Oil Excitement

I propose the word “excitement” as a critical keyword for understanding energy and affect in C19 Environmental Humanities. The U.S. petroleum industry began in Pennsylvania in 1859, and “excitement” was deployed as a... [ view full abstract ]

I propose the word “excitement” as a critical keyword for understanding energy and affect in C19 Environmental Humanities. The U.S. petroleum industry began in Pennsylvania in 1859, and “excitement” was deployed as a synonym for “boom.” Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, it became conventional in petroleum narratives to call the early industry the “excitement,” as in this example from an 1865 narrative: “Titusville…contained about one hundred and fifty inhabitants before the oil excitement; it now contains probably five thousand….”

“Excitement” contributes a distinctly C19 keyterm to the emerging field of the energy humanities, which seeks to name and investigate the affects made possible by massive fossil fuel extraction. Energy humanities scholarship has been primarily concerned with oil affect in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Stephanie LeMenager, for example, coined “petromelancholia” to describe a C21 feeling of sadness about “losing cheap energy that came relatively easily.” 

From the other end of petromodernity, “excitement” describes a positive and fittingly energetic affect, capturing the prospective, exuberant quality of the nascent industry in the 19^th century. In light of the devastation already wrought by fossil-fuel-driven climate change in the 21^st century, “excitement” appears naïve, callous.  “Excitement” can help us understand how short-term economic opportunity preempts the affects of environmental care and concern. But in other usages across history, an “excitement” is a pathological activity in the body, the arousal of departed spirits, or awakening from sleep. My paper will ask: what forces did we excite when we first began extracting petroleum?