Grounded in deep concern about the climate crisis, Carolyn Williams-Noren’s Oil Courses recalls a family reliant on the oil industry—her father worked for British Petroleum in Anchorage, Alaska—and a summer spent in its service on Endicott Island. What “curriculum” has oil offered each of us? To answer, Oil Courses turns to strange happenings in the changing landscape and in our interior lives, magnifying odd scenes that once seemed ordinary and filing them under the names of school subjects such as physics, economics, and history.

The Civil War was a watershed in public awareness of the many health-related issues soldiers faced while living in camps. Sanitarians among civilians and regular army officers attempted to meet those challenges by addressing a range of topics associated with preventive healthcare in the volunteer army. The US Sanitary Commission, a nongovernmental agency sanctioned by the Federal government, created a massive campaign to study conditions in semipermanent camps and advise unit commanders how to avoid unnecessary illness and curb soldier deaths by disease. Commission inspectors, mostly civilian physicians, examined camps from 1861 to early 1864 and filed more than 1,400 reports of their findings.