Loading sugar cane in Hawaii, 1917 (Library of Congress)

From the triangle trade to labor struggles in Hawaii to the rise of high-fructose corn syrup, sweetness in America has always been politically charged. Why has sugar been so intimately linked to power over the centuries? How has our national sweet tooth shaped our political and economic priorities?

In this episode, the History Guys will explore sweetness in American history.  The Sugar Act of 1764 helped feed colonial resentment of Great Britain, paving the way for protests and, ultimately, the American Revolution. A century and a half later, US tariff walls gave Puerto Rican sugar a ready market – but pushed the territory toward a one-crop economy that later collapsed.

Through the 19th century, sugar was intimately linked to slavery; free blacks in the 1830s boycotted slave-produced sugar in a stand against the “peculiar institution.” A century later, the sugar beet industry revolutionized the rural Midwest, bringing with it questions about the role of foreign migrant workers and urban factory workers. So where does sugar fit into labor history in the US? How has this tasty cash crop affected our environment and our economy? And what does it tell us about globalization before the 20th century?

Please help us shape this episode — post your ideas, stories, and questions below!

Historian David Nye discusses the origins of Americans’ ample appetites for energy.

Excerpted from: From Whales to Wind: A History of Energy

Historian Ann Norton Greene explains why the “Age of Steam” was also the Age of Horses.

Excerpted from: From Whales to Wind: A History of Energy

Historian Gail Cooper talks about the early days of air conditioning and the effort to move the outside indoors. Syndey Katz describes movie theaters in the days before A/C.

Excerpted from: Climate Control: A History of Heating & Cooling

Three decades after Jimmy Carter donned his famous cardigan and asked us to go on an energy diet, the US is consuming more than ever. In this episode, BackStory takes on big oil (and big whales, trees and water)!  Historian David Nye discusses the origins of our gluttony for energy, and historian Anne Norton Greene explains why the “Age of Steam” was also the Age of Horses.  Join us on our power trip!

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Show Highlights:

• The Age of Horses — Historian Ann Norton Greene explains why the “Age of Steam” was also the Age of Horses.
• Energy Gluttons — Historian David Nye discusses the origins of Americans’ ample appetites for energy.

Related Links:

• Brush up on consumption and production of different energy sources.
• Find out more about the new Energy Secretary.
• Read a review of Anne Greene’s “Horses at Work.”
• Learn about our complex relationship to Technology.
• View the 1953 video “A is for Atom.”
• Watch Jimmy Carter’s 1977 energy crisis speech
• Powering the 18th Century

It seems that Americans are finally waking up to the reality of climate change, but scientists tell us it may be too little, too late. This may be the most far-reaching environmental threat Americans have ever faced, but it’s certainly not the first. In this hour, we consider the history of American anxieties about the environment. Historian Bill Cronon weighs in on when “nature” became a thing to protect and not to fear. And we travel up to Shenandoah National Park to look for remnants of the communities displaced to make way for Nature. Also — Mother Nature’s gender, Populist politics, and the merits of an apocalyptic mindset.

Related Links

See what environmental historian Bill Cronon is up to!

Hear more stories of the removal from the Shenandoah Valley…

Take a look at an interactive timeline of environmental history.

Here are two pieces of archival tape, courtesy of the Carrier Library at James Madison University.

In this piece, Dorothy Noble Smith, who conducted a private oral history project, reads aloud the lyrics to a song written by Roy Harris’ father. Harris had earlier asserted that his father “never got over” leaving the Blue Ridge Mountains. The song lyrics are:

“I spent my life in the Blue Ridge Hills
Where I coudn’t hear nothing but the whippoorwills
There the lightning blazed such a beautiful sight
I could hardly tell when it grew night
But now I’m down in this low land
Where the water is warm and the land is poor”

Listen to the song:

In this 1983 recording, interviewer Dorothy Noble Smith asks Roy Harris of Grottoes, VA, his feelings on having to leave his home in Brown’s Gap, which later became Shenandoah National Park. He says that he did not mind, but that his father never got over it. Harris also tells that the park did not help his father re-settle, but later admits they paid his father for his land in Brown’s Gap, which allowed him to settle in Stony Point, Virginia. Only he says: “They gave him about half of what it was worth.”

Listen to Roy Harris’ story