A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
In his illuminating study, now available with a new preface by the author, John Stealey examines the legal basis of this industry, its labor practices, and its marketing and distribution patterns. Through technological innovation, salt producers harnessed coal and steam as well as men and animals, constructed a novel evaporative system, and invented drilling tools later employed in oil and natural gas exploration. Thus in many ways the salt industry was the precursor of the American extractive and chemical industries. Stealey's informative study is an important contribution to American economic, business, labor, and legal history.
Diamonds have long been bloody. A new history shows how Germany’s ruthless African empire brought diamond rings to retail display cases in America—at the cost of African lives.
Since the late 1990s, activists have campaigned to remove “conflict diamonds” from jewelry shops and department stores. But if the problem of conflict diamonds—gems extracted from war zones—has only recently generated attention, it is not a new one. Nor are conflict diamonds an exception in an otherwise honest industry. The modern diamond business, Steven Press shows, owes its origins to imperial wars and has never escaped its legacy of exploitation.
In Blood and Diamonds, Press traces the interaction of the mass-market diamond and German colonial domination in Africa. Starting in the 1880s, Germans hunted for diamonds in Southwest Africa. In the decades that followed, Germans waged brutal wars to control the territory, culminating in the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples and the unearthing of vast mineral riches. Press follows the trail of the diamonds from the sands of the Namib Desert to government ministries and corporate boardrooms in Berlin and London and on to the retail counters of New York and Chicago. As Africans working in terrifying conditions extracted unprecedented supplies of diamonds, European cartels maintained the illusion that the stones were scarce, propelling the nascent US market for diamond engagement rings. Convinced by advertisers that diamonds were both valuable and romantically significant, American purchasers unwittingly funded German imperial ambitions into the era of the world wars.
Amid today’s global frenzy of mass consumption, Press’s history offers an unsettling reminder that cheap luxury often depends on an alliance between corporate power and state violence.
How San Franciscans exploited natural resources such as redwood lumber to produce the first major metropolis of the American West.
California’s 1849 gold rush triggered creation of the “instant city” of San Francisco as a base to exploit the rich natural resources of the American West. City of Wood examines how capitalists and workers logged the state’s vast redwood forests to create the financial capital and construction materials needed to build the regional metropolis of San Francisco. Architectural historian James Michael Buckley investigates the remote forest and its urban core as two poles of a regional “city” consisting of a far-reaching network of spaces produced as company owners and workers arrayed men and machines to extract resources from the region’s rich natural environment to create human commodities.
Combining labor, urban, industrial, and social history, City of Wood employs a variety of sources—including contemporary newspaper articles, novels, and photographs—to explore the architectural landscape of lumber, from backwoods logging camps and company towns in the woods to busy lumber docks and the homes of workers and owners in San Francisco. By imagining the redwood lumber industry as a single community spread across multiple sites—a “City of Wood”—Buckley demonstrates how capitalist resource extraction links different places along the production value chain. The result is a paradigm shift in architectural history that focuses not just on the evolution of individual building design across time, but also on economic connections that link the center and periphery across space.
From their own point of view, mining families left behind a life of hard labor and drafty weatherboard homes. With little time for such celebrated arts as tale-telling and quilting, preindustrial mountain people strung more beans than dulcimers. In addition, the rural population was growing, and farmland was becoming scarce. What the families recall about the coal towns contradicts the popular image of mining life. Most miners did not owe their souls to the company store, and most mining companies were not unusually harsh taskmasters. Former miners and their families remember such company benefits as indoor plumbing, regular income, and leisure activities. They also recall the United Mine Workers of America as bringing not only pay raises and health benefits but work stoppages and violent confrontations.
Far from being mere victims of historical forces, miners and their families shaped their own destiny by forging a new working-class culture out of the adaptation of their rural values to the demands of industrial life. This new culture had many continuities with the older one. Out of the closely knit social ties they brought from farming communities, mining families created their own safety net for times of economic downturn. Shifflett recognizes the dangers and hardships of coal-town life but also shows the resilience of Appalachian people in adapting their culture to a new environment.
Crandall A. Shifflett is an associate professor of history at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula juts into Lake Superior, pointing from the western Upper Peninsula toward Canada. Native peoples mined copper there for at least five thousand years, but the industrial heyday of the “Copper Country” began in the late nineteenth century, as immigrants from Cornwall, Italy, Finland, and elsewhere came to work in mines largely run from faraway cities such as New York and Boston. In those cities, suburbs had developed to allow wealthier classes to escape the dirt and grime of the industrial center. In the Copper Country, however, the suburbs sprang up nearly adjacent to mines, mills, and coal docks.
Sarah Fayen Scarlett contrasts two types of neighborhoods that transformed Michigan’s mining frontier between 1875 and 1920: paternalistic company towns built for the workers and elite suburbs created by the region’s network of business leaders. Richly illustrated with drawings, maps, and photographs, Company Suburbs details the development of these understudied cultural landscapes that arose when elites began to build housing that was architecturally distinct from that of the multiethnic workers within the old company towns. They followed national trends and created social hierarchies in the process, but also, uniquely, incorporated pre-existing mining features and adapted company housing practices. This idiosyncratic form of suburbanization belies the assumption that suburbs and industry were independent developments.
Built environments evince interrelationships among landscapes, people, and power. Scarlett’s work offers new perspectives on emerging national attitudes linking domestic architecture with class and gender identity. Company Suburbs complements scholarship on both industrial communities and early suburban growth, increasing our understanding of the ways hierarchies associated with industrial capitalism have been built into the shared environments of urban areas as well as seemingly peripheral American towns.
Guillerman undertook this memoir because of the many misconceptions about coal mining that were evidenced most recently in the media coverage of the 2006 Sago Mine disaster. Shedding some much-needed light on this little-understood topic, Face Boss is riveting, authentic, and often raw. Guillerman describes in stark detail the risks, dangers, and uncertainties of coal mining: the wildcat and contract strikes, layoffs, shutdowns, mine fires, methane ignitions, squeezes, and injuries. But he also discusses the good times that emerged despite perilous working conditions: the camaraderie and immense sense of accomplishment that came with mining hundreds of tons of coal every day. Along the way, Guillerman spices his narrative with numerous anecdotes from his many years on the job and discusses race relations within mining culture and the expanding role of women in the industry.
While the book contributes significantly to the general knowledge of contemporary mining, Face Boss is also a tribute to those men and women who toil anonymously beneath the rolling hills of western Kentucky and the other coal-rich regions of the United States. More than just the story of one man's life and career, it is a stirring testament to the ingenuity, courage, and perseverance of the American coal miner.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the US-Mexico border was home to some of the largest and most technologically advanced industrial copper mines. This despite being geographically, culturally, and financially far-removed from traditional urban centers of power. Mining the Borderlands argues that this was only possible because of the emergence of mining engineers—a distinct technocratic class of professionals who connected capital, labor, and expertise.
Mining engineers moved easily between remote mining camps and the upscale parlors of east coast investors. Working as labor managers and technical experts, they were involved in the daily negotiations, which brought private US capital to the southwestern border. The success of the massive capital-intensive mining ventures in the region depended on their ability to construct different networks, serving as intermediaries to groups that rarely coincided.
Grossman argues that this didn’t just lead to bigger and more efficient mines, but served as part of the ongoing project of American territorial and economic expansion. By integrating the history of technical expertise into the history of the transnational mining industry, this in-depth look at borderlands mining explains how American economic hegemony was established in a border region peripheral to the federal governments of both Washington, D.C. and Mexico City.
China’s westernmost province of Xinjiang has experienced escalating cycles of violence, interethnic strife, and state repression since the 1990s. In their search for the roots of these growing tensions, scholars have tended to focus on ethnic clashes and political disputes. In Natural Resources and the New Frontier, historian Judd C. Kinzley takes a different approach—one that works from the ground up to explore the infrastructural and material foundation of state power in the region.
As Kinzley argues, Xinjiang’s role in producing various natural resources for regional powers has been an important but largely overlooked factor in fueling unrest. He carefully traces the buildup to this unstable situation over the course of the twentieth century by focusing on the shifting priorities of Chinese, Soviet, and provincial officials regarding the production of various resources, including gold, furs, and oil among others. Through his archival work, Kinzley offers a new way of viewing Xinjiang that will shape the conversation about this important region and offer a model for understanding the development of other frontier zones in China as well as across the global south.
Mexico was second only to the United States as the world's largest oil producer in the years following the Mexican Revolution. As the revolutionary government became institutionalized, it sought to assure its control of Mexico's oil resources through the Constitution of 1917, which returned subsoil rights to the nation. This comprehensive study explores the resulting struggle between oil producers, many of which were U.S. companies, and the Mexican government.
Linda Hall goes beyond the diplomacy to look at the direct impact of a powerful, highly profitable foreign-controlled industry on a government and a nation trying to recover from a major civil war. She draws on extensive research in Mexican archives, including both government sources and the private papers of Presidents Alvaro Obregón and Plutarco Elías Calles, as well as U.S. government and private sources.
Since the North American Free Trade Agreement has expanded United States business ties to Mexico, this study of a crucial moment in U.S.-Mexican business relations will be of interest to a wide audience in business, diplomatic, and political history.
To speak of mining in newly independent Mexico is to speak of silver. And silver, historically abundant in the Real del Monte–Pachuca district, was the object of the Company of Adventurers in the Mines of Real del Monte. Organized in response to a plea by Pedro Romero de Terreros for help in rehabilitating his famous family’s once-rich properties, the English Real del Monte was led by men convinced that the application of English capital, management practices, and technology to those ruined mines and mills would reap them a profit and would revitalize the new nation’s most promising industry.
The adventurers were to be disappointed. The story of the English company is one of financial disaster: the loss of more than $5 million between its beginning in 1824 and its dissolution in 1849. Yet this failure was ironic, for upon the foundations of the English company was built a modern concern that yielded great rewards to Mexican and American successors to the hapless Englishmen.
A full account of a single risky venture, this inquiry is a microcosm of early foreign economic penetration into the Mexican mining industry. It offers specific solutions to poorly understood historical problems concerning the wave of capital that flowed from Great Britain into Latin America upon the disruption of the Spanish Empire, problems hitherto treated only in generalizations.
For more than half a century, logging, lumber production, and affiliated enterprises in Wisconsin’s Northwoods provided jobs for tens of thousands of Wisconsinites and wealth for many individuals. The industry cut through the lives of nearly every Wisconsin citizen, from an immigrant lumberjack or camp cook in the Chippewa Valley to a Suamico sawmill operator, an Oshkosh factory worker to a Milwaukee banker.
When the White Pine Was King tells the stories of the heyday of logging: of lumberjacks and camp cooks, of river drives and deadly log jams, of sawmills and lumber towns and the echo of the ax ringing through the Northwoods as yet another white pine crashed to the ground. He explores the aftermath of the logging era, including efforts to farm the cutover (most of them doomed to fail), successful reforestation work, and the legacy of the lumber and wood products industries, which continue to fuel the state’s economy.
Enhanced with dozens of historic photos, When the White Pine Was King transports readers to the lumber boom era and reveals how the lessons learned in the vast northern forestlands continue to shape the region today.
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