Mining North America: an environmental history since 1522

Description

Introduction: Of mines, minerals, and North American environmental history / George Vrtis and J.R. McNeill -- Capitalist Transformations. Exhausting the Sierra Madre : mining ecologies in Mexico over the Longue Durée / Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert -- Reconstructing the environmental history of colonial mining : the Real del Catorce Mining District, northeastern New Spain/Mexico, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries / Antonio Avalos-Lozano and Miguel Aguilar-Robledo -- Industrial Catalysts. A world of mines and mills : precious-metals mining, industrialization, and the nature of the Colorado Front Range / George Vrtis -- Consequences of the Comstock : the remaking of working environments on America's largest silver strike, 1859-1880 / Robert N. Chester III -- Dust to dust : the Colorado coal mine explosion crisis of 1910 / Thomas G. Andrews -- Copper and longhorns : material and human power in Montana's smelter smoke war, 1860-1910 / Timothy James LeCain -- Efficiency, economics, and environmentalism : low-grade iron ore mining in the Lake Superior District, 1913-2010 / Jeffrey T. Manuel -- Health and Environmental Justice. Mining the atom : uranium in the twentieth-century American West / Eric Mogren -- A comparative case study of uranium mine and mill tailings regulation in Canada and the United States / Robynne Mellor -- The Giant Mine's long shadow : arsenic pollution and Native people in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories / John Sandlos and Arn Keeling -- Iron mines, toxicity, and indigenous communities in the Lake Superior basin / Nancy Langston -- If the rivers ran south : tar sands and the state of the Canadian nation / Steven M. Hoffman -- Quebec asbestos : triumph and collapse, 1879-1983 / Jessica van Horssen -- Afterword: Mining, memory, and history / Andrew C. Isenberg.;"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.