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.