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Book Review
Oil and Ideology: The Cultural Creation of the American Petroleum Industry. By Roger M. Olien and Diana Davids Olien. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xx, 305 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2523-9. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-8078-4835-2.)
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The mystery writer Josephine Tey called the problem Tonypandy. Popular myths and distorted understandings of historical events persist despite the efforts of historians to set the record straight. Tonypandy is the target of this history of the oil industry from its birth in western Pennsylvania in 1859 until the end of World War II. The authors, Roger M. Olien and Diana Davids Olien, make the case that many of the sins charged against the oil industry in general and John D. Rockefeller Sr. and Standard Oil of New Jersey in particular are more myth than credible history. Recent popular histories by Daniel Yergin (1991) and Ron Chernow (1998), they argue, have perpetuated many widely held distortions. |
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