A Decidedly Valuable and Dangerous Fuel

This issue of the Journal of American History focuses on the history of oil, and for good reason. Modern societies as we have known them could not operate without ample and diverse supplies of energy, suggesting that the story of our major fuels can hardly be ignored in any attempt to understand American history. Among energy sources, oil retains a special significance that argues for the special scholarly attention found within these covers. Reflecting oil’s unique strategic importance, Daniel Yergin aptly titled his influential industrial history of the topic The Prize. At the dawn of the twentieth century, coal towered above its rivals as the United States’ dominant source of energy. Ranking a distant second came wood. Until 1902, no American president had ever ridden in an automobile, the machine most closely associated with oil. It was not until midcentury that oil replaced coal as the country’s most used fuel. Over the last three decades of the century, oil jumped well ahead of natural gas, by then its closest rival. The ascendancy of oil involved more than just replacing one fuel with another. Growing consumption of the fossil fuel in liquid form was deeply intertwined with how Americans lived, how they conducted business, and how they fought wars. Thus studying oil is required to understand twentieth-century American history—whether the approach is social, economic, environmental, scientific, political, diplomatic, or military.

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