Oil Cities

The Making of North Louisiana’s Boomtowns, 1901-1930

By Henry Alexander Wiencek

University of Texas Press

How international oil companies navigated the local, segregated landscape of north Louisiana in the first decades of the twentieth century.

In 1904, prospectors discovered oil in the rural parishes of North Louisiana just outside Shreveport. As rural cotton fields gave way to dense, industrial centers of energy extraction, migrants from across the US—and the world—rushed to take a share of the boom. The resulting boomtowns, most notoriously Oil City, quickly gained a reputation for violence, drinking, and rough living. Meanwhile, North Louisiana’s large Black population endured virulent white supremacy in the oil fields and the courtrooms to earn a piece of the boom, including one Black woman who stood to become the wealthiest oil heiress in America.

In Oil Cities, Henry Wiencek uncovers what life was like amidst the tent cities, saloons, and oil derricks of North Louisiana’s oil boomtowns, tracing the local experiences of migrants, farmers, sex workers, and politicians as they navigated dizzying changes to their communities. This first historical monograph on the region’s dramatic oil boom reveals a contested history, in which the oil industry had to adapt its labor, tools, and investments to meet North Louisiana’s unique economic, social, political, and environmental dynamics.

Oil Cities makes a valuable contribution to the history of oil boomtowns by contrasting Shreveport with the boomtowns in its hinterlands and...breaks new ground historiographically. H-Environment

Wiencek fills a gap in 20th-century Louisiana history with this carefully researched book. CHOICE

Henry Wiencek’s account of oil, race, politics, and culture in early twentieth-century Louisiana is richly textured and moving. This is a smart and sharply written book that speaks to many of the painful challenges our society continues to face today. Darren Dochuk, University of Notre Dame, author of Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America

To understand today’s Louisiana and its peculiar politics , read Henry Wiencek’s Oil Cities—an essential history of the state’s decades-long capture by corporate interests, its race-fueled violence, its vicious attacks on unions, and its ravaging of the environment. And a young Huey Long keeps showing up. Sherrod Brown, US Senator

Oil Cities is a compelling study that investigates an important but often overlooked episode of oil development in the Caddo Parish region of North Louisiana during the early twentieth century. Combining social, economic, and environmental history, this is a rich contribution to the history of oil and extractive industry boomtowns. Tyler Priest, University of Iowa, author of The Offshore Imperative: Shell Oil’s Search for Petroleum in Postwar America

Henry Alexander Wiencek, who received his PhD in history in 2017 from the University of Texas at Austin, was a postdoctoral fellow at UT's Institute for Historical Studies. He lives in Los Angeles.