Location: Boren Hall 152
E-mail: robertlifset@ou.edu
Phone: 405-325-2594
Education
Robert Lifset researches and teaches energy and environmental history broadly defined. This includes the business, policy, political, environmental, social, and cultural history of energy with a focus on the United States in the 20th Century.
Lifset’s first book, Power On The Hudson, Storm King Mountain & The Emergence of Modern American Environmentalism (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), describes an iconic environmental struggle in New York’s Hudson River Valley in the 1960s and ‘70s. In 1962 Consolidated Edison of New York announced plans to construct a pumped-storage hydro-electric plant on Storm King Mountain in the Hudson Highlands, about sixty miles north of New York City. A grass-roots environmental opposition emerged fighting Con Ed for seventeen-years before negotiating a settlement the New York Times dubbed, “the Peace Treaty of the Hudson,” an agreement that continues to govern the relationship between energy production and environmental quality on the Hudson River.
Power On The Hudson takes the reader inside the courtrooms, press conferences, Congressional hearings, and meetings as each side reacted to, and fought to shape, the tide of events. Beginning with scenery and ending with ecology, the battle surged back and forth on the local, state and federal levels, waged by a cast of characters that included a gutsy federal biologist at risk of losing his job, a rookie Congressman, a smug governor and a PR operative.
Lifset explores how rising energy production and consumption played a powerful role in sparking an increase in environmental activism in post-war America; how the balance and relationship between energy and the environment was changing in the decades after World War Two. Power on the Hudson explores how this new balance between energy and the environment changed environmentalism, at the grassroots in the 1960s, into the political movement we recognize today by revealing how the science of ecology served to alter the movement’s strategies and tactics. The book also examines how this new balance altered the thinking and plans within the energy industry. Power On The Hudson was awarded the 2016 Herbert H. Lehman Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in New York History by the New York Academy of History.
Lifset is the editor of two books: American Energy Policy in the 1970s (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014) and American Energy Cinema (West Virginia University Press, 2023). American Energy Policy presents a collection of essays that explores a time of intense energy policymaking. This book examines the policy successes and failures that emerged from the 1970s and their impact on foreign policy and energy politics. American Energy Cinema (co-edited with Sarah Stanford-Mcintyre and Raechel Lutz) traces American energy history through the lens of Hollywood films. The book demonstrates how films both reflect existing beliefs and conjure new visions for Americans about the role of energy in their lives.
Lifset has published articles or essays in the Journal of American History, Journal of Energy History, Environmental History, Historical Social Research, Reviews in American History, and Hudson River Valley Review.
He is currently writing: A Tragic Disaster of Epic Proportions: An Environmental History of the Energy Crisis of the 1970s.
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