2011 - Steve Cote

Steve Cote (Ph.D., history, ’11) has published Oil and Nation: A History of Bolivia’s Petroleum Sector, the inaugural book in West Virginia University Press' new Energy and Society series. Oil and Nation places petroleum at the center of Bolivia’s contentious 20th-century history. Bolivia’s oil, Cote argues, instigated the largest war in Latin America in the 1900s, provoked the first nationalization of a major foreign company by a Latin American state, and shaped both the course and the consequences of Bolivia’s transformative National Revolution of 1952. Oil and natural gas continue to steer the country under the government of Evo Morales. Cote is an interpretive ranger for the National Park Service, stationed at Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay.