| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Redefining Efficiency: Pollution Concerns, Regulatory Mechanisms, and Technological Change in the U.S. Petroleum Industry. By Hugh S. Gorman. (Akron: University of Akron Press, 2001. xvi, 451 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 1-884836-74-7. Paper, $39.95, ISBN 1-884836-75-5.)

In order to make sense of the debates over industrial pollution that occurred in the 1960s, Hugh S. Gorman traces the ideas of pollution and efficiency within the U.S. petroleum industry throughout the twentieth century. By telling this history, Redefining Efficiency fills a crucial gap in our knowledge of the American petroleum industry. Backed by Gorman's understanding of the industry's technological evolution, this book is a superb example of the junction of political and environmental history. Exploration of this connection helps historians better to understand the role industries have played in defining the infrastructure for their own regulation.

Much of our knowledge of the history of oil grows from the stereotypes of the early boom in Pennsylvania and the exploitative tendencies of businessmen such as John D. Rockefeller Sr. We see ripples of this typology in the public rhetoric over Enron and drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the early twenty-first century. And Roger Olien and Diana Davids Olien instructed us about the formation of this perspective in Oil and Ideology (2000). Gorman, however, resists the exploitative typology to explore industry's early role in creating a network to regulate itself.

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