The coordinators of the Special issue section offer readers a series of additional contributions to shed light on a common topic. They combine rigor and readability in an effort to bring historical research to life, as well as to provide a wider audience with the keys needed to understand the past and through it—whether directly or indirectly—the present.
In contrast to Thomas Hughes’ classic systems theory published as Networks of Power exactly 40 years ago, the collective import of this volume’s assembled scholarship is to highlight the role of cultural contingency (vis-à-vis technological momentum) in the take-up of electricity.
This special issue focuses on the concept of petroculture and its relationship with energy history and energy humanities.
Following fierce construction controversies in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System became a familiar cultural hallmark and the most iconic pipeline in the world.
This article ventures seaward to examine how two contemporary Danish novels paradoxically uses irrealist features to make visible the existent opacity and mythology of oil.
In 1995 Michael Billig introduced the term ‘banal nationalism’ to refer to those representations and reproductions of the nation which are as ubiquitous as they tend to go unnoticed.
Based on the assumption that the periodical press was crucial for synchronising the world and preparing for global energy transition in the early 20th C., the article proposes a historiography of oil that acknowledges newspapers’ excess capacity as research material and takes advantage of analyti
The aim of this paper is twofold, first to explore how Sandrine Bessora’s novel Petroleum (2004) engages with the Medea intertext, and thus inserting itself in a specific literary filiation, addresses the writing of history.
This article focuses on select instances of the history of Greek petroleum geology, spanning over 150 years of -mostly failed- oil exploration attempts.
In the postwar years, petroleum products pervaded more and more aspects of Western European life.