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  • Book cover of The Face of Decline

    The anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania once prospered. Today, very little mining or industry remains, although residents have made valiant efforts to restore the fabric of their communities. In The Face of Decline, the noted historians Thomas Dublin and Walter Licht offer a sweeping history of this area over the course of the twentieth century. Combining business, labor, social, political, and environmental history, Dublin and Licht delve into coal communities to explore grassroots ethnic life and labor activism, economic revitalization, and the varied impact of economic decline across generations of mining families. The Face of Decline also features the responses to economic crisis of organized capital and labor, local business elites, redevelopment agencies, and state and federal governments. Dublin and Licht draw on a remarkable range of sources: oral histories and survey questionnaires; documentary photographs; the records of coal companies, local governments, and industrial development corporations; federal censuses; and community newspapers. The authors examine the impact of enduring economic decline across a wide region but focus especially on a small group of mining communities in the region's Panther Valley, from Jim Thorpe through Lansford to Tamaqua. The authors also place the anthracite region within a broader conceptual framework, comparing anthracite's decline to parallel developments in European coal basins and Appalachia and to deindustrialization in the United States more generally.

  • Book cover of The Congo

    Provides an introduction to the Congo. This book covers its history, from the unleashing of King Leopard's fury across the region in the 19th century, to the Western sponsored murder of Patrice Lumumba in 1961, and also the war since 1997. It pays attention to the importance of economic production for social organization throughout the country.

  • Book cover of A Golden State

    A collection of essays on mining and economic development in California from the Gold Rush through the end of the 19th century. This is the second in a series of four volumes comemmorating the state's sesquicentennial.

  • Book cover of Roaring Camp

    Historical insight is the alchemy that transforms the familiar story of the Gold Rush into something sparkling and new. The world of the Gold Rush that comes down to us through fiction and film--of unshaven men named Stumpy and Kentuck raising hell and panning for gold--is one of half-truths. In this brilliant work of social history, Susan Johnson enters the well-worked diggings of Gold Rush history and strikes a rich lode. She finds a dynamic social world in which the conventions of identity--ethnic, national, and sexual--were reshaped in surprising ways. She gives us the all-male households of the diggings, the mines where the men worked, and the fandango houses where they played. With a keen eye for character and story, Johnson restores the particular social world that issued in the Gold Rush myths we still cherish.

  • Book cover of Power and Powerlessness
    John Gaventa

     · 1982

    Explains to outsiders the conflicts between the financial interests of the coal and land companies and the moral rights of the vulnerable mountaineers.

  • Book cover of St. Clair, a Nineteenth-century Coal Town's Experience with a Disaster-prone Industry

    Chronicles the rise and fall of a Pennsylvanian coal town, the center of violent confrontations between labor and capital.

  • Book cover of October Sky
    Homer Hickam

     · 1999

    This book is the basis for the motion picture, October Sky.

  • Book cover of Applied Geophysics

    This is the completely revised and updated version of the popular and highly regarded textbook, Applied Geophysics. It describes the physical methods involved in exploration for hydrocarbons and minerals, which include gravity, magnetic, seismic, electrical, electromagnetic, radioactivity, and well-logging methods. All aspects of these methods are described, including basic theory, field equipment, techniques of data acquisition, data processing and interpretation, with the objective of locating commercial deposits of minerals, oil, and gas and determining their extent. In the fourteen years or so since the first edition of Applied Geophysics, many changes have taken place in this field, mainly as the result of new techniques, better instrumentation, and increased use of computers in the field and in the interpretation of data. The authors describe these changes in considerable detail, including improved methods of solving the inverse problem, specialized seismic methods, magnetotellurics as a practical exploration method, time-domain electromagnetic methods, increased use of gamma-ray spectrometers, and improved well-logging methods and interpretation.

  • Book cover of Coal and Culture

    A critical appreciation of the opera house in the coal-mining region of Appalachia from the mid 1860s to the early 1930s, Coal and Culture demonstrates that these were multipurpose facilities that were used for traveling theater, concerts, religious events, lectures, commencements, boxing matches, benefits, union meetings, and - if the auditorium had a flat floor - skating and basketball.

  • Book cover of Cobalt Red

    Now in paperback: the powerful, revelatory New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller, shortlisted for the Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year Award. An unflinching investigation reveals the human rights abuses behind the Congo’s cobalt mining operation—and the moral implications that affect us all. Cobalt Red is the searing, first-ever exposé of the immense toll taken on the people and environment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by cobalt mining, as told through the testimonies of the Congolese people themselves. Activist and researcher Siddharth Kara has traveled deep into cobalt territory to document the testimonies of the people living, working, and dying for cobalt. To uncover the truth about brutal mining practices, Kara investigated militia-controlled mining areas, traced the supply chain of child-mined cobalt from toxic pit to consumer-facing tech giants, and gathered shocking testimonies of people who endure immense suffering and even die mining cobalt. Cobalt is an essential component to every lithium-ion rechargeable battery made today, the batteries that power our smartphones, tablets, laptops, and electric vehicles. Roughly 75 percent of the world’s supply of cobalt is mined in the Congo, often by peasants and children in sub-human conditions. Billions of people in the world cannot conduct their daily lives without participating in a human rights and environmental catastrophe in the Congo. In this stark and crucial book, Kara argues that we must all care about what is happening in the Congo—because we are all implicated.