Jeff Manuel

We're all in the commodity business in one way or another.

the power of energy A virtual conference organized by the Hagley Library October 30 and 31, 2025 Advance registration required, hagley.org/FC2025 9-9:15 - WELCOME 9:15-10:45 - ENERGY SOVEREIGNTIES Jennifer Eaglin, Ohio State University, “Alternative Energies, the Environment, and Development in Brazil” Ashoka Manchala, University of Zurich, “Shifting Contexts of a Coal Company: The Singareni Collieries Company Limited and ‘Semi- sovereign’ Energy in Hyderabad, 1886-1952” Comment: Elizabeth Chatterjee, University of Chicago 11:00-12:45 - ENERGY FLOWS, INFORMATION FLOWS Tom Cinq-Mars, Duke University, “In Search of “Friendship”: An Archaeology of the World’s Longest Oil Pipeline in the Soviet Bloc” Amanda DeMarco, University of California-San Diego, “China’s “Informational Opening”: Reform-Era PRC-FRG Coal Delegations as Market Research” Elliott Sturtevant, Florida International University, “Nature’s Storehouse is Man’s Benefactor: Designing Infinite Growth along the Niagara Frontier” Comment: Christopher Jones, Arizona State 1:30-3:00 - COERCED ENERGIES Parveen Kumar, University of Delhi, “Forced Labor and the Energy Infrastructure of Japanese Wartime Expansion in SE Asia” Christian Robles-Baez, Stanford University, “Railwayless: How Human and Animal Power in Brazil Paved the Way for the Global Coffee Market” Comment: Diana Montano, Washington University in St. Louis FRIDAY OCTOBER 31 9:00-10:45 - ENERGY IN THE HOME BEYOND THE DOMESTIC Minseok Jang, University of Albany, SUNY, “Burning from Below: Yeontan and the Birth of South Korean Environmentalism” Alexandra Quantrill, Pratt Institute, “Women and the Grid: Electrical Experiments in 1920s Britain” Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden, University of North Texas, “Gunpowder, Industrial Capitalism, and Tata at the Piano” Comment: Chelsea Schields, University of California - Irvine 11:00-12:45 - HISTORIES OF CONTEMPORARY TECHNOLOGIES Nancy Campbell, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, “Our Shared Ledger: A Parochial Energy Histor…

Full program for "The Power of Energy" online conference sponsored by the Hagley Library, 10/30-10/31. Looking forward to this! 🗃️

Great article. This will be useful in my undergraduate history of technology classes. And I appreciate that you connected Whitney's story back to hay. Antebellum America—it was hay bales all the way down.

Not sure how I missed this post, but I did not miss the book in my mail. Cheers @jeffmanuel.bsky.social !!!

Thanks, Joe. It was a pleasure working with you and the Press to make this book a commodity you can hold in your hands!

If you can stomach an academic novel mid-semester, Julie Schumacher’s _Dear Committee Members_

Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences: Northwestern University

...even if history itself doesn’t give us an answer. And those are climate change and demographic change.”
www.northwestern.edu/academics/no...

"The human race faces two of the greatest challenges that it has ever faced. And these have no real precedent so history is not a very good guide here, but it’s something that we have to face and we have to think about with the tools that history provides us +

Last but not least, I like this photo of a kid on a horse in an 1898 flower parade. Just a neat photo. The end.
madison-historical.siue.edu/archive/item...

The Lynching of Robert Prager The high-water mark of the anti-immigrant and anti-German hysteria that gripped the nation during World War I

when a mob that had lynched a German immigrant, Robert Prager, was acquitted in minutes while a band played patriotic music. I wrote an article on the topic in 2018:
werehistory.org/the-lynching...

*Cool 1919 photo of a liberty loan drive at the Madison County courthouse. I didn't realize that the WW1 liberty bond drives continued after the war. Also, this courthouse saw one of the most egregious civil rights violations of the war months earlier +
madison-historical.siue.edu/archive/item...

*This 1912 photo of a woman shooting a cannon to kick off Madison County's (Illinois) centennial. As we head into what looks like a bummer of a semiquincentennial in 2026, I'm taking heart by looking at past commemorations.
madison-historical.siue.edu/archive/item...

A few highlights for me:
*As an energy historian, I love this photo of stockholders shaking hands outside a coal mine in Staunton, IL. The imagery of US coal mining is Appalachian-focused. We rarely get to see images of mining on the flat prairie.
madison-historical.siue.edu/archive/item...

Students in my digital archiving studio class have finished a neat collection of late 19th-early 20th century black and white photos from Madison County, Illinois. Check them out if you like midwestern history.

Now freely available here: madison-historical.siue.edu/archive/item...

Thanks for sharing this. I had the rare privilege of taking classes with Mokyr as an undergrad many years ago. Although I stuck with history rather than economics, Mokyr was key in inspiring me to consider a career in academia.

Absolutely. And at a moment when old routes to academic success were collapsing, Twitter in its heyday opened new pathways, essentially bringing the individual “influencer” model to academia, for better and for worse.

Also shooting from the hip here (as usual for me), but I think you're right. I suspect the key technical change was 2000s blogging, which let scholars bypass editors to reach "the public." Then the Great Recession wiped out an already shaky path into academic jobs at the end of the decade.

We used Merriman's _A History of Modern Europe_ as the textbook. Mokyr got into a debate with the author (via email) about some detail of steel production that was wrong. I still think about that when I'm writing: somewhere, a Mokyr might be reading so I better get it right.

Delighted to see Joel Mokyr among the winners of the Nobel economics prize. Taking history classes with him was a highlight of my time as an undergraduate. We students would sit at a big seminar table and he'd pace around behind us, peppering us with very detailed questions.

Something I think about from time to time is that in James’s novel—versus the film—the protagonist in Children of Men was a historian.

Agreed. It’s what I like about social media and what’s kept me on it. But I think it’s worth asking some hard questions about the opportunity costs of all the time and energy we’ve spent on these platforms. If scholars had spent that building something else, would we be in a better place today?

At the risk of technological determinism, it was the 2000s when the platforms—blogging, then social media—first allowed scholars to build a brand outside of disciplinary structures. No need to work through mentors or conferences or editors to build your little empire.

Jean Twenge’s new book has some interesting points about talking with kids and parents about how and when to turn off the location tracking on phones, especially among college students (who are no longer kids!)

“On October 6 I drove by the Society’s modest brick building, surrounded by yellow tape, and saw the moving truck, accompanied by two sheriffs—appropriate for a crime scene, the theft of the history that might have been written using the collection.”

Burning food for land-hungry biofuels is fuelling the climate crisis For the first time ever, Cerulogy, on behalf of T&E, looks at the global biofuels landscape today and what a growing market will look like in 2030.

Full report here: www.transportenvironment.org/articles/cro...

A graphic showing that 1/3 of US corn could turn into 3.6 billion tacos

Not to downplay the serious issues it raises, but this graphic from Cerulogy's recent biofuels is funny. Are those all-corn tacos? Is it just the tortilla? I'm now imagining the US Corn Belt growing billions of tacos...

Now imagine what it will be if they revive Keystone XL 😂

Students for profit? University of Illinois campuses pay company per online student Consumer protection advocates say the practice incentivizes the company to enroll as many students as possible, regardless of whether they'll benefit. The university says their standards aren't compro...

I appreciate WBEZ's scrutiny of higher ed online program managers. (My university is one of those mentioned with a Risepoint contract.) As @tressiemcphd.bsky.social has said for years, with OPMs the for-profit college model in now working *within* public higher ed.
www.wbez.org/education/20...

I do this occasionally in my public and oral history classes (upper-division undergrad and MA level). They take a lot of planning and do best as collaborative group projects, in my experience. A mix of skills is key: research, video editing, voiceover, etc. But when they're good, they're great!

Twitter is a MMORPG Playing Games With Strangers, Part 1

Years ago, Gabriel Rosenberg had an essay arguing that Twitter (and social media, in general) is best thought of as a sandbox MMORPG. I think this is a useful way to thinking about social media's relationship to "real life."
bearistotle.substack.com/p/twitter-is...