Mining North America

 Over the past five hundred years, North Americans have increasingly relied on mining to produce much of their material and cultural life. From cell phones and computers to cars, roads, pipes, pans, and even wall tile, mineral-intensive products have become central to North American societies. As this process has unfolded, mining has also indelibly shaped the natural world and the human societies within it. Mountains have been honeycombed, rivers poisoned, forests leveled, and the consequences of these environmental transformations have fallen unevenly across North America.
 
Drawing on the work of scholars from Mexico, the United States, and Canada, Mining North America examines these developments. It covers an array of minerals and geographies while bringing mining into the core debates that animate North American environmental history. Taken all together, the essays in this book make a powerful case for the centrality of mining in forging North American environments and societies.

J. R. McNeill is Professor of History and University Professor at Georgetown University. His most recent books are The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 and Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914.

George Vrtis is Associate Professor of History and Environmental Studies at Carleton College.

 

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Of Mines, Minerals, and North American Environmental History
George Vrtis and J. R. McNeill

PART ONE. CAPITALIST TRANSFORMATIONS

1. Exhausting the Sierra Madre: Mining Ecologies in Mexico over the Longue Durée
Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert

2. Reconstructing the Environmental History of Colonial Mining: The Real del Catorce Mining District, Northeastern New Spain/Mexico, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Antonio Avalos-Lozano and Miguel Aguilar-Robledo

PART TWO. INDUSTRIAL CATALYSTS

3. A World of Mines and Mills: Precious-Metals Mining, Industrialization, and the Nature of the Colorado Front Range
George Vrtis

4. Consequences of the Comstock: The Remaking of Working Environments on America’s Largest Silver Strike, 1859–1880
Robert N. Chester III

5. Dust to Dust: The Colorado Coal Mine Explosion Crisis of 1910
Thomas G. Andrews

6. Copper and Longhorns: Material and Human Power in Montana’s Smelter Smoke War, 1860–1910
Timothy James LeCain

7. Efficiency, Economics, and Environmentalism: Low-Grade Iron Ore Mining in the Lake Superior District, 1913–2010
Jeffrey T. Manuel

PART THREE. HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

8. Mining the Atom: Uranium in the Twentieth-Century American West
Eric Mogren

9. A Comparative Case Study of Uranium Mine and Mill Tailings Regulation in Canada and the United States
Robynne Mellor

10. The Giant Mine’s Long Shadow: Arsenic Pollution and Native People in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories
John Sandlos and Arn Keeling

11. Iron Mines, Toxicity, and Indigenous Communities in the Lake Superior Basin
Nancy Langston

12. If the Rivers Ran South: Tar Sands and the State of the Canadian Nation
Steven M. Hoffman

13. Quebec Asbestos: Triumph and Collapse, 1879–1983
Jessica van Horssen

Afterword: Mining, Memory, and History
Andrew C. Isenberg

Contributors
Index