Mining Language

Mining Language

Author: Allison Margaret Bigelow

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2020-04-16

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 1469654393

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.


Mining North America

Mining North America

Author: John R. McNeill

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2017-07-03

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13: 0520279174

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"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.


The Archaeology of American Mining

The Archaeology of American Mining

Author: Paul J. White

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2019-12-09

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 0813065356

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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


Mercury and the Making of California

Mercury and the Making of California

Author: Andrew Scott Johnston

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2013-09-15

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13: 1457183994

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Exploring the development of California and the relationship between the built environments of the mercury-mining industry and the emerging ethnic identities and communities in California, Mercury and the Making of California brings mercury to its rightful place alongside gold and silver in their defining roles in the development of the American West. In this pioneering study, Andrew Johnston examines the history of California’s mercury-mining industry—and its defining role in the development of the American West. Mercury was crucial to refining gold and silver; therefore, its production and use were vital to creating and securing power and wealth in the west. The first industrialized mining in California, mercury mining had its own particular organization and structure shaped by powers first formed within the Spanish Empire, transformed by British imperial ambitions, and manipulated by groups made wealthy and powerful by controlling it. In addition, the landscapes of work and camp and the relations among the many groups—Mexicans, Chileans, Spanish, British, Irish, Cornish, American, and Chinese—throughout the industry’s history illustrate the complex history of race and ethnicity in the American West. Combining rich documentary sources with a close examination of the existing physical landscape, Andrew 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 to Western history.


Hardrock Mining on Federal Lands

Hardrock Mining on Federal Lands

Author: National Research Council

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 1999-11-03

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 0309172667

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book, the result of a congressionally mandated study, examines the adequacy of the regulatory framework for mining of hardrock mineralsâ€"such as gold, silver, copper, and uraniumâ€"on over 350 million acres of federal lands in the western United States. These lands are managed by two agenciesâ€"the Bureau of Land Management in the Department of the Interior, and the Forest Service in the Department of Agriculture. The committee concludes that the complex network of state and federal laws that regulate hardrock mining on federal lands is generally effective in providing environmental protection, but improvements are needed in the way the laws are implemented and some regulatory gaps need to be addressed. The book makes specific recommendations for improvement, including: The development of an enhanced information management system and a more efficient process to review new mining proposals and issue permits. Changes to regulations that would require all mining operations, other than "casual use" activities that negligibly disturb the environment, to provide financial assurances for eventual site cleanup. Changes to regulations that would require all mining and milling operations (other than casual use) to submit operating plans in advance.


Mining for the Nation

Mining for the Nation

Author: Jody Pavilack

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 0271037695

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Examines the politics of coal miners in Chile during the 1930s and '40s, when they supported the Communist Party in a project of cross-class alliances aimed at defeating fascism, promoting national development, and deepening Chilean democracy"--Provided by publisher.


Gold Rushes and Mining Camps of the Early American West

Gold Rushes and Mining Camps of the Early American West

Author: Vardis Fisher

Publisher: Caxton Press

Published: 1968

Total Pages: 492

ISBN-13: 9780870040436

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Caxton Press Vardis Fisher and Opal Laurel Holmes bring together the stories of all of the remarkable men and women and all of the violent contrasts that made up one of the most entrhalling chapters in American history. Fisher, a respected scholar and versatile creative writer, devoted three years to the writing of this book.


Mining Archaeology in the American West

Mining Archaeology in the American West

Author: Donald L. Hardesty

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

Published: 2010-07

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.