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Striking Oil Bibliography
Further Reading

Asbury, Herbert. The Golden Flood: An Informal History of America's First Oil Field. New York: Knopf, 1942.

Beaton, Kendall. "Dr. Gesner's Kerosene: The Start of American Oil Refining." Business History Review:29 (March 1955): 28-53.

Beers, F. W. Atlas of the Oil Regions. Meadville, PA: Crawford County Historical Society, 1984.

Reprint of 1865 edition.

Black, Brian. Petrolia: The Landscape of America's First Oil Boom. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

Brantly, J. E. History of Oil Well Drilling. Houston, TX: Gulf Publishing Co., 1971.

Business History Review. Oil's First Century. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School, 1960.

Chernow, Ron. Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.. New York: Random House, 1998.

Clark, J. Stanley. The Oil Century: From the Drake Well to the Conservation Era. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958.

Clark, James A. The Chronological History of the Petroleum and Natural Gas Industries. Houston, TX: Clark Book Co., 1963.

Cone, Andrew and Walter R. Johns. Petrolia: A Brief History of the Pennsylvania Region. Franklin, PA: Venango County Historical Society, 1984.

Reprint of 1870 ed.

Giddens, Paul H. The Birth of the Oil Industry. New York: Macmillan, 1938.

Giddens, Paul H., ed.. Pennsylvania Petroleum, 1750-1872. Harrisburg, PA: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1947.

Reprinted 2002 by Margaret Anne Mong.

Giddens, Paul H. Early Days of Oil: A Pictorial History of the Beginnings of the Industry in Pennsylvania. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1948.

Reprinted 2002 by the Colonel Press.

Harris, Howard, and Blatz, Perry, eds. Keystone of Democracy: A History of Pennsylvania Workers. Harrisburg, PA: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1999.

A useful collection of brief vignettes on labor history, this volume offers an easy-to-use starting reference for any study of Pennsylvania workers.

Hazen, Margaret Hindle and Robert H. Hazen. Keepers of the Flame: The Role of Fire in American Culture, 1775-1925. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Herbert, John H. CLean Cheap Heat: The Development of Residential Markets for Natural Gas in the United States. New York: Praeger, 1992.

Jones, Howard Mumford. The Age of Energy. New York: Viking Press, 1971.

Melosi, Martin. Coping with Abundance. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1985.

Miller, Ernest C. This was Early Oil: Contemporary Accounts of the Growing Petroleum Industry, 1848-1885. Harrisburg, PA: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1968.

Olien, Roger M. and Diana Davids. Oil & Ideology: The Cultural Creation of the American Petroleum Industry. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Owen, Edgar Wesley. Trek of the Oil Finders: A History of Exploration for Petroleum. Tulsa, OK: American Association of Petroleum Geologists, 1975.

Roen, John B. and Brian J. Walker, ed.. "The Atlas of Major Appalachian Gas Plays." West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey, Publication V-25 (1996).

Sherman, Jon. Drake Well Museum and Park: Pennsylvania Trail of History Guide. Harrisburg, PA: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission and Stackpole Books, 2002.

Tarbell, Ida. The History of the Standard Oil Company. New York: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1904.

Wagner, W. R. and W. S. Lytle. Geology of Pennsylvania's Oil and Gas. Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources, Bureau of Topographic and Geologic Survey, 1980.

Williamson, Harold F. and Arnold R. Daum. The American Petroleum Industry: The Age of Illumination, 1859-1899. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1959.

Yergin, Daniel. The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.


Web Guide

The History of Standard Oil Company http://archive.org/details/historyofstandar00tarbuoft

Digital text of Ida Tarbell's History of the Standard Oil Company.

An Index to Early petroleum History Sites http://little-mountain.com/oilwell/

This site offers a good starting point to exploring oil history on the web.

Drake Well Museum: Birthplace of the Oil Industry-1859, Titusville, Pa http://www.drakewell.org

Drake Well Museum collects, preserves, and interprets the founding of the oil industry in Pennsylvania for residents and visitors by educating its audiences about the persons, places, and events important to the development of the petroleum industry and its growth into a global enterprise.

Historic Pittsburgh: Sketches in Crude Oil. Some Accidents and Incidents of the Petroleum Development in all Parts of the Globe http://digital.library.pitt.edu/cgi-bin/t/text/text-idx?c=pitttext&vie...

Digital version of well-known text from 1896. Lots of great lithographs of the era. Sketches in Crude Oil by John McLaurin introduced many Americans to oil and the Pennsylvania oil regions.

Ida M. Tarbell, Allegheny College http://tarbell.allegheny.edu

Excellent links regarding Ida Tarbell.

Oil History http://www.petroleumhistory.org/OilHistory/OHindex.html

PBS series on the Rockefeller Family http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/rockefellers/index.html

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