Recent Posts
Big and Small, They Mined Them All (MHA Presidential Address, 2021)
In June 2021, the Mining History Association held its annual meeting in a virtual format for the first time, due to COVID-19. As incoming President of the organization, after ceremoniously “accepting” the official mining pick of office, I delivered the traditional presidential address via Zoom.
The talk, titled “Big and Small, They Mined Them All: Thinking About Scale in Mining History,” was really my chance to talk about the modern Nevada gold mining boom and specifically the Carlin Trend.
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Photos and Mining History
Note: This post ran as a Presidential Column in the Spring 2022 issue of the Mining History News.
After reading the last newsletter, MHA member Hans Muessig wrote me with a suggestion for this column. “Historic photographs are a critical and I think underutilized resource in studying the past,” he argued, and I couldn’t agree more!
Historians are generally trained to pay closest attention to words and texts as sources, a preference that dates to the earliest years of the field’s professionalization in the 19th century.
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The Paper Record Behind Mining History
Note: This post ran as a Presidential Column in the Winter 2021/22 issue of the Mining History News.
I have a confession: I’m a historian, and yet I haven’t set foot in an archive since 2019 due to COVID-19. I’m getting antsy– I’ll look for digitized photos in online repositories, browse electronic versions of the Engineering and Mining Journal and Mining and Scientific Press, check out high-resolution historic newspapers at the Chronicling America site, and even peek at census images, but it’s not the same.
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