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Mining America is a vivid account of the damage wrought by almost two centuries of mining, but its main focus is on the conflicting attitudes behind the destruction and on society's responses. Veteran author and historian Duane Smith asserts that the marriage of mining and environmental issues was bound to touch America's sensitive pocketbook nerve - but the question now is, are all groups willing to pay the price?

In Mining Among the Clouds, Harvey N. Gardiner examines what one reporter dubbed "aerial" mining - silver mining at such high altitudes that the miners were literally working among the clouds. In the summer of 1871, two prospectors ventured high up Mount Bross in Colorado's Mosquito Range. There they discovered an outcropping of silver ore in blue limestone. An unprecedented find, it set off strike after strike in Park County. Thus began the silver boom that gave rise to Leadville, laying the foundation for Colorado's Silver Decade.

This book deals with the history of mining and smelting from the Renaissance to the present. Martin Lynch opens with the invention, sometime before 1453, of a revolutionary technique for separating silver from copper. It was this invention which brought back to life the rich copper-silver mines of central Europe, in the process making brass cannon and silver coin available to the ambitious Habsburg emperors, thereby underpinning their quest for European domination. Lynch also discusses the Industrial Revolution and the far-reaching changes to mining and smelting brought about by the steam engine; the era of the gold rushes; the massive mineral developments and technological leaps forward which took place in the USA and South Africa at the end of the 19th century; and, finally, the spread of mass metal-production techniques amid the violent struggles of the 20th century. In an engaging, concise and fast-paced text, he presents the interplay of personalities, politics and technology that have shaped the metallurgical industries over the last 500 years.

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.

Ministers of Reform vividly depicts the spiritual odyssey of an entire generation and shows how Protestant roots and a common "climate of creativity" nurtured a host of Progressive leaders from all walks of life. Crunden demonstrates that the same spirit of nnovation and moral rectitude so typical of the era's politics also characterized its artistic endeavors.
 

Sex, money, and politics—no, it’s not a thriller novel. Minneapolis Madams is the surprising and riveting account of the Minneapolis red-light district and the powerful madams who ran it. Penny Petersen brings to life this nearly forgotten chapter of Minneapolis history, tracing the story of how these “houses of ill fame” rose to prominence in the late nineteenth century and then were finally shut down in the early twentieth century.

In their heyday Minneapolis brothels were not only open for business but constituted a substantial economic and political force in the city. Women of independent means, madams built custom bordellos to suit their tastes and exerted influence over leading figures and politicians. Petersen digs deep into city archives, period newspapers, and other primary sources to illuminate the Minneapolis sex trade and its opponents, bringing into focus the ideologies and economic concerns that shaped the lives of prostitutes, the men who used their services, and the social-purity reformers who sought to eradicate their trade altogether. Usually written off as deviants, madams were actually crucial components of a larger system of social control and regulation. These entrepreneurial women bought real estate, hired well-known architects and interior decorators to design their bordellos, and played an important part in the politics of the developing city.

Petersen argues that we cannot understand Minneapolis unless we can grasp the scope and significance of its sex trade. She also provides intriguing glimpses into racial interactions within the vice economy, investigating an African American madam who possibly married into one of the city’s most prestigious families. Fascinating and rigorously researched, Minneapolis Madams is a true detective story and a key resource for anyone interested in the history of women, sexuality, and urban life in Minneapolis.

The 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters Strike proved to be a pivotal event in twentieth-century American labor history. The Minneapolis Teamsters challenged the muscle of big business, as well as the authority of local, state, and federal government, and in the process they changed the very nature of labor relations in the United States. In The Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934, Philip Korth's description of events surrounding this landmark labor action are filtered through the recollections of the people who were there. Korth blends historical record with the words of actual participants to draw a thorough and compelling portrait of a labor strike and its consequences. Philip Korth's study illustrates the organizational strategies that made the Minneapolis strike a success, as well as how opposition and public perception defined emerging labor relations practices and public policy. At the same time, the author provides an in-depth examination of the conflict through interviews with witnesses and participants in this pivotal event in labor history.

Only in Minnesota can you snap a Polaroid of a fifty-five-foot-tall grinning green man with a size seventy-eight shoe or marvel at the spunk of a Swede who dedicated his life to spinning a gigantic ball of twine. The world’s largest hockey stick, as well as the biggest pelican, prairie chicken, turkey, fish, otter, fox, and loon also make Minnesota their home. Where else can you ponder the mysterious "miracle meat" of Spam in a museum dedicated to pork products or have your head examined by the phrenology machines at the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices? 

Minnesota Marvels is a tour of the inspired, bizarre, brilliant, scandalous, and funny sites around the state. Look up in wonder at the several Paul Bunyan statues, including the original (Bemidji), the tallest (Akeley), and the largest talking version (Brainerd). Ease on down the road to visit the first home of the heel-tapping native of Grand Rapids, Judy Garland, or walk the "main street" of Sauk Centre immortalized by native son Sinclair Lewis. See the birthplaces of Charles Lindbergh, the Mayo brothers, the Greyhound bus, the snowmobile, and the ice-cream sandwich. 

Minnesota is also the home of such attractions as the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and the world’s largest aerial lift bridge in Duluth, and architectural wonders such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s modernist gas station in Cloquet and Frank Gehry’s arresting Weisman Art Museum. Stunning mansions with histories of ghost sightings, the hangouts and lairs of infamous gangsters, and old-fashioned breweries dot the state.

Conveniently organized by town name and illustrated throughout, Minnesota Marvels is the perfect light-hearted guide for entertaining road trips all over the state. 

In an engaging and readable style, renowned historian Theodore Blegen takes the reader on a tour of Minnesota's development, from the geological events that shaped the land to westward movement to twentieth-century modernization.  This second edition includes a concluding chapter by Russell W. Fridley that chronicles the impact of turbulent national politics and cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s on the state, as well as an extensive reading list and detailed index. Minnesota is a concise yet comprehensive account of the state's progress, highlighting landmarks in politics, technology, the arts, and architecture.

Ancient Minoan culture has been typically viewed as an ancestor of classical Greek civilization, but this book shows that Minoan Crete was on the periphery of a powerfully dynamic cultural interchange with its neighbors. Rather than viewing Crete as the autochthonous ancestor of Greece's glory, Nanno Marinatos considers ancient Crete in the context of its powerful competitors to the east and south.

Analyzing the symbols of the Minoan theocratic system and their similarities to those of Syria, Anatolia, and Egypt, Marinatos unlocks many Minoan visual riddles and establishes what she calls a "cultural koine," or standard set of cultural assumptions, that circulated throughout the Near East and the eastern Mediterranean at the time Minoan civilization reached its peak. With more than one hundred and fifty illustrations, Minoan Kingship and the Solar Goddess delivers a comprehensive reading of Minoan art as a system of thought.

Minong (the Ojibwe name for Isle Royale) is the search for the history of the Ojibwe people's relationship with this unique island in the midst of Lake Superior. Cochrane uses a variety of sources: Ojibwe oral narratives, recently rediscovered Jesuit records and diaries, reports of the Hudson's Bay post at Fort William, newspaper accounts, and numerous records from archives in the United States and Canada, to understand this relationship to a place. What emerges is a richly detailed account of Ojibwe activities on Minong—and their slow waning in the latter third of the nineteenth century.
     Piece by piece, Cochrane has assembled a narrative of a people, an island, and a way of life that transcends borders, governments, documentation, and tidy categories. His account reveals an authentic 'history': the missing details, contradictions, deviations from the conventions of historical narrative—the living entity at the intersection of documentation by those long dead and the narratives of those still living in the area. Significantly, it also documents how non-natives symbolically and legally appropriated Isle Royale by presenting it to fellow non-natives as an island that was uninhabited and unused.

Latin American history—the stuff of wars, elections, conquests, inventions, colonization, and all those other events and processes attributed to adults—has also been lived and partially forged by children. Taking a fresh look at Latin American and Caribbean society over the course of more than half a millennium, this book explores how the omission of children from the region's historiography may in fact be no small matter.
    Children currently make up one-third of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean, and over the centuries they have worked, played, worshipped, committed crimes, and fought and suffered in wars. Regarded as more promising converts to the Christian faith than adults, children were vital in European efforts to invent loyal subjects during the colonial era. In the contemporary economies of Latin America and the Caribbean—where 23 percent of people live on a dollar per day or less—the labor of children may spell the difference between survival and starvation for millions of households.
    Minor Omissions brings together scholars of history, anthropology, religion, and art history as well as a talented young author who has lived in the streets of a Brazilian city since the age of nine. The book closes with the prophetic dystopian tale "The Children's Rebellion" by the noted Uruguayan writer Cristina Peri Rossi.

Across the whole of modern Czech history—from 1918, through World War II, and into the postwar years—ethnic and minority issues have been of the utmost prominence. Moreover, Czechoslovakia has in the past been held up as a model for solving problems related to ethnic and minority tensions through legal regulations—regulations that played a key role in delineating minority status. Primarily intended for an international, non-Czech audience, this book takes a long-term perspective on issues related to ethnic and language minorities in Czechoslovakia. Bridging legal and historical disciplines, Jan Kuklík and René Petráš show that as ethnic minority issues once again come to the forefront of policy debates in Europe and beyond, a detailed knowledge of earlier Czech difficulties and solutions may help us to understand and remedy contemporary problems.

Phoenix is the largest city in the Southwest and one of the largest urban centers in the country, yet less has been published about its minority populations than those of other major metropolitan areas. Bradford Luckingham has now written a straightforward narrative history of Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans, and African Americans in Phoenix from the 1860s to the present, tracing their struggles against segregation and discrimination and emphasizing the active roles they have played in shaping their own destinies.

Settled in the mid-nineteenth century by Anglo and Mexican pioneers, Phoenix emerged as an Anglo-dominated society that presented formidable obstacles to minorities seeking access to jobs, education, housing, and public services. It was not until World War II and the subsequent economic boom and civil rights era that opportunities began to open up. Drawing on a variety of sources, from newspaper files to statistical data to oral accounts, Luckingham profiles the general history of each community, revealing the problems it has faced and the progress it has made. His overview of the public life of these three ethnic groups shows not only how they survived, but how they contributed to the evolution of one of America's fastest-growing cities.

Mirabile Dictu covers in six separate chapters the works of Virgil, Dante, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser. Its broad aim is to provide a select cross-section of works in the Middle Ages and Renaissance in order systematically to examine and compare for the first time the marvelous in the light of epic genre, of literary and critical theory (both past and present), and of historically and culturally determined representational practices.

Douglas Biow organizes this volume around the literary topos of the bleeding branch through which a metamorphosed person speaks. In each chapter the author takes this "marvellous event" as his starting point for a broad-ranging comparison of the several poets who employed the image; he also investigates the ways in which a period's notion of "history" underpins its representations of the marvelous. This method offers a controlled yet flexible framework within which to develop readings that engage a multiplicity of theories and approaches.

Mirabile Dictu offers not only an insightful survey of the literary connections among this group of important poets, but also a useful point of departure for scholars and students intrigued by the reuse of epic conventions, by the peculiar role of "marvellous" events in dramatic poetry, and by the later history of classical literature.

 

In a century-old edition of a British newspaper, a quaint narrative entitled "A Visit to the Comstock" was prefaced by the following poem: Paint me, Washoe, as you see it, / Tinting with a truthful touch; / Line it with a faithful pencil, / Do not colour overmuch. Many writers through the decades have "coloured overmuch" in their descriptions of Nevada by using picturesque words and extreme language when discussing the paradoxical state. Idah Meacham Strobridge, often called "Nevada's first woman of letters", pointed out that images of Nevada frequently suggest a "mirage-land", a place where nothing is quite what it seems. Wilbur S. Shepperson's examination of such mirages--imaginary, literary, historical, real--is the subject of Mirage-Land: Images of Nevada. In the pages of this book, readers will discover ways in which a variety of men and women image-makers envisioned the Silver State, as well as ways they communicated their visions to others. Shepperson explains the process of mirage building by introducing readers to details from myriad sources--journals, diaries, historic newspapers, government reports, essays, magazines, novels, and even chamber of commerce promotional brochures. The well-known accents of John C. Fremont, Mark Twain, and Dan De Quille mingle with such little-known voices as Louise M. Palmer, Henry T. Williams, and George Wharton James among others. While the exemplary voices may express paradox, self-contradiction, antithesis, even confusion, Shepperson arranges his examples in a way that shows readers an aggregate vision. For him, Nevada history and Nevada humanity together embrace the length of Highway 395, the width of Interstates 80 and 15, and the breadthof a good many gravel roads in between. Essentially Shepperson sees few meaningful differences between the Comstock of the 1860s, other mining camps, sheep and cattle operations, Reno of the 1930s, and the present-day Las Vegas.

One of the most significant Supreme Court cases in U.S. history has its roots in Arizona and is closely tied to the state’s leading legal figures. Miranda has become a household word; now Gary Stuart tells the inside story of this famous case, and with it the legal history of the accused’s right to counsel and silence.

Ernesto Miranda was an uneducated Hispanic man arrested in 1963 in connection with a series of sexual assaults, to which he confessed within hours. He was convicted not on the strength of eyewitness testimony or physical evidence but almost entirely because he had incriminated himself without knowing it—and without knowing that he didn’t have to. Miranda’s lawyers, John P. Frank and John F. Flynn, were among the most prominent in the state, and their work soon focused the entire country on the issue of their client’s rights. A 1966 Supreme Court decision held that Miranda’s rights had been violated and resulted in the now-famous "Miranda warnings."

Stuart personally knows many of the figures involved in Miranda, and here he unravels its complex history, revealing how the defense attorneys created the argument brought before the Court and analyzing the competing societal interests involved in the case. He considers Miranda's aftermath—not only the test cases and ongoing political and legal debate but also what happened to Ernesto Miranda. He then updates the story to the Supreme Court’s 2000 Dickerson decision upholding Miranda and considers its implications for cases in the wake of 9/11 and the rights of suspected terrorists. Interviews with 24 individuals directly concerned with the decision—lawyers, judges, and police officers, as well as suspects, scholars, and ordinary citizens—offer observations on the case’s impact on law enforcement and on the rights of the accused.

Ten years after the decision in the case that bears his name, Ernesto Miranda was murdered in a knife fight at a Phoenix bar, and his suspected killer was "Mirandized" before confessing to the crime. Miranda: The Story of America’s Right to Remain Silent considers the legacy of that case and its fate in the twenty-first century as we face new challenges in the criminal justice system.

For decades, contemporary artworks with reflective properties have stimulated public forms of spectatorship. According to Cristina Albu, these artworks, which can include elements such as mirrors, live video feedback, or sensors, draw attention to affective interdependence and mechanisms of social control. 

In Mirror Affect, Albu provides a historical account of mirroring processes in contemporary art and offers insight into the phenomenological and sociopolitical concerns that have inspired artists to stage processes of affective, perceptual, and behavioral mirroring between art viewers. Beginning with the 1960s, Albu charts the rise of interpersonal modes of art spectatorship. She reveals contemporary artists’ strategic use of reflective and responsive interfaces to instill doubt in visual representation and appeal to active scrutiny of the changing social dynamics. She suggests that the mirroring processes envisioned by contemporary artists such as Joan Jonas, Dan Graham, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Olafur Eliasson, and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer trigger visual disjunctions to upset narcissistic inclinations. They invite viewers to see themselves in relation to others and to ponder their role within complex social systems.

From sculpture and performance to art and technology projects, video art, and installation art, Mirror Affect analyzes forms of interpersonal spectatorship, revising and expanding current historiographies of participatory art.

What is the status of visual evidence in history? Can we actually see the past through images? Where are the traces of previous lives deposited? Michael Camille addresses these important questions in Mirror in Parchment, a lively, searching study of one medieval manuscript, its patron, producers, and historical progeny.

The richly illuminated Luttrell Psalter was created for the English nobleman Sir Geoffrey Luttrell (1276-1345). Inexpensive mechanical illustration has since disseminated the book's images to a much wider audience; hence the Psalter's representations of manorial life have come to profoundly shape our modern idea of what medieval English people, high and low, looked like at work and at play. Alongside such supposedly truthful representations, the Psalter presents myriad images of fantastic monsters and beasts. These patently false images have largely been disparaged or ignored by modern historians and art historians alike, for they challenge the credibility of those pictures in the Luttrell Psalter that we wish to see as real.

In the conviction that medieval images were not generally intended to reflect daily life but rather to shape a new reality, Michael Camille analyzes the Psalter's famous pictures as representations of the world, imagined and real, of its original patron. Addressed are late medieval chivalric ideals, physical sites of power, and the boundaries of Sir Geoffrey's imagined community, wherein agricultural laborers and fabulous monsters play a similar ideological role. The Luttrell Psalter thus emerges as a complex social document of the world as its patron hoped and feared it might be.

This book is the definitive literary history of the colonial Dutch East Indies and is partially distinguished from its predecessors by its discussion of materials ranging from natural history and religious sermons to pamphlets and the accounts of travelers from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. What emerges from this comprehensive approach is an unusually thorough and sensitive account of the manifold encounters of the Dutch with the East Indian societies that they conquered, tried to understand, and, finally, had to relinquish under the inevitable pressures of change and the desire for independence. This history records how a hybrid literature emerges from that of the colonial culture to become a distinct literature of its own and why the concepts derived from European cultural history--such as baroque or neoclassicism--are totally inapplicable to the works discussed here.

Behavior genetics has always been a breeding ground for controversies. From the “criminal chromosome” to the “gay gene,” claims about the influence of genes like these have led to often vitriolic national debates about race, class, and inequality. Many behavior geneticists have encountered accusations of racism and have had their scientific authority and credibility questioned, ruining reputations, and threatening their access to coveted resources.  

In Misbehaving Science, Aaron Panofsky traces the field of behavior genetics back to its origins in the 1950s, telling the story through close looks at five major controversies. In the process, Panofsky argues that persistent, ungovernable controversy in behavior genetics is due to the broken hierarchies within the field. All authority and scientific norms are questioned, while the absence of unanimously accepted methods and theories leaves a foundationless field, where disorder is ongoing. Critics charge behavior geneticists with political motivations; champions say they merely follow the data where they lead. But Panofsky shows how pragmatic coping with repeated controversies drives their scientific actions. Ironically, behavior geneticists’ struggles for scientific authority and efforts to deal with the threats to their legitimacy and autonomy have made controversy inevitable—and in some ways essential—to the study of behavior genetics.

Probing the similarities and differences in the ways Americans, Australians, and Britons understood and responded to poverty, Mark Peel draws a picture of social work that is based in the sometimes fraught encounters between the poor and their interpreters. He uses dramatization to bring these encounters to life—joining Miss Cutler and that resurrected horse are Miss Lindstrom and the fried potatoes and Mr. O’Neil and the seductive client—and to give these people a voice. Adding new dimensions to the study of charity and social work, this book is essential to understanding and tackling poverty in the twenty-first century.

During the years leading up to her marriage with Leonard Woolf in 1912, the year in which she finished The Voyage Out and sent it to be published by her cousin at Duckworth’s, the future Virginia Woolf was teaching herself how to be a writer. While her brothers were sent first to private schools, then to Cambridge to be educated, Virginia Stephen and her sister Vanessa were informally educated at home. With this background, how did she know she was a writer? What were her struggles? How did she teach herself? What made Miss Stephen into the author Virginia Woolf?

Miss Stephen’s Apprenticeship explores these questions, delving into Virginia Woolf ’s letters and diaries, seeking to understand how she covered the distance from the wistful “I only wish I could write,” to the almost casual statement, “the novels are finished.” These days, the trajectory of a writer very often starts with studying for an MFA. In Woolf ’s case, however, it’s instructive to ask: How did a great writer, who had no formal education, invent for herself the framework she needed for a writing life? How did she know what she had to learn? How did she make her own way? 

Novelist Rosalind Brackenbury explores these questions and others, and in the process reveals what Virginia Woolf can give to young writers today. 

Utah's ethnic diversity is often overlooked. In a society sometimes presumed to be homogeneous, there is a danger that the varied experiences of its members will be lost to history. Missing Stories, available here for the first time in paperback, effectively counters such misconceptions and explores the rich history of ethnic and minority groups in the state. Several representatives from each of eight such groups tell in their own voices stories of themselves, their families, and their communities. The groups represented are Utes, African-Americans, Jews, Chinese, Italians, Japanese, Greeks, and Hispanics. In a preface to each section of oral history interviews, a respected historian of the community introduces background and heritage, setting the context for the personal recollections that follow. Also included are striking photographs by Kent Miles and George Janecek that capture much of the personality and character of the interviewees.

These oral histories recount migrations to new homes in Utah or adjustment to white settlement of traditional homelands in the state. They bring to light the struggles of individuals and families to survive and the formation and maintenance of communities in frequently adverse conditions, whether on reservations or farms, in small towns or large cities. The histories are enriched by accounts of challenges met and overcome and enlivened by stories of events and persons who sometimes achieved legendary status within and outside the groups. Missing Stories reveals the many ways that ethnic and minority groups have contributed to Utah's history and fills in missing pieces necessary to a complete portrayal of the state's society and culture.

Mission Accomplished contributes to the literature on comparative constitutional law by offering insights into the constitutional discourses that go beyond the discussion of notorious cases and events in these four countries. Procházka argues that the various historical, cultural, socio-psychological, political and institutional contexts have translated into different modes of constitutional adjudication and interpretation.

The history of the study of popular culture in American academic since its (re)introduction in 1967 is filled with misunderstanding and opposition. From the first, proponents of the study of this major portion of american culture made clear that they were interested in making popular culture a supplement to the usual courses in such fields as literature, sociology, history, philosophy, and the other humanities and social sciences; nobody proposed that study of popular culture replace the other disciplines, but many suggested that it was time to reexamine the accepted courses and see if they were still viable. Opposition to the status quo always causes anxiety and oppostion, but when the issues are clarified, often oppoosition and anxiety melt away, as they are now doing.