"Energy humanities is a field of scholarship that, like medical humanities and digital humanities before it, overcomes traditional boundaries between the disciplines and between academic and applied research. Like its predecessors, energy humanities highlights the essential contribution that the insights and methods of the human sciences can make to areas of study and analysis once thought best left to the natural sciences. This isn't a case of the humanities simply helping their cross-campus colleagues to learn the mechanics of communication so that they might better articulate their ideas. Rather, these fields of scholarship are ones that demonstrate how the scale and complexity of the issues being explored demand insights and approaches that transcend old school disciplinary boundaries. Energy Humanities : A Reader offers a carefully curated selection of the best and most influential work in energy humanities that has appeared over the past decade. To stay true to the diverse work that makes up this emergent field, selections range from anthropology and geography to philosophy, history, and cultural studies to recent energy-focused interventions in art and literature. The three readers all agree that this is an important, ground-breaking collection of work"--Provided by publisher.

The year 1973 marks one of the most important turning points in the history of the twentieth century. Prior to that year, the world had become accustomed to a plentiful supply of inexpensive fossil fuels--especially oil. During this first major international oil crisis, however, the western world's dependency on unstable eastern energy resources became dramatically clear. Published to accompany the comprehensive and enlightening 2008 exhibition, 1973: Sorry, Out of Gas, hosted by the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, this beautifully designed, frightening and strangely inspiring volume examines the oil crisis of 1973 as the major precedent of contemporary concerns about energy resources and fossil fuel dependency. The 1973 shortage triggered research and development of renewable energy sources, improved technologies and sparked social experiments that were to have an enduring impact on the fields of architecture and policy in both America and Europe. Put together by the acclaimed Italian book designer Massimo Pitis, this volume includes a monumental stash of documentary photographs, ephemera, documents, transcripts and original writings on all things related to the oil crisis--from Jimmy Carter to underground utopias. Reproductions cover everything from impossible traffic jams leading up to empty gas stations to board games with names like Energy Quest and Petrol. Specially conceived for this occasion, an illustrated tale by Harriet Russell, whose work is regularly featured in Time Out and the Guardian, introduces the ideas behind this book from a child's point of view. Russell's drawings depict ironic and humorous situations that will familiarize children with energy-saving and oil dependency concerns.

This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.