Author: John R. McNeill
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520279174
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 456
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Book Description
"Over the past five hundred years, North Americans have increasingly turned to mining to produce many of their basic social and cultural objects. From cell phones to cars and roadways, metal pots to wall tile and even talcum powder, minerals products have become central to modern North American life. As this process has unfolded, mining has also indelibly shaped the natural world and North Americans' relationship with it. Mountains have been honeycombed, rivers poisoned, and forests leveled. The effects of these environmental transformations have fallen unevenly across North American societies. Mining North America examines these developments. Drawing on the work of scholars from Mexico, the United States, and Canada, this book explores how mining has shaped North America over the last half millennium. It covers an array of minerals and geographies while seeking to draw mining into the core debates that animate North American environmental history generally. Taken together, the authors' contributions make a powerful case for the centrality of mining in forging North American environments and societies"--Provided by publisher.
Author: Kendall W. Brown
Publisher: UNM Press
ISBN: 0826351077
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
For twenty-five years, Kendall Brown studied Potosí, Spanish America's greatest silver producer and perhaps the world's most famous mining district. He read about the flood of silver that flowed from its Cerro Rico and learned of the toil of its miners. Potosí symbolized fabulous wealth and unbelievable suffering. New World bullion stimulated the formation of the first world economy but at the same time it had profound consequences for labor, as mine operators and refiners resorted to extreme forms of coercion to secure workers. In many cases the environment also suffered devastating harm. All of this occurred in the name of wealth for individual entrepreneurs, companies, and the ruling states. Yet the question remains of how much economic development mining managed to produce in Latin America and what were its social and ecological consequences. Brown's focus on the legendary mines at Potosí and comparison of its operations to those of other mines in Latin America is a well-written and accessible study that is the first to span the colonial era to the present.
Author: Paul J. White
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813065356
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 291
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Book Description
Mining History Association Clark C. Spence Award The mining industry in North America has a rich and conflicted history. It is associated with the opening of the frontier and the rise of the United States as an industrial power but also with social upheaval, the dispossession of indigenous lands, and extensive environmental impacts. Synthesizing fifty years of research on American mining sites that date from colonial times to the present, Paul White provides an ideal overview of the field for both students and professionals. The Archaeology of American Mining offers a multifaceted look at mining, incorporating findings from an array of subfields, including historical archaeology, industrial archaeology, and maritime archaeology. Case studies are taken from a wide range of contexts, from eastern coal mines to Alaskan gold fields, with special attention paid to the domestic and working lives of miners. Exploring what material artifacts can tell us about the lives of people who left few records, White demonstrates how archaeologists contribute to our understanding of the legacies left by miners and the mining industry. A volume in the series the American Experience in Archaeological Perspective, edited by Michael S. Nassaney
Author: Allison Margaret Bigelow
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469654393
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377
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Book Description
Mineral wealth from the Americas underwrote and undergirded European colonization of the New World; American gold and silver enriched Spain, funded the slave trade, and spurred Spain's northern European competitors to become Atlantic powers. Building upon works that have narrated this global history of American mining in economic and labor terms, Mining Language is the first book-length study of the technical and scientific vocabularies that miners developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as they engaged with metallic materials. This language-centric focus enables Allison Bigelow to document the crucial intellectual contributions Indigenous and African miners made to the very engine of European colonialism. By carefully parsing the writings of well-known figures such as Cristobal Colon and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes and lesser-known writers such Alvaro Alonso Barba, a Spanish priest who spent most of his life in the Andes, Bigelow uncovers the ways in which Indigenous and African metallurgists aided or resisted imperial mining endeavors, shaped critical scientific practices, and offered imaginative visions of metalwork. Her creative linguistic and visual analyses of archival fragments, images, and texts in languages as diverse as Spanish and Quechua also allow her to reconstruct the processes that led to the silencing of these voices in European print culture.
Author: Donald L. Hardesty
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
Mining played a prominent role in the shaping and settling of the American West in the nineteenth century. Following the discovery of the famous Comstock Lode in Nevada in 1859, mining became increasingly industrialized, changing mining technology, society, and culture throughout the world. In the wake of these changes Nevada became an important mining region, with new people and technologies further altering the ways mining was pursued and miners interacted. Historical archaeology offers a research strategy for understanding mining and miners that integrates three independent sources of information about the past: physical remains, documents, and oral testimony. Mining Archaeology in the American West explores mining culture and practices through the microcosm of Nevada’s mining frontier. The history of mining technology, the social and cultural history of miners and mining societies, and the landscapes and environments of mining are topics examined in this multifocus research. In this updated and expanded edition of the seminal work on mining in Nevada, Donald Hardesty brings scholarship up to the present with important new research and insights into how people, technology, culture, architecture, and landscape changed during this period of mining history.
Author: Sylvia Alden Roberts
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595524923
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 162
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Book Description
Did you know that an estimated 5,000 blacks were an early and integral part of the California Gold Rush? Did you know that black history in California precedes Gold Rush history by some 300 years? Did you know that in California during the Gold Rush, blacks created one of the wealthiest, most culturally advanced, most politically active communities in the nation? Few people are aware of the intriguing, dynamic often wholly inspirational stories of African American argonauts, from backgrounds as diverse as those of their less sturdy- complexioned peers. Defying strict California fugitive slave laws and an unforgiving court testimony ban in a state that declared itself free, black men and women combined skill, ambition and courage and rose to meet that daunting challenge with dignity, determination and even a certain elan, leaving behind a legacy that has gone starkly under-reported. Mainstream history tends to contribute to the illusion that African Americans were all but absent from the California Gold Rush experience. This remarkable book, illustrated with dozens of photos, offers definitive contradiction to that illusion and opens a door that leads the reader into a forgotten world long shrouded behind the shadowy curtains of time."
Author: Clark C. Spence
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9780415190091
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 314
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Book Description
First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Author: William Ascarza
Publisher: M.T. Publishing Company
ISBN: 9781938730696
Category : Arizona
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This impressive volume on Arizona mining covers many historical aspects from mines to minerals to transportation and extraction methods. Thousands of miles of railroads were built in Arizona to sustain mining operations that formed the crux of the territory's and later the state's economy. Hundreds of towns in Arizona owed their longevity or in many cases their ephemeral existence based upon the productivity of the local mines. Extensive mapping of the territory was undertaken, not specifically for settlement but for mineral discoveries and for ensuring the ease of extraction from the ground to the market. Mining captivated the Native Americans, Spanish, Mexicans and later the great influx of American miners and pioneers who arrived in Arizona after the Gadsden Purchase of 1854. Since then, Arizona's economy and community has greatly benefited from mining enterprises resulting in heightened employment opportunities both mining related and supported along with an improved infrastructure of roads, railroads, bridges and dams, hospitals, schools, cultural and civic centers. Mining has also influenced state tourism and recreation as many of the forest service roads and highways were built for the purpose of connecting mines to refining facilities and on to market. Tourist destinations including the towns of Ajo, Bisbee, Jerome and Prescott, would not have their aesthetically appealing store fronts and town layout were it not for revenue generated from the local mining operations. Gem and mineral shows across the state including the annual Tucson Gem & Mineral Show and the Quartzite Show generate millions of dollars directly benefiting the hospitality industry and local and regional attractions. Over 250 mining related images appear in this volume to represent Arizona's place as one of the great mining centers and mineral producers in the world. This volume is a compilation of 105 articles published under the heading of "Mine Tales", a Monday column in the Arizona Daily Star. Broken down into three physiographic provinces, Arizona has a diverse mineral content that has enabled it to be at the forefront of the mining industry in the United States and the world. 9 x 12 inches, 160 pages.
Author: Andrew C. Isenberg
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374707200
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
An environmental History of California during the Gold Rush Between 1849 and 1874 almost $1 billion in gold was mined in California. With little available capital or labor, here's how: high-pressure water cannons washed hillsides into sluices that used mercury to trap gold but let the soil wash away; eventually more than three times the amount of earth moved to make way for the Panama Canal entered California's rivers, leaving behind twenty tons of mercury every mile—rivers overflowed their banks and valleys were flooded, the land poisoned. In the rush to wealth, the same chain of foreseeable consequences reduced California's forests and grasslands. Not since William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis has a historian so skillfully applied John Muir's insight—"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe"—to the telling of the history of the American West. Beautifully told, this is western environmental history at its finest.
Author: Kent Curtis
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1607322358
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 251
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Book Description
Gambling on Ore examines the development of the western mining industry from the tumultuous and violent Gold Rush to the elevation of large-scale copper mining in the early twentieth century, using Montana as representative of mining developments in the broader US mining west. Employing abundant new historical evidence in key primary and secondary sources, Curtis tells the story of the inescapable relationship of mining to nature in the modern world as the United States moved from a primarily agricultural society to a mining nation in the second half of the nineteenth century. In Montana, legal issues and politics—such as unexpected consequences of federal mining law and the electrification of the United States—further complicated the mining industry’s already complex relationship to geology, while government policy, legal frameworks, dominant understandings of nature, and the exigencies of profit and production drove the industry in momentous and surprising directions. Despite its many uncertainties, mining became an important part of American culture and daily life. Gambling on Ore unpacks the tangled relationships between mining and the natural world that gave material possibility to the age of electricity. Metal mining has had a profound influence on the human ecology and the social relationships of North America through the twentieth century and throughout the world after World War II. Understanding how we forged these relationships is central to understanding the environmental history of the United States after 1850.
