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.

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.

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.

Note: This post ran as a Presidential Column in the Fall 2021 issue of the Mining History News. Between a book project I’ve been working on and our excellent MHA meeting in Elko last June, there’s been a question I’ve been wrestling with a lot: how do we save and interpret mining history? What “stuff” should be saved so future generations of historians and the interested public can learn? These are remarkably difficult questions.

Note: This post ran as a Presidential Column in the Summer 2021 issue of the Mining History News. Now that our Elko “virtual conference” is in the rear view mirror, I think I can safely say this: it went better than just about anyone expected, and that’s no small victory for a volunteer group trying to adapt on the fly to a global pandemic. The Mining History Association’s culture and traditions ended up being an asset in pivoting to a virtual environment, and the hard work of our resilient conference planners created an excellent learning experience.

Sometimes one just wants to query some data, right? I recently found myself again wanting to query the excellent work of the Supreme Court Database (SCDB for short), which is an important resource for legal historians and political scientists of all stripes. Several years ago, I pulled together a quick SQLite database and have used it since then. It’s now time to generate a fresh database with updated SCDB data, so I figured I would document how I do it, in case it might be useful to others.

My colleague Dr. Brian Leech, a history professor at Augustana College, and I are seeking the opinions of mining historians about the best books in mining history. The survey is anonymous. The results of the survey will be publicized at a future conference of the Mining History Association (and perhaps other academic conferences), and a journal article exploring the results in greater detail will be prepared for consideration by an academic journal in the field.

For more than four years, I’ve been working on a digital legal history project called 9CHRIS – the 9th Circuit Historical Records Index System. The potential for historical analysis that comes from having some 40,000 briefs and transcripts available is what keeps me perpetually interested in continuing to improve this project. Each time I open one of the documents, I think of the potential that such rich detail can offer to historians and others studying the West, especially the relationship between western places, western residents, and the law.

This is a short post about teaching. In a lower-level general education history course I am teaching this semester at ASU, I encourage students to make a small handwritten study sheet (a.k.a. “crib sheet” or “cheat sheet”) to use in class while taking each exam, to jog their memories, help them better marshal specific evidence to use in their answers, and reduce exam anxiety.1 I also hoped the process of preparing the handwritten sheet would be a valuable study exercise, encouraging them to comprehensively scan the material as they looked for facts to include, and reinforcing key concepts by writing them on the sheet.

In working with manuscript census materials, modern data derived from them, and published documents from the Census Bureau, I found myself coming back to particular resources time and again. In a hope this might be of use to someone else, I’ve put together this list of those I use most frequently. If you have suggestions or corrections, please contact me or leave a note in the comments, below. Manuscript materials Main page for manuscript population schedules, 1790–1930, digitized from NARA microfilm, hosted on the Internet Archive: https://archive.