of any kind will not be tolerated. Harassment includes but is not limited to inappropriate or intimidating behavior and language, unwelcome jokes or comments, unwanted touching or attention, offensive images, photography without permission, and stalking.

Participants may send reports or concerns about violations of this policy to conduct@chstm.org.

 

Upcoming Meetings

  • Friday, December 13, 2024 12:30 pm to 2:00 pm EST

    Energy History Bibliography!
    Help us to construct an energy history bibliography! All contributions welcome. Feel free to enter bibliographic information, along with links if you have them. We have broken the list up simply into two categories: “classics” and “recent favorites.” Feel free to interpret both loosely. Our goal is to collect what historians think are the best and most important energy histories available today. Think broadly about what might matter to energy historians, including:

    • Energy sources: oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind, solar, hydropower, and more!
    • Approaches: environment, science & technology, labor, organic, inorganic, electricity, consumption/demand, business and culture, and more!
    • Geographies: anywhere and everywhere! Help us to effectively cover the geographies you know!

    Link to the shared bibliography here (and feel free to start adding to it! https://docs.google.com/document/d/16HVJ7sw0W3AzQxZHzjOYzidlU85PZWpiZr1FlM3syIc/edit?usp=sharing
  • Friday, January 10, 2025 12:30 pm to 2:00 pm EST
    • Aleksandra Kaye and Bernardo S. Buarque, From Wells to Woes: Divergent Legacies of Early Oil Extraction in Galicia and Taranaki
    • Mercedes Fernández-Paradas, Carlos Larrinaga Rodríguez, and Antonio J. Pinto, Franco-Hispanic Energy Market in the 1930s: How Gas and Electricity Evolved During European Interwar
  • Friday, February 14, 2025 12:30 pm to 2:00 pm EST
    • Nataliia Laas, Waste Anxieties in the Late Soviet Union
    • Jan Wachter, Energy Policy in East Central Europe
  • Friday, March 14, 2025 12:30 pm to 2:00 pm EDT
    • Jake Stephen Milner, Decarbonising Deindustrial Places: Industrial Collective Memories in the Age of Green Economic Development
    • Aditi Basu, Hinduism and Sun Deification in India: Relevance in the 21st Century as Solar Energy
  • Friday, April 11, 2025 12:30 pm to 2:00 pm EDT
    • Nicholas Ostrum, Extracting Concessions and Losing Ground: The Twin Failures of Souédie and the Euphrates Dam, 1963-1969
  • Friday, May 9, 2025 12:30 pm to 2:00 pm EDT
    • Syllabus share! What should be on a syllabus for energy history and energy-related topics? 

Past Meetings

  • November 8, 2024
    • Nicholas Misukanis, The Battle on the Border: Gorleben, Nuclear Waste, and Helmut Schmidt’s Quest for German Energy Autonomy
  • October 11, 2024
    • Robert Lifset, The Independents Strikes Back: The Energy Crisis of the 1970s and the Forging of a New Chapter in the Environmental History of the Oil Industry
  • June 14, 2024
    • CANCELLED (will be rescheduled for Fall 2024) Joya John, Energy Histories, Museums, and Postcolonial Development in India

     
  • May 10, 2024
    • Odinn Melsted and Candida Sánchez-Burmester, “Geoscience Spillover: The Oil Industry and Geothermal Development in Greater California, 1960s-1970s”
    • Dante LaRiccia, "Toward a ‘World Energy Order’: Oil Crisis, Energy Transition, and Global Governance at the United Nations, 1973-1981"

     
  • April 12, 2024
    • Andrew Kettler, “Disenchanting the Senses: Sulfuric Discourse and the World System”

     
  • March 8, 2024
    • Minseok Jang, Testing a New Energy Resource: Fire Tests and the Risk of Kerosene in the Anglo-American World, 1859-1911

     
  • February 9, 2024
    • Chad Montrie, “‘What is Labour’s Stake?’: Workers and the History of Environmentalism in Alberta.”

     
  • January 12, 2024
    • Julia Mead, “Frozen Assets: Czechoslovakia’s 1979 Blizzard and the Energetic Social Contract of Late Socialism”

     
  • December 8, 2023
    • Wout Saelens, “Energy politics: urban fuel policy and the transition to coal in Ghent (eighteenth-nineteenth centuries).”

     
  • November 10, 2023
    • Petra Dolata and Victor McFarland, “Oil Consultant Walter J. Levy”

     
     

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Group Conveners

  • brian.leech's picture

    Brian Leech

    Brian Leech is Associate Professor of History at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. He is an environmental historian of North American regions with a focus on the history of natural resources, including mining, energy, and food. Leech is the author of The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and Its Expanding Berkeley Pit (2018) and he is at work on two projects: a history of the portrayal of mining in popular culture and a history of speed limits in the American West.

     
  • robert.lifset's picture

    Robert Lifset

    Robert Lifset is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma. His books include Power on the Hudson, Storm King Mountain and The Emergence of Modern American Environmentalism (2014) and American Energy Policy in the 1970s (2014), and is co-editor of American Energy Cinema (West Virginia University Press, 2023). Lifset is currently researching a history of the energy crisis of the 1970s. Robert Lifset is also the founding web and list editor of H-Energy (http://www.h-net.org/~energy/), an online, interdisciplinary website devoted to the study of energy history.

     
  • Sstanfordmcin's picture

    Sarah Stanford-McIntyre

    Sarah Stanford-McIntyre is an Assistant Professor in the Herbst Program for Engineering, Ethics & Society at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her book project, Natural Risk: An Environmental History of West Texas Oil and the Rise of Sunbelt Texas (Forthcoming, Columbia University Press), examines how oil workers responded to industry hazards and shaped Texas industrialization. She is co-editor of American Energy Cinema (West Virginia University Press), which historicizes American film depictions of the energy industries.
     
    She has also published on grain elevator disasters, oil industry labor battles, computing and geophysics, Texas hydroelectric development, and wind energy. She is beginning a second monograph on renewable energy development in the US Southwest.

     

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