This book draws together international contributors to analyse a wide range of aspects of mining history across the globe including mining archaeology, technologies of mining, migration and mining, the everyday life of the miner, the state and mining, industrial relations in mining, gender and mining, environment and mining, mining accidents, the visual history of mining, and mining heritage. The result is a counter balance to more common national and regional case study perspectives.
A group of 20 Irish immigrants, suspected of comprising a secret terrorist organization called the "Molly Maguires", were executed in Pennsylvania in the 1870s for the murder of 16 men. This work offers a new interpretation of their dramatic story, tracing the origins of the Molly Maguires to Ireland and explaining the growth of a particular structure of meaning.
Exploring the social complexities of the Frieda River Project in Papua New Guinea, this book tells the story of local stakeholder strategies on the eve of industrial development, largely from the perspective of the Paiyamo – one of the project’s so-called ‘impact communities’. Engaging ideas of knowledge, belief and personhood, it explains how fifty years of encounters with exploration companies shaped the Paiyamo’s aspirations, made them revisit and re-examine their past, and develop new strategies to move towards a better, more prosperous future.
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.
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.
Praise for the First Edition “...a well-written book on data analysis and data mining that provides an excellent foundation...” —CHOICE “This is a must-read book for learning practical statistics and data analysis...” —Computing Reviews.com A proven go-to guide for data analysis, Making Sense of Data I: A Practical Guide to Exploratory Data Analysis and Data Mining, Second Edition focuses on basic data analysis approaches that are necessary to make timely and accurate decisions in a diverse range of projects. Based on the authors’ practical experience in implementing data analysis and data mining, the new edition provides clear explanations that guide readers from almost every field of study. In order to facilitate the needed steps when handling a data analysis or data mining project, a step-by-step approach aids professionals in carefully analyzing data and implementing results, leading to the development of smarter business decisions. The tools to summarize and interpret data in order to master data analysis are integrated throughout, and the Second Edition also features: Updated exercises for both manual and computer-aided implementation with accompanying worked examples New appendices with coverage on the freely available TraceisTM software, including tutorials using data from a variety of disciplines such as the social sciences, engineering, and finance New topical coverage on multiple linear regression and logistic regression to provide a range of widely used and transparent approaches Additional real-world examples of data preparation to establish a practical background for making decisions from data Making Sense of Data I: A Practical Guide to Exploratory Data Analysis and Data Mining, Second Edition is an excellent reference for researchers and professionals who need to achieve effective decision making from data. The Second Edition is also an ideal textbook for undergraduate and graduate-level courses in data analysis and data mining and is appropriate for cross-disciplinary courses found within computer science and engineering departments.
Much more is known about the past that is interesting, valuable and and relevant to our problems than any one of us can ever know. Making Sense of History proposes we focus on Five Zones of Priority: Livelihoods, Protection from violence, Freedom, Relationships, and Ideas. Partington examines some perennial problems, such as Progress or Regression, Bias, Prejudice and Moral Judgment, Depth versus Breadth and the ongoing fabrication of myths, and accusations of genocide and cannibalism. Partington warns against looking to history for the certainties that physics or mathematics provide. We have free will and make decisions rather than react uniformly to external forces. Historical understanding is more like proverbial wisdom writ large than the theorems of Pythagoras or Einstein. A more serious problem is the ideological capture of much history teaching in countries like Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Partington does not advocate vainglorious national pride but defends the achievement of those countries in making a better, though imperfect, balance between freedom and security than has been made at almost every other time or place.
Although Canadian history has no shortage of stories about disasters and accidents, the phenomena of risk, upset, and misfortune have been largely overlooked by historians. Disasters get their due, but not so the smaller-scale accident where fate is more intimate. Yet such events often have a vivid afterlife in the communities where they happen, and the way in which they are explained and remembered has significant social, cultural, and political meaning. An Accidental History of Canada brings together original studies of an intriguing range of accidents stretching from the 1630s to the 1970s. These include workplace, domestic, childhood, and leisure accidents in colonial, Indigenous, rural, and urban settings. Whether arising from colonial power relations, urban dangers, perils in resource extraction, or hazardous recreations, most accidents occur within circumstances of vulnerability, and reveal precarity and inequities not otherwise apparent. Contributors to this volume are alert to the intersections of the settler agenda and the elevation of risk that it brings. Indigenous and settler ways of understanding accidents are juxtaposed, with chapters exploring the links between accidents and the rise of the modern state. An Accidental History of Canada makes plain that whether they are interpreted as an intervention by providence, a miscalculation, an inevitability, or the result of observable risk, accidents – and our responses to them – reveal shared values.
"Commodities provide a lens through which local and global histories can be understood and written. The study of commodities history follows these goods as they make their way from land and water through processing and trade to eventual consumption. It is a fast-developing field with collaborative, comparative, and interdisciplinary research, with new information technologies becoming increasingly important. Although many individual researchers continue to focus on particular commodities and regions, they often do so in partnership with others working on different areas and employing a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, placing commodities history at the forefront of local and global historical analysis. This Oxford Handbook features contributions from scholars involved in these developments across a range of countries and linguistic regions. They discuss the state of the art in their fields, draw on their own work, and signal lacunae for future research. Each of its 31 chapters focuses on an important thematic area within commodities history: key approaches, global histories, modes of production, people and land, environmental impact, consumption, and new methodologies. Taken together, the Oxford Handbook of Commodities History offers insight into the directions in which commodities history is heading, and the multiple ways in which it can contribute to a better understanding of the world"--
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.
