Trish Kahle is a historian of energy, work, and politics at Georgetown University Qatar and coleads the Energy Humanities Research Initiative at the Center for International and Regional Studies.
A marvelous study of coal’s role in fueling the possibilities and limits of modern democratic citizenship. Kahle shows that while coal helped generate new magnitudes of material prosperity, it ultimately failed in its promise to deliver democratic equality. We must learn from coal’s mistakes in our current energy transition. -- Dominic Boyer, author of <i>No More Fossils</i> With analytical rigor and moral courage, Kahle recasts the history of the modern United States by placing coal miners at its center. She shows how miners fueled the industrial nation and, in fighting for rights and protections amid workplace violence, shaped what it meant to be a citizen within it. The result is a powerful account of the contradictions between energy and democracy in America’s coal-fired century. -- Victor Seow, author of <i>Carbon Technocracy</i>