Water Power, Industrial Manufacturing, and Environmental Transformation in 19th-Century New England
From the time Puritans settled in New England in the seventeenth century to the decades after the American Revolution, the region’s landscape was dotted by small mills that used water power for sawing wood, grinding grain, and carding wool to meet the needs of local communities.
Harvesting Light: New England Whaling in the Nineteenth Century
This module covers the New England-based commercial whale fishery in the middle of the nineteenth century. The documents cover three themes: how did whalers’ labor on board ship and their dependence on the whale-oil economy shape their ways of valuing and understanding whales; how were transitions from an “organic to a “mineral” energy regime experienced by whalers and whale-oil consumers; and, how did whalers and consumers understand the ecosystem change brought on by energy demands?
Animal Power
After human muscle power, domesticated animals provided the most accessible, economical and efficient source of power available to Americans in the nineteenth century.
Rise of Coal in the Nineteenth-Century United States
Coal can easily appear mundane to modern eyes—an inferior product from a bygone era.
Coal Mining and Labor Conflict
The rapidly increasing use of coal in the late nineteenth century required hundreds of thousands of workers to dig that coal out of the ground, sort and load it into railroad cars, and ship it to the urban and industrial centers that consumed it.
Electricity Consumption: Culture, Gender and Power
Patterns of energy consumption started to change significantly in the first decades of the twentieth century. As electrical service became increasingly available in urban areas, middle class households experimented with and adopted new electrical appliances.
Electricity and the Public Good: Private-Public Power Debates in the 1920s-30s
Who should develop and control electric power resources? In the 1920s and 1930s, private electric companies struggled with state and federal governments over how the vital new infrastructure would be built and made accessible.
Antitrust and Monopoly
In 1859, the completion of the first successful petroleum well in northwestern Pennsylvania set off a wild speculative oil boom. Independent oil producers dominated this early oil extraction. Petroleum moved to markets first on wagons traveling over rough roads, and then by means of pipelines and railroads. Corporate consolidation in the refining stage, however, soon created a bottleneck in the supply chain.
The Big Dam Era
The era of large-scale hydroelectric dam building spanned roughly four decades, from the 1930s through the 1960s. Symbolically, the era commenced with Hoover Dam’s dedication in 1935. Hoover, however, was a culmination of larger technological and political changes.
The End of the Big Dam Era
Large-scale dams suggested engineering mastery over the vagaries of nature and structural social and economic conditions. They enthralled Americans who read into them possibilities for a new, emergent modernity that mixed rural electrification, public power, and industrial growth. But economic growth came at great social and environmental cost.
Nuclear Energy, the Environment, and Debating the Costs of Progress
Almost since its inception, nuclear technology has raised challenging questions about the goals, costs, and the very nature of progress. Would nuclear technologies lead to a world of cheap energy that freed humans from the demands of physical labor—or to a world of dystopic, technocratic rule and environmental ruin?
Solar Architecture and Solar Design, 1930s-1950s
From right before World War II until the late 1950s, American architects and engineers experimented with solar house heating and solar houses were built across the Midwest, Northeast, and Southwestern United States. Working with international aid organizations such the Ford Foundation, architects also were involved with solar technology transfer as part of development projects in India, South Africa, and Morocco.
The Oil Shocks of the 1970s
In October 1973, the Arab state members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) declared that they would cut oil production, and limit exports to certain countries, to protest the United States’ support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War. American policymakers believed that this decision, which they called an “embargo,” would raise the market price of oil as supplies diminished and would lead to shortages of oil in the United States.