Democracy in Power : A History of Electrification in the United States.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Vaheesan, Sandeep.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (435 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2024.

Summary:

Private money, public good, and the original fight for control of America’s energy industry. Until the 1930s, financial interests dominated electrical power in the United States. That changed with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal which restructured the industry. The government expanded public ownership, famously through the Tennessee Valley Authority, and promoted a new kind of utility: the rural electric cooperative that brought light and power to millions in the countryside. Since then, public and cooperative utilities have persisted as an alternative to shareholder control. Democracy in Power traces the rise of publicly governed utilities in the twentieth-century electrification of America. Sandeep Vaheesan shows that the path to accountability in America’s power sector was beset by bureaucratic challenges and fierce private resistance. Through a detailed and critical examination of this evolution, Vaheesan offers a blueprint for a publicly led and managed path to decarbonization. Democracy in Power is at once an essential history, a deeply relevant accounting of successes and failures, and a guide on how to avoid repeating past mistakes.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Abbreviations

Introduction

Past

CHAPTER ONE Wall Street Keeps Rural America in the Dark

CHAPTER TWO Public Power Advances

CHAPTER THREE A New Deal for Electricity

CHAPTER FOUR "Turning Our Darkness to Dawn"

Present

CHAPTER FIVE Grassroots Democracies?

CHAPTER SIX Institutions Serving Two Masters

CHAPTER SEVEN The Continued Dominance of Dirty Power

Promise

CHAPTER EIGHT Our Economy to Make-and Remake

CHAPTER NINE Public Power for the Entire Country

CHAPTER TEN The Fights Ahead

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780226836393

0226836398

OCLC:

1472149190