US Studies Network Scholar Profile - Caroline Johnston

Bio: Caroline is a Mellon Research Fellow in American History at the University Cambridge, specializing in the political, environmental, and economic history of the United States. Her current book project examines the oil and coal boom of the 1970s and 1980s in the Rocky Mountain region, to consider the broader relationship between fossil fuels, right-wing politics, and the mythos of the American west.

“Every week, it feels like there’s another news story that connects to oil, right-wing politics, or both. That makes my work very legible to people—it’s easy for them to see the relevance and to bring their own questions and concerns to it.”

To start us off, could you tell me a bit about your background and the journey that brought you to studying American history?

Caroline: I grew up in Denver in a family that wasn’t academic but was very politically minded. We talked about politics constantly. I still remember the first time someone told me they didn’t talk about politics at the dinner table, and I thought, “Then what do you talk about?”

When I first went to university, I did two years at CU Boulder and majored in political science because it had “politics” in the name, so I assumed it was the right fit. But it wasn’t really answering the questions I cared about—about peoples’ beliefs, worldviews, and their deeper roots. After two years, I transferred to McGill. Almost by chance, I took a Civil War history course. I remember the professor walking into the room, going straight to the front, and immediately beginning to lecture on why the Civil War is such an important moment and how we can understand it. I had this instant moment of clarity: “Oh, this is what I want to do with my life.” I switched my major within the first week of that semester and basically took only history courses after that. That professor became a crucial mentor. He supervised my master’s at McGill and sat with me as I applied for PhD programs.

How did that initial interest in politics and ideology evolve into your current focus on the Rocky Mountain West and energy history?

Caroline: When I started my PhD in History at Vanderbilt, I was still asking very politically grounded questions. I focused on right-wing politics in the 1970s and 1980s, but once I got into the research, I began noticing Western imagery—cowboys, the romantic West—appearing in the archives. I wanted to know where that was coming from, and I found out that there had been a major oil and coal boom in the Rocky Mountain region.

In the end, I decided the project should focus on this boom: how it reshaped the region, how people thought about the West, and how it reshaped politics both locally and nationally. That became my dissertation and is now my first book project.

You’ve studied and taught American history both inside the US and abroad. How has that shaped your perspective on the field?

Caroline: It’s been hugely influential. When I went from McGill back to Vanderbilt for my PhD and started working with undergraduates in the US, I realized I had different assumptions about what people “already knew” about American history.

In the US, you’re often doing a lot of work to undo national myths and memories. There’s a sense that students come in with a shared narrative, and part of the job is to complicate those assumptions. When you’re teaching outside the US, you have to adopt a different perspective. If those myths are there at all, they can appear very differently. The distance can be really helpful.

Would you describe yourself as a Western historian, or how do you situate yourself within the field?

Caroline: Western history is its own subfield, with its own conferences and associations. I didn’t have a Western historian on my PhD committee and I didn’t attend graduate program known for Western history. This meant I approached the West through energy history and political economy, rather than the other way around. I’m curious to see how that plays out now that I’m teaching at Cambridge.

I definitely am a Western historian in that my work is set in the Rocky Mountain West, and I engage deeply with themes that Western historians have worked on for a long time—frontier myths, land and resource ownership, federal intervention, and so on. But I also draw heavily from environmental and energy history, histories of right-wing politics, and the new histories of capitalism. I see my work as sitting at the intersection of those conversations rather than neatly within one of them.

Could you tell us a bit more about your current book project?

Caroline: The project is a history of the oil and coal boom in the Rocky Mountain West between 1973 and 1982, with the narrative extending beyond 1982 to capture the national political implications. I start with the boom itself, to examine how extraction and investment reshaped the region economically, socially, and environmentally. Then I trace how oil and coal executives helped found and organize political groups that went on to influence right-wing politics nationally. I think one of their core contributions was their specific approach to government intervention.

The book also explores how romanticized imagery of the American West—cowboys, rugged individualism—was repurposed in the 1970s and 80s. I’m interested in how Americans attached meanings to that imagery, and why it became such a powerful vehicle for political and cultural movements in that period.

What has it been like to take on the technical side of energy history?

Caroline: Daunting, but fascinating. I’ve read a lot of geology papers, and I’m not naturally inclined toward Earth science, so it’s been a steep learning curve just to understand the basics. Geology has been the main area where I’ve had to teach myself how to learn an entirely different academic language. Beyond geology, there’s a substantial body of work on energy in other disciplines: sociology, anthropology, political science, economics. Reading across those fields can really shake up your own assumptions—why you’re asking the questions you’re asking, whether they’re the right questions, and how you might reframe them.

That’s one of the exciting things about being part of a network like the one we’re building here at Cambridge: you can walk into a room, say “Here’s what I’m thinking about,” and someone from a different discipline will inevitably offer a perspective that reframes everything in a productive way.

You’re also working on a topic with a lot of contemporary resonance.

Caroline: In some ways, it’s a very natural conversation starter. Every week, it feels like there’s another news story that connects to oil, right-wing politics, or both. That makes my work very legible to people—it’s easy for them to see the relevance and to bring their own questions and concerns to it.

Those conversations are valuable, but they’re also a bit disorienting. I understand the 1970s and 1980s much better than I understand the present. Historians are not supposed to be presentist; we’re not meant to be pundits on current events. So I often find myself thinking, “If your question is about 1972 to 1982 in the Rocky Mountains, I’m your person. If it’s about this week’s headlines, I’m much less confident.” Being outside the US helps. The US is not the center of everyone’s world here, which is refreshing and intellectually productive. It creates space to think about American history from angles that aren’t dominated by US-centric assumptions.

What has your experience of Cambridge been like so far?  

Caroline: Honestly, it’s been amazing, and also a surprise. I never really imagined I’d move abroad; I assumed that if I stayed in academia, it would be in the US. Being here was unexpected.

The density and variety of expertise at Cambridge is astounding. You find yourself at lunch sitting next to people doing the most fascinating work in completely different fields. That’s one of the real strengths of the college system: it pushes you into conversations you probably wouldn’t have at a more conventionally organized university. I’ve talked more with mathematicians and natural scientists here than I ever would have if I’d stayed in a departmental bubble elsewhere.

The downside is that the same structure makes it harder to build coherent communities within a field or region—like US history or US studies more broadly. The college system means less central organization at the level of departments or schools. That can make it more challenging to find “your people,” and you can end up with this odd situation where you meet people you’d never otherwise encounter, but you don’t automatically meet the people you would definitely know at another university because they also work on the United States. I’ve met wonderful colleagues, but I’m also very aware there are US-focused scholars here I simply haven’t crossed paths with yet. That’s one of the reasons I’m excited about the network we’re building: it can serve as a bridge, adding a layer of connection that cuts across colleges, departments, and faculties.

What purpose do you see the new network serving more broadly? Or what do you hope it will become?

Caroline: The timing feels significant. Across the US, and to some extent in the UK as well, universities are under strain. Departments, especially those connected to fields that have been deemed politically contentious, are being downsized or shut down. In that context, it feels rare and hopeful to be part of something that is starting and expanding rather than contracting. A network like this can help address two different kinds of strain.

There’s the intellectual isolation that comes when workloads rise and institutional support shrinks. Having a group of people who work on the US from different disciplinary angles means you don’t have to sit alone with your questions, wondering if you’re framing your research the right way. But there’s also the emotional side. This kind of network can help people reconnect with the reasons they got into this work in the first place—to feel passionate again, to ask others what they’re studying and why, and to be re-energized by that exchange. People talk a lot about interdisciplinarity, but it’s actually very hard to do in practice: funding is departmental, incentives are narrow, and there isn’t always a natural space to collaborate across fields. My hope is that this network becomes that space, making it genuinely possible to work across faculties and disciplines.

Looking ahead, where do you see your scholarship going after this current book?

Caroline: The next project is big, probably too big in its current form, which is why I’m excited to get different perspectives on it as I start the research process. I want to trace how Americans defined their own freedom—what they wanted from their lives, and how they saw their relationship to government—as it related to the ballooning US defense budget in the second half of the twentieth century.

In the 1960s and 70s, you see an emerging idea of freedom as the ability to live in a safe place: to drink clean water, breathe clean air, live in a place that isn’t poisoning you, to be physically safe. That environmentalist vision of freedom is powerful. But in many ways, it seems to have been crowded out by another vision: freedom as the right to pollute (through the right to own and operate certain things) and freedom as the right to kill, often through the language and practice of gun ownership. I’m interested in how people came to see that as the freedom they wanted—and what role the defense sector played. The defense budget has funded research and production that eventually feeds into civilian products, from tech to Hummers to AR-15s. I suspect there’s a deep link between these changing notions of freedom and the material infrastructure made available to civilians through defense spending.

It’s still a very amorphous idea; I’ve been bouncing it off people, trying to find the right way to articulate and approach it. It will be interesting, and probably humbling, to look back at this interview in a few years and see how far the project has moved from this initial sketch.

How does energy history, in particular, continue to inform your thinking as you look toward this next project?

Caroline: Energy history has been incredibly persuasive to me in arguing that human relationships with fossil fuels have defined key features of modern life: capitalism, our economy, democracy, mobility. What’s exciting now is that there’s a robust foundational literature. Historians of energy have already done the work of recasting major arcs of American history around fossil fuels. Oil in particular, by the late twentieth century, is everywhere but also difficult to spot. Most hardly ever see oil, even though it structures our daily lives. You glimpse the infrastructure—petrol stations, pipelines, refineries—but the substance itself remains largely invisible.

At the same time, oil exists in many different sites and scales: extraction zones, refineries, transport routes, financial markets, political debates, home appliances, clothing, gadgets, everyday objects. In each of those spaces, different actors attach different meanings and stakes to it. That makes it impossible to tell a simple top-down story. It’s not as if one person has an idea about oil and everyone else adopts it. Instead, you have countless people, institutions, and communities forming ideas about what oil is and what it does in their lives. It’s a way of getting at the relationships between material infrastructure, political ideologies, and everyday life.

I’m in a transitional moment in my work. I’m in the later stages of the first book, still doing a lot of work but with a clear path forward. At the same time, I’m beginning to articulate the next project. I’m sure the next few years will reshape how I think about all of this. But it’s a good moment to be in and a great time to be doing that work surrounded by this new network and the broader community at Cambridge.