Anointed with Oil is a groundbreaking new history of the United
States that places the relationship between religious faith and oil
together at the center of America's rise to global power in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As prize-winning historian
Darren Dochuk reveals, from the earliest discovery of oil in
America during the Civil War, Americans saw oil as the nation's
special blessing and its peculiar burden, the source of its
prophetic mission in the world. Over the century that followed and
down to the present day, the oil industry's leaders and its
ordinary workers together fundamentally transformed American
religion, business, and politics--boosting America's ascent as the
preeminent global power, giving shape to modern evangelical
Christianity, fueling the rise of the Republican Right, and setting
the terms for today's political and environmental uncertainties.
Through extensive research in corporate, political, and community
archives in the US and around the world, Dochuk brings to life a
vast cast of characters: oil hunters, executives, powerbrokers,
politicians, muckrakers, preachers, and ordinary oil patch
residents. He profiles the generations of geologists and wildcat
drillers who understood petroleum as a blessing from God, and the
oil executives who developed an ideology of high-risk, high-reward
entrepreneurialism by fusing notions of earthly dominion with trust
in the supernatural. He examines how many oil workers and their
families weathered the boom-bust economies of extraction zones like
the Southwest by drawing closer to Christ. And he recounts how,
after making their fortunes in "big oil," families such as the
Rockefellers constructed enormous philanthropies and sought to
uplift America and the world according to Judeo-Christian values
and a vision of well-ordered markets--even as other independent
tycoons who embraced a more fervent "wildcat religion" and
enthusiasm for laissez-faire capitalism eventually dethroned these
centrists and helped to usher conservatives like Ronald Reagan and
George Bush to victory. Ranging from the Civil War to the present,
from West Texas to Saudi Arabia to the Alberta Tar Sands, and from
oil patch boomtowns to the White House, Anointed with Oil a
sweeping, magisterial book that transforms how we understand modern
America.
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