Energy Humanities – serie

How the 1970s energy crisis facilitated a neoliberal shift in US political culture.In Energizing Neoliberalism, Caleb Wellum offers a provocative account of how the 1970s energy crisis helped to recreate postwar America. Rather than think of the crisis as the obvious outcome of the decade's "oil shocks," Wellum unpacks the cultural construction of a crisis of energy across different sectors of society, from presidents, policy experts, and environmentalists to filmmakers, economists, and oil futures traders. He shows how the dominant meanings ascribed to the 1970s energy crisis helped to energize neoliberal visions of renewed abundance and power through free market values and approaches to energy. Deeply researched in federal archives, expert discourse, and popular culture, Energizing Neoliberalism demonstrates the central role that energy crisis narratives played in America's neoliberal turn. Wellum traces the roots of the crisis to the consumption practices and cultural narratives spawned by the petrocultural politics of Cold War capitalism. In a series of illuminating case studies—including 1970s energy conservation debates, popular car films, and the creation of oil futures trading—Wellum chronicles the consolidation of a neoliberal capitalist order in the United States through an energy politics marked by anxious futurity, petro-populist sentiment, and financialized energy markets. He shows how experiences of energy shortages and fears of future energy crises unsettled American national identity and power yet also informed Reagan-era confidence in free markets and US global leadership.In taking a cultural approach to the 1970s energy crisis, Wellum offers a challenging meditation on the status of "crisis" in modern history, contemporary life, and critical thought and how we rely on crises to make sense of the world.

How a distinctly American way of thinking about energy shaped US culture and society from the Progressive Era to the atomic bomb.In Moral Energy in America, Rebecca K. Wright offers an illuminating exploration of how the concept of energy shaped American thought, culture, and politics throughout the first half of the twentieth century. This essential history traces how politicians, sociologists, geographers, urban planners, economists, and intellectuals adopted the idea of energy to bolster their social programs and visions of the future through distinctive energy imaginaries.Energy was not a stable concept in the period, and it appealed to writers and advocates across the political and cultural spectrum. While medical practitioners and social workers interwove energy into discussions of race, immigration, youth, and crime, mainstream political campaigns appealed to the public by drawing energy into political rhetoric. Wright positions energy at the heart of key intellectual debates of the period, such as the Bourne-Dewey confrontation over America's role in World War I and the rise of technocratic ideas that envisioned energy as a new metric for societal progress. In a thirty-year era that shook the foundations of American democracy—a period punctuated by the Great Depression, the rise of communism and fascism abroad, two world wars, and the atomic bomb—energy became a key metaphor through which to understand major transformations in American society. Wright demonstrates how energy's many meanings transcended material and scientific definitions to influence everything from racial theories to economic policies, and ultimately played a pivotal role in molding the American moral landscape.