Historical Mining Research Articles

Reviewed by: Gray Gold: Lead Mining and Its Impact on the Natural and Cultural Environment, 1700–1840 by Mark Milton Chambers Sonia Toudji Gray Gold: Lead Mining and Its Impact on the Natural and Cultural Environment, 1700–1840. By Mark Milton Chambers. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 258. $65.00, ISBN 978-1-62190-698-8.) Le Pays des Illinois, a region of French Louisiana in the upper Mississippi River Valley, was a theater for early encounters between Europeans and Native [End Page 340] Americans, and eventually became part of the frontiers and borderlands of the United States. This region was first claimed as part of the French empire, was transferred to Spanish control following the Treaty of Paris in 1763, and finally became an American territory after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Consequently, historians of the early United States have tended to overlook the pre-1803 colonial history of this region, often incorporating it into histories of the American West that begin with the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804. In the process, stories of those pre-1803 encounters became part of state-level histories, consigned to their own “colonial” chapter. In Gray Gold: Lead Mining and Its Impact on the Natural and Cultural Environment, 1700–1840, Mark Milton Chambers attempts to recover the history of Kaskaskia, an outpost on the present-day Illinois-Missouri border, where “the meeting between Native Americans and French miners . . . fits, in some sense, in the story of American mining long before the western gold rushes” (p. 7). As the title suggests, Chambers argues that lead mining in this corner of the eighteenth-century West promoted local wealth and improved the national economy in ways similar to the gold and silver mining that shaped the nineteenth-century West. In four chronologically organized chapters, Chambers sets out to remind the reader that the “American West” before the Lewis and Clark expedition was not empty, and that the history of American mining encompasses the mining practices of Native peoples before contact with European empires. The first chapter explores the “prospecting, extracting, and smelting” of lead in the Native communities that established themselves around Kaskaskia (p. 13). Chambers argues that during the eighteenth century, French and Native mining practices “converged” in the Illinois Country (p. 13). Chapter 2 assesses Spanish administrative efforts to increase productivity in the lead mining industry by introducing new methods and technologies. In chapters 3 and 4, the narrative moves into the post-1803 era, with a focus on the consequences of lead mining in the region. Chambers details how an increase in lead production led to environmental problems such as arsenic water pollution. Similarly, he explains how the American industrialization of lead mining, which brought new technologies and practices, negatively impacted the landscape, settlements, and Native Americans. Scholarship on the colonial upper Mississippi Valley has mostly focused on Native-French relations, the fur trade, and frontier histories. Gray Gold revisits those relations while highlighting what Chambers calls a “mining middle ground”—a zone where Euro-American and Native miners learned from one another, blended their prospecting and smelting practices, and created a new alliance centered on mining lead ore (p. 13). Chambers also notes that the literature on mining in the West has traditionally focused on nineteenth-century gold rushes, overlooking the extraction of gray gold in the eighteenth-century West. Thomas Jefferson wrote about lead mining in the Illinois Country in his Notes on the State of virginia in 1785. And as president, Jefferson reported to Congress about the rich lead mines of the Louisiana Purchase, which he hoped would “encourage more Americans to settle in the region for the benefit of national wealth” (p. 103). Gray Gold weaves together several stories over two centuries of history of lead mining in the upper Mississippi Valley. Well researched and wonderfully [End Page 341] written, this book builds on the most recent literature and uses a wide variety of approaches to the history of mining, the West, and Native Americans. Sonia Toudji University of Central Arkansas Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association

Reviewed by: Discordant Memories: Atomic Age Narratives and Visual Culture by Alison Fields Robert (Bo) Jacobs (bio) Discordant Memories: Atomic Age Narratives and Visual Culture By Alison Fields. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. Pp. 256. "Containment—the process of gaining control over something harmful," writes Alison Fields, "is a key mechanism for responding to traumatic memories" (p. 16). Her book proceeds to explore nuclear-themed artwork as locations where the containment of nuclear memories has fractured, revealing a disjointed and evolving memory culture in the wake of Hiroshima. Fields opens with an exploration of the so-called "Hiroshima Maidens," twenty-five young women who experienced the nuclear attack on Hiroshima as children and were brought to the United States ten years later to receive reconstructive and plastic surgeries. This bold start establishes that institutions may strive to contain historical traumas in narratives of event, impact, and consequence, but they are better understood as organic and living beyond the memorialized event, just as the bodies of those who endured it. The book then contrasts the formal memorializations of the attacks in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos, these museums exemplifying the "discordant memories" of the title. Although the official curations—in service to the communities in which they are embedded—seem to describe disparate events, it is on the "leaking" of memory culture beyond both of these containers that the book centers its analysis. Fields argues that "the experience of atomic trauma cannot be contained" (p. 80), then proceeds to lay out several chapters detailing this dynamic. These chapters explore a series of pieces by artists and writers working in multiple media who deconstruct and reenvision memory cultures of the nuclear attacks, augmenting their trajectories of inheritance. Many are master practitioners within their medium. Of particular note are the participatory [End Page 625] and responsive multimedia works by Shinpei Takeda, the range of historical and topical focuses of various members of the Atomic Photographers Guild, and the photographic explorations of Navajo uranium mining landscapes by Will Wilson. An examination of the role of manga in reproducing and then leaking outside of the formal Japanese Hiroshima narrative and the tension between survivor testimonies and official curation also reveal the vitality of this leaking. Though it also surveys "atomic bomb literature" produced in Japan in the decades following the nuclear attacks, the book is at its best when analyzing visual artwork. Fields asserts that "visual expressions of memory offer possibilities for resisting linear, closed-off narratives of the past and for reflecting the continuing, and often cyclical, nature of trauma" (p. 19). We are fortunate the book includes seventeen full-color photographic plates that allow us to encounter a number of the original works that Fields describes. Fields uses her inquiry to guide readers through the growing awareness that the 1945 nuclear attacks were not the solitary moments of nuclear harm on human beings and communities: to contextualize some of the artwork, she walks readers through the history of nuclear testing and uranium mining. This is most evident in the discussion of the work of members of the Atomic Photographers Guild, many of whom played a central role in foregrounding this ongoing history through their work. The fact that the Guild includes the work of Yoshito Matsushige, the only photographer to capture images on the actual day of one of the nuclear attacks on Japan, links the visualization of direct nuclear attack with ongoing assaults on human beings and the ecosystem during the Cold War. In tracing how Hiroshima has continued leaking out of its curatorial containment, Fields shows us a history that is alive and imbricated with human beings who experienced the direct attack and all of us who continue to inherit and live amid its historical ripples. I was particularly interested in the complicated relationships that many of the pieces imply between radiologically affected communities in the United States and Hiroshima as both place and mythic icon. I welcome work that pursues that fault line, both artistically and politically, as well as work that extends this analysis into the many other sites of nuclear harm around the world. A second generation of scholars...

Historical Mining Research Articles

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Historical Mining Research Articles

Related Topics

Articles published on Historical Mining

Volcanogenic massive sulfide (VMS) deposits of the Dunnage Zone of the Newfoundland Appalachians: setting, styles, key advances, and future research

Superstack Nostalgia

Characterizing the Changes in the Source Apportionment of Metal in Surface Waters by an Integrated Approach

Review: I Will Live for Both of Us: A History of Colonialism, Uranium Mining, and Inuit Resistance, by Joan Scottie, Warren Bernauer, and Jack Hicks

Gray Gold: Lead Mining and Its Impact on the Natural and Cultural Environment, 1700–1840 by Mark Milton Chambers

Geoenvironmental characterisation of legacy mine wastes from Tasmania – Environmental risks and opportunities for remediation and value recovery

Trace and rare-earth elements in garnets from silicate-carbonate formations of the Kusa-Kopan complex (Southern Urals)

Mercury distribution inthe great cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo) from the Krogulna ponds and Nysa Kłodzka River (Poland).

Combining ground stability investigation with exploratory drilling for mine water geothermal energy development; lessons from exploration and monitoring

Speciation and mobility of arsenic and antimony in soils and mining wastes from an abandoned Sb–Au mining area

Discordant Memories: Atomic Age Narratives and Visual Culture by Alison Fields

New data regarding the identification of critical raw materials recoverable from raw, processed and the waste mining industry materials from Romania.

Mining, loss, and despair: Exploring energy transitions and opioid use in an Appalachian coal community

Mercury-Modulated Immune Responses in Arctic Barnacle Goslings (Branta leucopsis) upon a Viral-Like Immune Challenge.

Re-Mining of Waste Rock Dumps from a Closed Lead–Zinc Mine—Characterisation of the Residuals

The truth is in the stream: Use of tracer techniques and synoptic sampling to evaluate metal loading and remedial options in a hydrologically complex setting

Characterising mine wastes as archaeological landscapes

Human-induced reactivation of a dormant earthflow? A geomorphological interpretation of historical mining maps of the Ischl salt mine (Austria)

FORMATION OF HYDROGEOLOGICAL CONDITIONS OF THE CHELYABINSK COAL BASIN AT THE POST-OPERATIONAL STAGE

Mercury Levels in Sediment, Water and Selected Organisms Collected in a Coastal Contaminated Environment: The Marano and Grado Lagoon (Northern Adriatic Sea, Italy)