Caroline Johnston is a political, environmental, and economic historian of the modern United States and the Mellon Research Fellow in American History at Cambridge. Her research examines modern right-wing movements and fossil fuel economies in the late twentieth century.
Her first book project, tentatively titled "Carbon Cowboys,” examines how the Rocky Mountain energy boom between 1973 and 1982 fostered powerful conservative organizations and ideas. This project traces energy executives in the Rocky Mountains as they established important tenets of modern right-wing ideologies that mirrored their industries’ extractive methods. It argues that political organizers amidst the regional oil and coal boom tied cowboy aesthetics and carbon consumption to ascendant right-wing corporatist politics.
Her forthcoming article, “Fighting the Right to be Out: the Briggs Initiative, Compulsory Privacy, and the Politics of Fear in 1970s California,” follows California state senator John Briggs, who sponsored a ballot initiative in 1978 allowing school boards to fire teachers for “public homosexual activity [or] conduct.” This article analyzes antigay assumptions about discretion that shaped both right-wing politics and gay rights activism.