David E. Nye (University of Southern Denmark)
The Great Energy Transition: America from 1876 to 1929

David E. Nye is an American citizen who has been based in Europe since 1982, with a research focus on US technological history. His research as a whole was recognized with the 2005 Leonardo da Vinci Medal. He has written 12 books with MIT Press, including The Great Energy Transition (2026),  the focus of this lecture. He has taught American studies in Spain, Britain, and the US, but primarily in Denmark, where he founded the Center for American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark in 1993. He has had research grants at Harvard, MIT, Cambridge, Leeds, the University of Virginia, the Smithsonian, and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. He was knighted by the Queen of Denmark in 2013. Since retiring from teaching, he has been a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Minnesota and a Bye-Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge. 

The lecture offers a social history of the period from 1876 to 1929, when American society underwent two simultaneous energy transitions: electrification and the adoption of oil and gas. The talk will not focus on energy production or business history but rather on the transformation of the lifeworld. Few histories of these years attend to the social consequences of new energies, and yet their adoption meant fundamental changes in almost every aspect of the home, the workplace, transportation, entertainment, and public space. When looking at the longue durée rather than short-term events, one is forcibly struck by fundamental shifts in the understanding of nature, space, time, and identity.  Yet Americans failed to conceptualize these changes in terms of "energy" in the thermodynamic sense, but continued to use the outmoded idea of "force." Nor did they yet use the word technology. They struggled with a semantic void.