Illegal mining for critical minerals needed for the global renewable energy transition is increasingly driving deforestation in Indigenous lands in the Amazon. In recent years, these illegal miners, who are often self-employed, mobile and working covertly, have expanded their gold mining operations to include cassiterite or “black gold”, a critical mineral essential for the renewable energy transition.
Offshore Attachments reveals how the contested management of sex and race transformed the Caribbean into a crucial site in the global oil economy. By the mid-twentieth century, the Dutch islands of Curaçao and Aruba housed the world’s largest oil refineries. To bolster this massive industrial experi
March 8, 1950—International Women’s Day—Marked the Embrace of a Feminist Battle Against ImperialismThis post was originally published on Zócalo Public Square and is reposted here with permission.By Elisabeth B. Armstrong, author of Bury the Corpse of Colonialism: The Revolutionary Feminist C
By Eric Porter, author of A People's History of SFO: The Making of the Bay Area and an AirportFor many people, airports may seem like alienating “nonplaces”—as anthropologist Marc Augé put it—where we rush to make connections and spend long, monotonous hours waiting for delayed flights. But I’ve
For the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, we reached out to scholar Adria Imada to discuss her new book, An Archive of Skin, An Archive of Kin: Disability and Life-Making during Medical Incarceration.Adria L. Imada is Professor of History at University of California, Irvine,
By Moon-Ho Jung, author of Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security StateIn the wake of very visible hate crimes against Asian Americans this past year, President Joe Biden vowed to combat racism to make America live up to its reputed ideals
by María Elena García, author of Gastropolitics and the Specter of Race: Stories of Capital, Culture, and Coloniality in PeruI never intended to write a book about food. And certainly, I never planned to write a book that critiqued the chefs credited for transforming Peru—the country of my birth
By William B. Taylor, author of Fugitive Freedom: The Improbable Lives of Two Impostors in Late Colonial MexicoI didn’t plan to write Fugitive Freedom. This was partly because the project that preceded it seemed endless. But when I finally finished Theater of a Thousand Wonders: A History of Mir
The story of Potosí, a virtual mountain of silver whose revelation made world news and became a secular icon after an Andean prospector named Diego Gualpa struck pay dirt high on its flanks in 1545.