Results by title
64 books match the query 'Mining' and 9 start with m
Mercury and the Making of California
Mining, Landscape, and Race, 1840–1890Andrew Scott Johnston
University Press of Colorado, 2015
Gold and silver could not be refined without mercury; therefore, its production and use were vital to securing power and wealth in the West. The first industrialized mining in California, mercury mining had its own particular organization, structure, and built environments. These were formed within the Spanish Empire, subsequently transformed by British imperial ambitions, and eventually manipulated by American bankers and investors. In California, mercury mining also depended on a workforce differentiated by race and ethnicity. The landscapes of work and camp and the relations among the many groups involved in the industry—Mexicans, Chileans, Spanish, English, Irish, Cornish, American, and Chinese—form a crucial chapter in the complex history of race and ethnicity in the American West.
This pioneering study explicates the mutual structuring of the built environments of the mercury-mining industry and the emergence of California’s ethnic communities. Combining rich documentary sources with a close examination of the existing physical landscape, Johnston explores both the detail of everyday work and life in the mines and the larger economic and social structures in which mercury mining was enmeshed, revealing the significance of mercury mining for Western history.
Mettlework
A Mining Daughter on Making HomeJessica E. Johnson
Acre Books, 2024
In the weeks after her first child is born, Jessica E. Johnson receives an email from her mother that contains artifacts of the author’s early childhood: scans of Polaroids and letters her mother wrote in mountain west mining camps and ghost towns—places without running water, companions, or help. Awash in love and restlessness, Johnson begins to see how the bedrock images of her isolated upbringing have stayed with her, even when she believed she was removing herself from their logic.
As she copes with the swirling pressures of parenting, teaching at an urban community college, and a partnership shaped by chronic illness, Johnson starts digging through her mother’s keepsakes and the histories of the places her family passed through, uncovering the linked misogyny and disconnection that characterized her childhood world—a world with uncomfortable echoes in the present and even in the act of writing itself. The resulting journey encompasses Johnson’s early memories, the story of the earth told in the language of geology, bits of vivid correspondence, a mothering manual from the early twentieth century, and the daily challenges of personal and collective care in a lonesome-crowded Pacific wonderland. Mettlework traces intergenerational failures of homemaking, traveling toward presence and relationship amid the remains of extractive industry and unsustainable notions of family.
Mining Irish-American Lives
Western Communities from 1849 to 1920Alan J. M. Noonan
University Press of Colorado, 2022
Historian Alan J. M. Noonan uses a range of previously overlooked sources, including collections of emigrant letters, hospital logbooks, private detective reports, and internment records, to tell the stories of Irish men and women who emigrated to mining towns to search for opportunity. Noonan details the periods, the places, and the experiences over multiple generations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He carefully examines their encounters with nativists, other ethnic groups, and mining companies to highlight the contested emergence of a hyphenated Irish-American identity.
Unearthing personal details along with the histories of different communities, the book investigates Irish immigrants and Irish-Americans through the prism of their own experiences, significantly enriching the history of the period.
Mining among the Clouds
The Mosquito Range and the Origins of Colorado's Silver BoomHarvey N. Gardiner
University Press of Colorado, 2002
Mining in Africa
Regulation and DevelopmentBonnie Campbell
Pluto Press, 2009
The continent of Africa is rich in minerals needed by Western economies, but rather than forming the basis for economic growth the mining industry contributes very little to African development
Investigating the impact of the 2003 Extractive Industries Review on a number of African countries, the contributors find that a key dimension of the problem lies in the regulatory frameworks imposed on the African countries by the IMF and World Bank. They aim to convince academics, governments and industry that regulation needs to be reformed to create a mining industry favourable to social and economic development and environmental protection.
The book takes a multidisciplinary approach and provides a historical perspective of each country, making it ideal for students of development studies and development organisations.
Mining in World History
Martin Lynch
Reaktion Books, 2004
Mining in the Museum
Mineral Technology on Display in American HistoryEric C. Nystrom
University of Massachusetts Press, 2027
Examining 150 years of mining and mineral technology exhibits at the Smithsonian
Buried deep underground or cut into remote landscapes, mines are often dirty, dark, and dangerous places, located far from the everyday urban spaces that most Americans call home. Yet mining is foundational to the making of the United States, supplying the raw materials that built its infrastructure, powered its industries, and shaped its scientific institutions, even as the work itself has remained physically removed, technically complex, and culturally overlooked. Mining in the Museum reveals how Americans have encountered this vital industry not at the distant mine face, but in museum galleries. Tracing more than 150 years of mining and mineral technology exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, Eric C. Nystrom shows how curators transformed ore, instruments, models, and machinery into stories about progress, innovation, and national development, and how those interpretive choices shaped what the nation remembers—and forgets—about mining.
Using mining collections as a lens into institutional change, Nystrom offers a new history of the Smithsonian and its United States National Museum, examining how curators, administrators, and policymakers debated what museums were for, which kinds of knowledge they should produce, and what objects deserved display. He follows the shifting fortunes of mineral and mining exhibits across world’s fairs, scientific surveys, and changing exhibition philosophies, showing how display strategies evolved alongside professional science and public education. As mining’s place in the national imagination changed, so too did its presence in the federal museum, moving from a central scientific and technological showcase to a subject increasingly preserved by regional and local institutions closer to mining communities themselves. Grounded in extensive archival research, Mining in the Museum illuminates the evolving relationship among technology, public history, and the politics of display, demonstrating how museums help define which industries, and which kinds of work, become part of the American story.
Mining the Borderlands
Industry, Capital, and the Emergence of Engineers in the Southwest Territories, 1855-1910Sarah E. M. Grossman
University of Nevada Press, 2018
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.
Mining, the Environment, and Indigenous Development Conflicts
Saleem H. Ali
University of Arizona Press, 2003
This book gets to the heart of resource conflicts and environmental impact assessment by asking why indigenous communities support environmental causes in some cases of mining development but not in others. Saleem Ali examines environmental conflicts between mining companies and indigenous communities and with rare objectivity offers a comparative study of the factors leading to those conflicts.
Mining, the Environment, and Indigenous Development Conflicts presents four cases from the United States and Canada: the Navajos and Hopis with Peabody Coal in Arizona; the Chippewas with the Crandon Mine proposal in Wisconsin; the Chipewyan Inuits, Déné and Cree with Cameco in Saskatchewan; and the Innu and Inuits with Inco in Labrador. These cases exemplify different historical relationships with government and industry and provide an instance of high and low levels of Native resistance in each country. Through these cases, Ali analyzes why and under what circumstances tribes agree to negotiated mining agreements on their lands, and why some negotiations are successful and others not.
Ali challenges conventional theories of conflict based on economic or environmental cost-benefit analysis, which do not fully capture the dynamics of resistance. He proposes that the underlying issue has less to do with environmental concerns than with sovereignty, which often complicates relationships between tribes and environmental organizations. Activist groups, he observes, fail to understand such tribal concerns and often have problems working with tribes on issues where they may presume a common environmental interest.
This book goes beyond popular perceptions of environmentalism to provide a detailed picture of how and when the concerns of industry, society, and tribal governments may converge and when they conflict. As demands for domestic energy exploration increase, it offers clear guidance for such endeavors when native lands are involved.