Research Seminar: Nancy Campbell

Virtual Event 
November 18, 2026
Time 12:00-1:30
Registration will be via Eventbrite

This chapter tells a parochial story of how Luzerne County was remade as a site for “capital formation” by the activities of holding companies in the 1950s and 1960s, laying groundwork to explain how Salem Township became ripe for predation in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Previous speculative frenzies transformed the social fabric along the North Branch. The Connecticut Susquehanna Company colonization of the Wyoming Valley sparked agrarian settler violence feeding the post-Revolutionary “land mania” of the 1790s.

 Anthracite coal motivated infrastructural investment in the roads, bridges, canals, mining and dredging technologies, telegraphs, and railroads of the 19th century. But the power dynamics at work in the 20th century financialization of electric power centered on the holding companies that were the engines of land grabs and consolidation in the county and, by the 1950s, in Salem Township itself. Later chapters then take up the ways in which financial risks emerged, eddied, and diffused, deposing the ways of life that had grown up along the North Branch.

Nancy Campbell is a professor in the Science and Technology Studies department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Trish Kahle of Georgetown University will provide an introductory comment.