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.

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.

It’s finally here! Seeing Underground: Maps, Models, and Mining Engineering in America, published by the University of Nevada Press, is available in hardcover and kindle editions. I examine how maps and models created a visual culture of mining engineering, helping American mining engineers fashion a professional identity and occupational opportunities for themselves. I’m grateful for all the support and assistance I’ve received as I’ve chased this fascinating history. Here’s the description from the press:

In an earlier post I discussed some of the limitations of full-text searching in digitized copies of historic mining engineering literature, and suggested several historic index publications specific to mining engineering that could be used to augment your search by looking for information the old-fashioned way. Mining engineering information also appeared in historic indexes that covered engineering as a whole. Third-party indexes that cover engineering topics generally include at least some of the more popular mining engineering journals in their coverage.

Many excellent historical books on mining and mining engineering are now available from archive.org and Google Books. In some cases, these repositories also have partial (or, rarely, complete) runs of historical technical journals of interest to mining historians. Full-text search of these digitized books is a godsend, but sometimes it doesn’t work right. Maybe you are looking for a topic instead of a keyword, or the conversion to text mangled the word you want, or the website doesn’t allow you to look inside several volumes at once (ahem, archive.