History Book Club February 2026 | Ethanol: A Hemispheric History for the Future of Biofuels
What is the History Book Club?
The History Book Club is a monthly event series that brings together alumni, faculty, students, and friends of the History Department to engage virtually with our faculty and graduates, and learn about their recently published books.
Do I need to read the book to attend this gathering?
You do not! Our History Book Club gatherings are designed to be enjoyed by any history-lover, whether or not you’ve read the featured book.
About the book
Ethanol: A Hemispheric History for the Future of Biofuels
(University of Oklahoma Press, October 2025)
Though ethanol, a liquid fuel made from agricultural byproducts, has generated controversy in recent years—good or bad for the environment? a big-ag boon or boondoggle?—its use goes back more than a century. Tracing the little-known history of this promising and contentious fuel, Ethanol: A Hemispheric History for the Future of Biofuels reveals the transnational nature of ethanol's development by its two biggest producers, the U.S. and Brazil. By drawing the connections between the shifting fortunes of ethanol in these two countries, the book presents the first full picture of the long history of this renewable fuel that from the beginning offered an imperfect alternative to oil.
Though generally presented as parallel stories, the histories of ethanol in the U.S. and Brazil are inextricably linked. Authors Jeffrey T. Manuel and Thomas D. Rogers show how policies in one country shaped those in the other. Brazil patterned its mid-century development on the U.S. model, adopting an automobile- and highway-focused transportation system and a fossil fuel-intensive agricultural sector. U.S. policymakers in turn took note when Brazil responded to the 1970s oil shocks by distributing ethanol nationwide, replacing half of its gasoline consumption. In the 2000s, the nations' leaders worked together to dramatically expand ethanol production. Today, as a new generation of biofuels meant to power aviation and fight climate change again connects Brazilian and U.S. ethanol, Manuel and Rogers explain how the fuel's future, like its history, is complicated by technical, scientific, economic, and social questions—about how to calculate carbon emissions, agricultural land use, national security and sovereignty, and the balance between government regulation and market forces. Understanding the future of biofuels demands a reckoning with this extensive, shared history—a reckoning that Manuel and Rogers's far-reaching, deeply researched book brings into view.
About the Authors
Jeffrey T. Manuel received his PhD from the UMN History Department in 2009 and is currently a Professor in the Department of History at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Manuel's current research explores the history of biofuels (especially ethanol) in the United States and Brazil. His research focuses on the history of energy, technology, and the environment. Manuel is the author of Taconite Dreams: The Struggle to Sustain Mining on Minnesota's Iron Range, 1915-2000. His research on the history of the iron ore industry also appeared in Technology and Culture and Mining North America: An Environmental History Since 1522. Manuel is also active in public and oral history. His work as a public historian has appeared in several journals and he has served as curator and online producer for exhibitions in Minnesota and Illinois. He has interpreted the 1918 lynching of Robert Prager in Collinsville, Illinois, and he is a co-editor of Madison Historical: The Online Encyclopedia and Digital Archive for Madison County, Illinois.
Thomas D Rogers is a Professor of History at Emory University. In recent years, he has worked on labor and environmental history in the context of agricultural modernization and biofuels. His 2022 book Agriculture’s Energy: The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil’s Green Revolution, examines Brazil’s rapid 20th century agricultural modernization. He uses a singular initiative from 1975—the National Alcohol Program, which incentivized the production of sugarcane ethanol as fuel—as a vehicle to explore some consequences of this rapid rural transformation. His first book, The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil, ranged across labor and environmental history in a study of agro-environmental change in the sugarcane region of the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco. He is currently working on a project examining Brazil’s political, economic, and cultural transition of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. He is interested in the entanglements between these processes and how they were lived and perceived by the working class.