Brian Black

Making Oil Essential: Emerging Patterns of Petroleum Culture in the United States During the Era of the Great War

Providing proper context to the First World War requires that historians consider the resource-based narrative approach that is informed by environmental history. Of these resources that were transformed by the Great War, energy, and particularly petroleum, presents a most revealing narrative. Across a spectrum of compounding uses, the tipping point to alter petroleum’s status was the Great War. From planes to tanks, the strategy and process of battle became firmly entwined with the burning of petroleum. However, this is just part of the story of petroleum’s emerging importance in this period. A variety of global economic and regional political and social factors converged on the era of the Great War to catapult the moderately valuable commodity of petroleum to new standards of value, systemisation, and competition for access. Indeed, by the end of the conflict, petroleum had become a commodity of global significance—even meriting the term ‘essential’.

Nature's Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia. By Kathryn Shively Meier. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Pp. xiii, 219.

liam Howe, and his brother, Lord Admiral Richard Howe, in their capacity as royal peace commissioners. The author never doubts that “Mr. Lee’s Plan” proves Lee’s intrigue and probably treason to the Revolution. He acknowledges that “most historians have reluctantly come to the conclusion that Charles Lee did indeed author this document,” yet he emphatically takes to task those who “ascribe good motives to Lee” for writing it (141). Although Mazzagetti does raise the possibility that, under the circumstances, Lee might have tried to ingratiate himself to his British captors, he summarily dismisses this option. Yet there were several Americans (Ethan Allen comes to mind) who, either from concerns for self-preservation or to achieve a certain goal, played both sides against the middle. For Mazzagetti, there is no grey area; “whatever Lee’s motives and misgivings . . . the plan cannot be read as anything other than a betrayal” (144). This work is well written and clearly argued. The book’s organization is not strictly chronological but more thematic. It opens in June 1775 at the moment when the Continental Congress chose George Washington over several candidates, including Charles Lee, to command its army against the British. Lee was a brilliant yet flawed person, and questions about his moral character and eccentric behavior have dominated the literature about him from the Revolution to the present. Mazzagetti’s account of Lee’s life continues this interpretative trend.