Friday, 6 October 2017 — 12:00 noon — WAG 316
Henry Wiencek, UT-IHS
“‘One spark…will blow us all to Kingdom Come’: The Environmental Disaster (and Social Spectacle) of Louisiana’s Oil Field Fires, 1901–1930”
In the first decades of the 20th century, North Louisiana experienced an oil boom that brought new wealth to Shreveport, gave birth to Oil City and other boomtowns, and devastated much of the surrounding countryside. Oil well fires were an especially dramatic manifestation the petroleum boom, and when such fires lit up the night sky around Oil City, Shreveport residents would actually pay to come out to see them. Shreveport and Oil City both fed off the same industry, yet their landscapes were radically different. Were the sources of this difference simply natural, or were they instead rooted in engrained attitudes toward the empherality of boomtowns and the disposability of the countryside around them?
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Henry Wiencek is a historian of the modern United States who explores the intersections of race relations and natural resource extraction. In May 2017, he defended his dissertation, “Oil City: The Social, Economic and Environmental Anatomy of North Louisiana’s Oil Boomtowns, 1901-1935,” which he wrote under the guidance of Jacqueline Jones. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at UT’s Institute for Historical Studies. As a graduate student at UT, he contributed to several digital history initiatives, including servied as Graduate Editor of Not Even Past and guest host on the podcast 15 Minute History. As a postdoctoral fellow, he is presently teaching an undergraduate seminar and revising “Oil City” into a monograph.