Results by title
64 books match the query 'Mining' and 6 start with s
Searchlight
The Camp That Didn't FailHarry Reid
University of Nevada Press, 2007
Deep in the desolate Mojave Desert in Nevada’s extreme southern tip lies a small mining town called Searchlight. This meticulously researched book by Searchlight’s most distinguished native son recounts the colorful history of the town and the lives of the hardy people who built it and sustained a community in one of the least hospitable environments in the United States. Its story encompasses both Nevada’s early twentieth-century mining boom and the phenomenal growth of southern Nevada after World War II. Searchlight is a valuable contribution to the history of Nevada and a lively account of life in the forbidding depths of the Mojave Desert.<br> <br>
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Seeing Underground
Maps, Models, and Mining Engineering in AmericaEric C. Nystrom
University of Nevada Press, 2014
Digging mineral wealth from the ground dates to prehistoric times, and Europeans pursued mining in the Americas from the earliest colonial days. Prior to the Civil War, little mining was deep enough to require maps. However, the major finds of the mid-nineteenth century, such as the Comstock Lode, were vastly larger than any before in America. In Seeing Underground, Nystrom argues that, as industrial mining came of age in the United States, the development of maps and models gave power to a new visual culture and allowed mining engineers to advance their profession, gaining authority over mining operations from the miners themselves.
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.
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.
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Smoke and Tailings
An Environmental History of Butte and Anaconda, Montana, 1880–1930Fredric L. Quivik
University of Nevada Press, 2026
Smoke and Tailings explores the environmental history of copper-smelting industry in Butte and Anaconda, Montana. Situating within the emerging “Envirotech” field, Smoke and Tailings blends environmental history and the history of technology. Author and historian Fredric L. Quivik integrates these disciplines with political, legal, and business history to provide a comprehensive analysis of the industry’s environmental legacy.
Butte’s history, a long-standing subject of historical inquiry, gains new depth as Quivik examines the technological developments pioneered by local mining companies. He challenges the simplistic narrative of a powerful corporation imposing its will on helpless agricultural communities. Local communities mounted strong opposition to the industry’s polluting methods; Quivik acknowledges this dynamic while also revealing efforts by the Anaconda Copper Mining Company to address environmental issues. The company developed and implemented technical solutions to minimize resource waste and mitigate damage, driven by both economic interests and litigation pressures. While these advancements lessened some of the environmental harm, they were insufficient to prevent long-term consequences. The operations in Butte and Anaconda ultimately created the largest Superfund complex in the United States, requiring billions of dollars in remediation.
Quivik’s nuanced approach opens the “black box” of technology, showing how innovations both alleviated and exacerbated the environmental challenges of mining, milling, and smelting. In addition to contributing to the rich literature on smelter smoke, this book breaks new ground by examining the underexplored environmental impacts of tailings, offering a fresh perspective on the intersection of industry, technology, and environmental change. The cultural landscapes of Butte and Anaconda retain many features of the region’s history of both environmental degradation and remediation. Smoke and Tailings is an essential addition to the study of Butte’s industrial and ecological history.
Butte’s history, a long-standing subject of historical inquiry, gains new depth as Quivik examines the technological developments pioneered by local mining companies. He challenges the simplistic narrative of a powerful corporation imposing its will on helpless agricultural communities. Local communities mounted strong opposition to the industry’s polluting methods; Quivik acknowledges this dynamic while also revealing efforts by the Anaconda Copper Mining Company to address environmental issues. The company developed and implemented technical solutions to minimize resource waste and mitigate damage, driven by both economic interests and litigation pressures. While these advancements lessened some of the environmental harm, they were insufficient to prevent long-term consequences. The operations in Butte and Anaconda ultimately created the largest Superfund complex in the United States, requiring billions of dollars in remediation.
Quivik’s nuanced approach opens the “black box” of technology, showing how innovations both alleviated and exacerbated the environmental challenges of mining, milling, and smelting. In addition to contributing to the rich literature on smelter smoke, this book breaks new ground by examining the underexplored environmental impacts of tailings, offering a fresh perspective on the intersection of industry, technology, and environmental change. The cultural landscapes of Butte and Anaconda retain many features of the region’s history of both environmental degradation and remediation. Smoke and Tailings is an essential addition to the study of Butte’s industrial and ecological history.
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Stampede To Timberline
Ghost Towns & MiningMuriel Sibell Wolle
Ohio University Press, 1974
This book includes the story of 240 of Colorado’s mining camps, with emphasis on the human side. The men who swarmed to the mountains to find precious metal came in successive waves from the late 1850s on, combing the gulches, scrambling over the passes and climbing the peaks. Their story is full of adventurous chances, lucky strikes, boom conditions, reckless spending, banditry, claim jumping, railroad wars and labor troubles.
The author searched the Colorado Rockies from the time she saw and sketched her first ghost town until she had rediscovered and painted the vanishing mining camps. Twenty-two maps give the location of each one and serve as a guide for those who want to reach them by car or jeep, by horseback or on foot.
The hardships of the early prospectors, the strikes they made, the gold and silver mines they uncovered, the towns they established, and the rise and fall of their fortunes are vividly recorded.
Names and dates are given of the earliest finds, of the most important mines and the money they made, of the newspapers printed, and of the hotels, churches and theaters erected. The difficult supply routes into the rocky fastnesses are also clearly traced. But all these facts are humanized by an author who is an artist rather than a historian, and to whom all this mining in the Colorado Rockies is essentially the story of heroic pioneer effort—the men and women behind the deeds.
The book contains 212 separate sketches made by the artist-author on the spot at the oftentimes remote and completely deserted mining camps. These pictures, as well as her 1200 other lithographic sketches of Colorado towns, form an invaluable record of places which are rapidly disappearing under the ravages of fire, wind and snow.
The author searched the Colorado Rockies from the time she saw and sketched her first ghost town until she had rediscovered and painted the vanishing mining camps. Twenty-two maps give the location of each one and serve as a guide for those who want to reach them by car or jeep, by horseback or on foot.
The hardships of the early prospectors, the strikes they made, the gold and silver mines they uncovered, the towns they established, and the rise and fall of their fortunes are vividly recorded.
Names and dates are given of the earliest finds, of the most important mines and the money they made, of the newspapers printed, and of the hotels, churches and theaters erected. The difficult supply routes into the rocky fastnesses are also clearly traced. But all these facts are humanized by an author who is an artist rather than a historian, and to whom all this mining in the Colorado Rockies is essentially the story of heroic pioneer effort—the men and women behind the deeds.
The book contains 212 separate sketches made by the artist-author on the spot at the oftentimes remote and completely deserted mining camps. These pictures, as well as her 1200 other lithographic sketches of Colorado towns, form an invaluable record of places which are rapidly disappearing under the ravages of fire, wind and snow.
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State Crime on the Margins of Empire
Rio Tinto, the War on Bougainville and Resistance to MiningKristian Lasslett
Pluto Press, 2014
This book offers a pioneering window into the elusive workings of state-corporate crime within the mining industry. It follows a campaign of resistance organised by indigenous activists on the island of Bougainville, who struggled to close a Rio Tinto owned copper mine, and investigates the subsequent state-corporate response, which led to the shocking loss of some 10,000 lives.
Drawing on internal records and interviews with senior officials, Kristian Lasslett examines how an articulation of capitalist growth mediated through patrimonial politics, imperial state-power, large-scale mining, and clan-based, rural society, prompted an ostensibly ‘responsible’ corporate citizen, and liberal state actors, to organise a counterinsurgency campaign punctuated with gross human rights abuses.
State Crime on the Margins of Empire represents a unique intervention rooted in a classical Marxist tradition that challenges positivist streams of criminological scholarship, in order to illuminate with greater detail the historical forces faced by communities in the global south caught in the increasingly violent dynamics of the extractive industries.
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Subterranean Struggles
New Dynamics of Mining, Oil, and Gas in Latin AmericaEdited by Anthony Bebbington and Jeffrey Bury
University of Texas Press, 2013
Over the past two decades, the extraction of nonrenewable resources in Latin America has given rise to many forms of struggle, particularly among disadvantaged populations. The first analytical collection to combine geographical and political ecological approaches to the post-1990s changes in Latin America’s extractive economy, Subterranean Struggles closely examines the factors driving this expansion and the sociopolitical, environmental, and political economic consequences it has wrought. In this analysis, more than a dozen experts explore the many facets of struggles surrounding extraction, from protests in the vicinity of extractive operations to the everyday efforts of excluded residents who try to adapt their livelihoods while industries profoundly impact their lived spaces. The book explores the implications of extractive industry for ideas of nature, region, and nation; “resource nationalism” and environmental governance; conservation, territory, and indigenous livelihoods in the Amazon and Andes; everyday life and livelihood in areas affected by small- and large-scale mining alike; and overall patterns of social mobilization across the region. Arguing that such struggles are an integral part of the new extractive economy in Latin America, the authors document the increasingly conflictive character of these interactions, raising important challenges for theory, for policy, and for social research methodologies. Featuring works by social and natural science authors, this collection offers a broad synthesis of the dynamics of extractive industry whose relevance stretches to regions beyond Latin America.
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