A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Since ancient times, men and women have dreamed of soaring among the stars, but only in this century has that dream been realized. In Rockets into Space, Frank Winter tells the fascinating story of the modern launch vehicle, from the mythological musings of the Babylonians and Greeks to the present-day reality of manned and unmanned space flight.
In concise yet comprehensive chapters dense with anecdotal detail, Winter tracks the theoretical formulations and technological breakthroughs that have charted the evolution of rocket propulsion and vehicle design. He pays particular attention to the remarkable contributions of pioneers Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert Goddard, Hermann Oberth, Eugen Sänger, and Sergei Korolev, whose genius and vision paved the way for later innovation. He describes the clandestine development of the V-2 rocket in Germany, under the technical leadership of Wernher von Braun, and its dramatic impact on postwar rocket research and satellite development in the United States and the Soviet Union. He also chronicles the complex events of the last three decades, which have produced ever more sophisticated rockets capable of launching larger payloads, from weapons to weather and communications satellites. Finally, he surveys exotic propulsion systems—nuclear, electric, solar, photon, laser—that lie on the frontiers of science today but that will shape the spaceflight and space policy decisions of tomorrow.
Rockets into Space is an authoritative, entertaining guidebook for all who are interested in the history of space travel.
This newly reissued debut book in the Rutgers University Press Classics imprint is the story of the search for a rocket propellant which could be trusted to take man into space. This search was a hazardous enterprise carried out by rival labs who worked against the known laws of nature, with no guarantee of success or safety.
Acclaimed scientist and sci-fi author John Drury Clark writes with irreverent and eyewitness immediacy about the development of the explosive fuels strong enough to negate the relentless restraints of gravity. The resulting volume is as much a memoir as a work of history, sharing a behind-the-scenes view of an enterprise which eventually took men to the moon, missiles to the planets, and satellites to outer space.
With the end of the Cold War, will the space race become a cooperative venture? This book, which tells the story of the European Space Agency, shows how such a cooperative enterprise has worked over the past three decades and how it might apply to future space science.
Linking fifteen European nations, the European Space Agency offers a working model of scientific, technological, and political cooperation on an international scale. Roger M. Bonnet and Vittorio Manno give us an insiders’ view of the agency—its beginnings as the European Space Research Organization, its development in the face of early difficulties, and its daily operations. Covering thirty years, this account traces the evolution of ESA’s programs, facilities, and capabilities and the establishment of its scientific, technological, industrial, and political policies and objectives. With an eye to future global space activities, the authors detail ESA’s relationships with its own member states and with other countries, particularly the United States. The history of cooperation between ESA and NASA as exemplified by two specific projects—Ulysses and the international space station—highlights the difficulties of associating different decision-making bodies and political systems.
Illustrated with pictures and diagrams, enlivened with anecdotes involving key world players in space science, this book provides a rich blend of factual information and personal recollection, history and interpretation. A timely contribution to the study of the politics of science and technology, it points the way to future international cooperation.
Far from diminishing our future in space, Human Spaceflight lays out a provocative future for human space travel. The noted aerospace engineer and scientist says that human space exploration will continue well into the future, but space travel by humans will stop at Mars. Instead, nanotechnology, space sails, robotics, biomolecular engineering, and artificial intelligence will provide the vehicles of the future for an exciting evolution not just of space travel but of humankind.
Friedman has worked with agencies around the globe on space exploration projects to extend human presence beyond Mars and beyond the solar system. He writes that once we accept Mars as the only viable destination for humans, our space program on planet Earth can become more exciting and more relevant. Mars, he writes, will take hundreds, even thousands, of years to settle. During that time, humans and all our supporting technologies will evolve, allowing our minds to be present throughout the universe while our bodies stay home on Earth and Mars.
From the start, the Soviet human space program had an identity crisis. Were cosmonauts heroic pilots steering their craft through the dangers of space, or were they mere passengers riding safely aboard fully automated machines? Tensions between Soviet cosmonauts and space engineers were reflected not only in the internal development of the space program but also in Soviet propaganda that wavered between praising daring heroes and flawless technologies. Soviet Space Mythologies explores the history of the Soviet human space program within a political and cultural context, giving particular attention to the two professional groups—space engineers and cosmonauts—who secretly built and publicly represented the program. Drawing on recent scholarship on memory and identity formation, this book shows how both the myths of Soviet official history and privately circulating counter-myths have served as instruments of collective memory and professional identity. These practices shaped the evolving cultural image of the space age in popular Soviet imagination. Soviet Space Mythologies provides a valuable resource for scholars and students of space history, history of technology, and Soviet (and post-Soviet) history.
The launch of the Sputnik satellite in October 1957 changed the course of human history. In the span of a few years, Soviets sent the first animal into space, the first man, and the first woman. These events were a direct challenge to the United States and the capitalist model that claimed ownership of scientific aspiration and achievement.
The success of the space program captured the hopes and dreams of nearly every Soviet citizen and became a critical cultural vehicle in the country’s emergence from Stalinism and the devastation of World War II. It also proved to be an invaluable tool in a worldwide propaganda campaign for socialism, a political system that could now seemingly accomplish anything it set its mind to.
Into the Cosmos shows us the fascinating interplay of Soviet politics, science, and culture during the Khrushchev era, and how the space program became a binding force between these elements. The chapters examine the ill-fitted use of cosmonauts as propaganda props, the manipulation of gender politics after Valentina Tereshkova’s flight, and the use of public interest in cosmology as a tool for promoting atheism. Other chapters explore the dichotomy of promoting the space program while maintaining extreme secrecy over its operations, space animals as media darlings, the history of Russian space culture, and the popularity of space-themed memorabilia that celebrated Soviet achievement and planted the seeds of consumerism.
In The Space Station the story of this debate is told by Hans mark, who had major roles in the development of the space shuttle from its beginnings in the sixties and who bore a primary responsibility for overseeing the space station project during the decisive years from 1981 to 1984. Mark's appointment to the post of deputy administrator of NASA capped a career devoted to the development and management of space technology—he served as director of NASA's Ames Research Center, then as under secretary and later secretary of the U.S. Air Force. Serving under both President Carter and President Reagan, mark is uniquely able to chronicle the intricate process by which the space shuttle became a reality and the space station an acknowledged goal of the American space effort.
A scientist by training, Mark's account of his career in the space program is the story of a personal dream as well as the story of a vast public enterprise whose human side is only now being fully appreciated.
Setting the tone for the collection,
NASA chief historian Roger D. Launius and Howard McCurdy maintain that
the nation's presidency had become imperial by the mid-1970s and that
supporters of the space program had grown to find relief in such a presidency,
which they believed could help them obtain greater political support and
funding. Subsequent chapters explore the roles and political leadership,
vis-à-vis government policy, of presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy,
Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan.
Examines the Kennedy administration’s rhetorical campaign to persuade Congress and the public to adopt a manned flight to the moon. In so doing, the study addresses three key themes.
First, it illuminates the contrasting nature of technical and narrative arguments and explores how those arguments play different roles in public discussion of social policy. Second, the book examines how both the executive branch and the news media function to help set the agenda in American politics. Offering a case study of the increasingly complex relationship between the government and the media.
Finally, Selling Outer Space explores the power of technology to shape and direct human action.
Winner of the Eugene M. Emme Astronautical Literature Award
A Bloomberg View Must-Read Book of the Year
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year
“A substance-rich, original on every page exploration of how the space program interacted with the environmental movement, and also with the peace and ‘Whole Earth’ movements of the 1960s.”
—Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution
The summer of 1969 saw astronauts land on the moon for the first time and hippie hordes descend on Woodstock. This lively and original account of the space race makes the case that the conjunction of these two era-defining events was not entirely coincidental.
With its lavishly funded mandate to put a man on the moon, the Apollo mission promised to reinvigorate a country that had lost its way. But a new breed of activists denounced it as a colossal waste of resources needed to solve pressing problems at home. Neil Maher reveals that there were actually unexpected synergies between the space program and the budding environmental, feminist and civil rights movements as photos from space galvanized environmentalists, women challenged the astronauts’ boys club and NASA’s engineers helped tackle inner city housing problems. Against a backdrop of Saturn V moonshots and Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind, Apollo in the Age of Aquarius brings the cultural politics of the space race back down to planet Earth.
“As a child in the 1960s, I was aware of both NASA’s achievements and social unrest, but unaware of the clashes between those two historical currents. Maher [captures] the maelstrom of the 1960s and 1970s as it collided with NASA’s program for human spaceflight.”
—George Zamka, Colonel USMC (Ret.) and former NASA astronaut
“NASA and Woodstock may now seem polarized, but this illuminating, original chronicle…traces multiple crosscurrents between them.”
—Nature
Where did humanity get the idea that outer space is a frontier waiting to be explored? Destined for the Stars unravels the popularization of the science of space exploration in America between 1944 and 1955, arguing that the success of the US space program was due not to technological or economic superiority, but was sustained by a culture that had long believed it was called by God to settle new frontiers and prepare for the inevitable end of time and God’s final judgment. Religious forces, Newell finds, were in no small way responsible for the crescendo of support for and interest in space exploration in the early 1950s, well before Project Mercury—the United States’ first human spaceflight program—began in 1959.
In this remarkable history, Newell explores the connection between the art of Chesley Bonestell—the father of modern space art whose paintings drew inspiration from depictions of the American West—and the popularity of that art in Cold War America; Bonestell’s working partnership with science writer and rocket expert Willy Ley; and Ley and Bonestell’s relationship with Wernher von Braun, father of both the V-2 missile and the Saturn V rocket, whose millennial conviction that God wanted humankind to leave Earth and explore other planets animated his life’s work. Together, they inspired a technological and scientific faith that awoke a deep-seated belief in a sense of divine destiny to reach the heavens. The origins of their quest, Newell concludes, had less to do with the Cold War strife commonly associated with the space race and everything to do with the religious culture that contributed to the invention of space as the final frontier.
With Seeing Like a Rover, Janet Vertesi takes us behind the scenes to reveal the work that goes into creating our knowledge of Mars. Every photograph that the Rovers take, she shows, must be processed, manipulated, and interpreted—and all that comes after team members negotiate with each other about what they should even be taking photographs of in the first place. Vertesi’s account of the inspiringly successful Rover project reveals science in action, a world where digital processing uncovers scientific truths, where images are used to craft consensus, and where team members develop an uncanny intimacy with the sensory apparatus of a robot that is millions of miles away. Ultimately, Vertesi shows, every image taken by the Mars Rovers is not merely a picture of Mars—it’s a portrait of the whole Rover team, as well.
Today von Braun is recognized as the person most responsible for laying the groundwork for public acceptance of America's space program. When President Bush directed NASA in 1989 to prepare plans for an orbiting space station, lunar research bases, and human exploration of Mars, he was largely echoing what von Braun proposed in The Mars Project.
Journalists and investigators have historically cited production problems and managerial wrong-doing as the reasons behind the disaster. The Presidential Commission uncovered a flawed decision-making process at the space agency as well, citing a well-documented history of problems with the O-ring and a dramatic last-minute protest by engineers over the Solid Rocket Boosters as evidence of managerial neglect.
Why did NASA managers, who not only had all the information prior to the launch but also were warned against it, decide to proceed? In retelling how the decision unfolded through the eyes of the managers and the engineers, Vaughan uncovers an incremental descent into poor judgment, supported by a culture of high-risk technology. She reveals how and why NASA insiders, when repeatedly faced with evidence that something was wrong, normalized the deviance so that it became acceptable to them.
No safety rules were broken. No single individual was at fault. Instead, the cause of the disaster is a story not of evil but of the banality of organizational life. This powerful work explains why the Challenger tragedy must be reexamined and offers an unexpected warning about the hidden hazards of living in this technological age.
Why did NASA managers, who not only had all the information prior to the launch but also were warned against it, decide to proceed? In retelling how the decision unfolded through the eyes of the managers and the engineers, Vaughan uncovers an incremental descent into poor judgment, supported by a culture of high-risk technology. She reveals how and why NASA insiders, when repeatedly faced with evidence that something was wrong, normalized the deviance so that it became acceptable to them. In a new preface, Vaughan reveals the ramifications for this book and for her when a similar decision-making process brought down NASA's Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003.
A History Today Book of the Year
A world-renowned astronomer and an esteemed science writer make the provocative argument for space exploration without astronauts.
Human journeys into space fill us with wonder. But the thrill of space travel for astronauts comes at enormous expense and is fraught with peril. As our robot explorers grow more competent, governments and corporations must ask, does our desire to send astronauts to the Moon and Mars justify the cost and danger? Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees believe that beyond low-Earth orbit, space exploration should proceed without humans.
In The End of Astronauts, Goldsmith and Rees weigh the benefits and risks of human exploration across the solar system. In space humans require air, food, and water, along with protection from potentially deadly radiation and high-energy particles, at a cost of more than ten times that of robotic exploration. Meanwhile, automated explorers have demonstrated the ability to investigate planetary surfaces efficiently and effectively, operating autonomously or under direction from Earth. Although Goldsmith and Rees are alert to the limits of artificial intelligence, they know that our robots steadily improve, while our bodies do not. Today a robot cannot equal a geologist’s expertise, but by the time we land a geologist on Mars, this advantage will diminish significantly.
Decades of research and experience, together with interviews with scientific authorities and former astronauts, offer convincing arguments that robots represent the future of space exploration. The End of Astronauts also examines how spacefaring AI might be regulated as corporations race to privatize the stars. We may eventually decide that humans belong in space despite the dangers and expense, but their paths will follow routes set by robots.
An Arizona native with family roots in territorial times, Lowell grew from modest beginnings on a ranch near Nogales to become a major world figure in the fields of minerals, mining, and economic geology. He has personally discovered more copper than anyone in history and has developed multibillion-dollar gold and copper mines that have changed the economies of nations. And although he has consulted for corporations in the field of mining, he has largely operated as an independent agent and explorer, the architect of his own path and success.
His life’s story unfolds in four stages: his early education in his field, on-the-job learning at sites in the United States and Mexico, development of exploration strategies, and finally, the launch of his own enterprises and companies. Recurring themes in Lowell’s life include the strict personal, ethical, and tactical policies he requires of his colleagues; his devotion to his family; and his distaste for being away from the field in a corporate office, even to this day. The magnitude of Lowell’s overall success is evident in his list of mine discoveries, as well as in his scientific achievements and the enormous respect his friends and colleagues have had for him throughout his lengthy career, which he continues to zealously pursue.
The mining teams Smith formed with Chaffee and with industrialist David Moffat were among the most successful and respected in Colorado, and many in the state held Smith in high regard. Yet despite the credit he received during his lifetime for establishing Colorado’s mining industry, Smith has not received much attention from historians, perhaps because he was content to leave public-facing duties to his partners while he concerned himself with managing mine operations.
From Smith’s early years and his labor in the mines to his rise to prominence as an investor and developer, Forsyth shows how Smith used the mining and milling knowledge he acquired in California to become a leader in technological innovation in Colorado’s mining industry.
Starting in the late nineteenth century, mining engineers developed a new set of practices, artifacts, and discourses to visualize complex, pitch-dark three-dimensional spaces. These maps and models became necessary tools in creating and controlling those spaces. They made mining more understandable, predictable, and profitable. Nystrom shows that this new visual culture was crucial to specific developments in American mining, such as implementing new safety regulations after the Avondale, Pennsylvania fire of 1869 killed 110 men and boys; understanding complex geology, as in the rich ores of Butte, Montana; and settling high-stakes litigation, such as the Tonopah, Nevada, Jim Butler v. West End lawsuit, which reached the US Supreme Court.
Nystrom demonstrates that these neglected artifacts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have much to teach us today. The development of a visual culture helped create a new professional class of mining engineers and changed how mining was done. Seeing Undergound is the winner of the 2015 Mining History Association’s Clark Spence Award for the best book on mining history.
New paperback edition with an introduction by Robert B. Reich
Monongah: The Tragic Story of the 1907 Monongah Mine Disaster documents the events and conditions that led to the worst industrial accident in the history of the United States. This mining accident claimed hundreds of lives on the morning of December 6, 1907 and McAteer, an expert on mine and workplace health and safety, delves deeply into the economic forces and social-political landscape of the mining communities of north central West Virginia to expose the truth behind this tragedy. After nearly thirty years of exhaustive research, McAteer determines that close to 500 men and boys—many of them immigrants—lost their lives that day, leaving hundreds of women widowed and more than one thousand children orphaned.
The tragedy at Monongah led to a greater awareness of industrial working conditions, and ultimately to the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969, which McAteer helped to enact. This new paperback edition includes an introduction by Robert B. Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Secretary of Labor during the Clinton administration.
Ninety-nine men entered the cold, dark tunnels of the Consolidation Coal Company’s No.9 Mine in Farmington, West Virginia, on November 20, 1968. Some were worried about the condition of the mine. It had too much coal dust, too much methane gas. They knew that either one could cause an explosion. What they did not know was that someone had intentionally disabled a safety alarm on one of the mine’s ventilation fans. That was a death sentence for most of the crew. The fan failed that morning, but the alarm did not sound. The lack of fresh air allowed methane gas to build up in the tunnels. A few moments before 5:30 a.m., the No.9 blew up. Some men died where they stood. Others lived but suffocated in the toxic fumes that filled the mine. Only 21 men escaped from the mountain.
In early 1947 residents of the west side of Carbondale, Pennsylvania began noticing a peculiar steam escaping from the ground. An investigation into this phenomenon revealed that Carbondale was slowly but steadily being destroyed by a burning inferno deep below its surface—a fire raging through the deserted anthracite coal mine shafts that twisted and turned beneath that part of the city. After several years of attempting to contain the fire by flushing, municipal leaders decided that the only sure way of eliminating the threat to the community was by digging it out. To eradicate the burning menace, hundreds of homes and buildings were purchased and destroyed, and what was once a vibrant neighborhood became an abandoned wasteland.
Historian Kathleen Purcell Munley narrates here the story of this great fire, identifying its source, tracing its history, and, through personal interviews with former Carbondale residents, reveals its physical and psychological toll. The mine fire destroyed the West Side as it was, but this volume will keep its memory alive and preserve an important chapter in the history of Carbondale and Pennsylvania.
Aerial mine tramways proved to have a special fascination; people often rode them for a thrill, sometimes with disastrous results. They were also very temperamental, needed constant attention, and were prone to accidents. The years between 1900 and 1920 saw the operation of some of the west's most spectacular tramways, but the decline in high-country mining beginning in the 1920s--coupled with the development of more efficient means of transportation--made this technology all but obsolete by the end of the Second World War.
Historians and the general reader will be equally enthralled by Trennert's fascinating story of the rise and fall of aerial mine tramways.
"Professor Trennert has explored a new area of mining history, and is to be commended for his pioneering work." --Liston Leyendecker, author of The Griffith Family and the Founding of Georgetown.
In the tradition of great American rags to riches stories, Seven Iron Men weaves together the history of how the seven Merritt brothers discovered iron ore on the Mesabi Range. In 1890 they were poised to become one of the wealthiest families in America but lost it all to industrialist John D. Rockefeller.
“The tale of their long and furious quest makes for one of the most melodramatic stories in American history. . . . The Merritts leap from the chronicle in all the colors of life—especially Lon, the king of them all, with his maudlin poetizing, his childlike faith in mankind, and his incredible tropical hat. It is a tale full of thrills, shot with sardonic humors.” —H. L. Mencken, The Nation
“Certainly it is no small contribution to the history of the American people to unfold the tale of the discovery and development of those huge iron deposits of the Mesabi Range flanking much of Lake Superior. To these perhaps quite as much as to any other one factor the country owes its industrial supremacy in the ago of steel.” —New York Herald Tribune
Paul de Kruif (1890–1971) was a microbiologist, served as a contributing editor to Reader’s Digest, and was the best-selling author of Microbe Hunters.
Author Clark Spence focuses on the two most important types of dredges in the state—the bucket-line dredge and the dragline dredge—and describes their financing, operation, problems, and effect on the state and environment. These dredges made it possible to work ground previously deemed untouchable because bedrock where gold collected could now be reached. But they were also highly destructive to the environment. As these huge machines floated along, they dumped debris that harmed the streams and destroyed wildlife habitat, eventually prompting state regulations and federal restoration of some of the state’s crippled waterways.
Providing a record of Idaho’s dredging history for the first time, this book is a significant contribution to the knowledge and understanding of Western mining, its technology, and its overall development as a major industry of the twentieth century.
An account of the creation of a modern, environmentally sensitive mine as told by the people who developed and worked it.
In 1978, a geologist working for the Homestake Mining Company discovered gold in a remote corner of California’s Napa County. This discovery led to the establishment of California’s most productive gold mine in the twentieth century. Named the McLaughlin Mine, it produced about 3.4 million ounces of gold between 1985 and 2002. The mine was also one of the first attempts at creating a new full-scale mine in California after the advent of environmental regulations and the first to use autoclaves to extract gold from ore.
One Shot for Gold traces the history of the McLaughlin Mine and how it transformed a community and an industry. This lively and detailed account is based largely on oral history interviews with a wide range of people associated with the mine, including Homestake executives, geologists, and engineers as well as local neighbors of the mine, officials from county governments, townspeople, and environmental activists. Their narratives— supported by thorough research into mining company documents, public records, newspaper accounts, and other materials—chronicle the mine from its very beginning to its eventual end and transformation into a designated nature reserve as part of the University of California Natural Reserve System.
A mine created at the end of the twentieth century was vastly different from the mines of the Gold Rush. New regulations and concerns about the environmental, economic, and social impacts of a large mine in this remote and largely rural region of the state-required decisions at many levels. One Shot for Gold offers an engaging and accessible account of a modern gold mine and how it managed to exist in balance with the environment and the human community around it.
Jack H. Morris asserts that Newmont is the link between early gold mining and today’s technology-driven industry. We learn how the company’s founder and several early leaders grew up in gold camps and how, in 1917, the company helped finance South Africa’s largest gold company and later owned famous gold mines in California and Colorado. In the 1960s the company developed the process to capture “invisible gold” from small distributions of the metal in large quantities of rock, thereby opening up the rich gold field at Carlin, Nevada.
Modern gold mining has all the excitement and historic significance of the metal’s colorful past. Instead of panning for ready nuggets, today’s corporate miners must face heavy odds by extracting value from ores containing as little as one-hundredth of an ounce per ton. In often-remote locations, where the capital cost of a new mine can top $2 billion, 250-ton trucks crawl from half mile deep pits and ascend, beetle-like, loaded with ore for extraction of the minute quantities of gold locked inside.
Morris had unique access to company records and the cooperation of more than 80 executives and employees of the firm, but the company exercised no control over content. The author tells a story of discovery and scientific breakthrough; strong-willed, flamboyant leaders like founder Boyce Thompson; corporate raiders such as T. Boone Pickens and Jimmy Goldsmith; shakedowns by the Indonesian government and monumental battles with the French over the richest mine in Peru; and learning to operate in the present environmental regulatory climate. This is a fascinating story of the metal that has ignited passions for centuries and now sells for over $1,000 an ounce.
California’s Calaveras County—made famous by Mark Twain and his celebrated Jumping Frog—is the focus of this comprehensive study of Mother Lode mining. Most histories of the California Mother Lode have focused on the mines around the American and Yuba Rivers. However, the “Southern Mines”—those centered around Calaveras County in the central Sierra—were also important in the development of California’s mineral wealth. Calaveras Gold offers a detailed and meticulously researched history of mining and its economic impact in this region from the first discoveries in the 1840s until the present. Mining in Calaveras County covered the full spectrum of technology from the earliest placer efforts through drift and hydraulic mining to advanced hard-rock industrial mining. Subsidiary industries such as agriculture, transportation, lumbering, and water supply, as well as a complex social and political structure, developed around the mines. The authors examine the roles of race, gender, and class in this frontier society; the generation and distribution of capital; and the impact of the mines on the development of political and cultural institutions. They also look at the impact of mining on the Native American population, the realities of day-to-day life in the mining camps, the development of agriculture and commerce, the occurrence of crime and violence, and the cosmopolitan nature of the population. Calaveras County mining continued well into the twentieth century, and the authors examine the ways that mining practices changed as the ores were depleted and how the communities evolved from mining camps into permanent towns with new economic foundations and directions. Mining is no longer the basis of Calaveras’s economy, but memories of the great days of the Mother Lode still attract tourists who bring a new form of wealth to the region.
Mining in North America has long been criticized for its impact on the natural environment. Mica Jorgenson’s The Weight of Gold explores the history of Ontario, Canada’s rise to prominence in the gold mining industry, while detailing a series of environmental crises related to extraction activities. In Ontario in 1909, the discovery of exceptionally rich hard rock gold deposits in the Abitibi region in the north precipitated industrial development modeled on precedents in Australia, South Africa, and the United States. By the late 1920s, Ontario’s mines had reached their maturity, and in 1928, Minister of Mines Charles McRae called Canada “the mineral treasure house to [the] world.”
Mining companies increasingly depended upon their ability to redistribute the burdens of mining onto surrounding communities—a strategy they continue to use today—both at home and abroad. Jorgenson connects Canadian gold mining to its international context, revealing that Ontario’s gold mines informed extractive knowledge which would go on to shape Canada’s mining industry over the next century.
Starting with the predominance of New England and the Middle Atlantic states in the early nineteenth century, Copper for America traces the industry's migration to Michigan in mid-century and to Montana, Arizona, and other western states in the late nineteenth century. The book also examines the U.S. copper industry's decline in the twentieth century, studying the effects of strong competition from foreign copper industries and unforeseen changes in the national and global copper markets.
An extensively documented chronicle of the rise and fall of individual mines, companies, and regions, Copper for America will prove an essential resource for economic and business historians, historians of technology and mining, and western historians.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press