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Author: Admin | 2025-04-27
Earth sciences history: journal of the History of the Earth Sciences SocietyReaders of Earth Sciences History will surely agree that mining has an integral place in the history of the geosciences, even though mining history is today a distinct academic specialization. Following some decades of relative neglect among professional historians, it is now regaining some degree of prominence. Part of the reason for the earlier fallow years was the turn from a more strictly economic and industrial history of technology-and with it modernization theory-to the more interdisciplinary approaches (and cultural and post-colonial theories) that have informed history of technology and Science and Technology Studies (STS) since the 1970s or thereabouts. To those of us working on mining history today, this fact may seem paradoxical: mining is an ideal subject for anybody interested in cutting-edge social and cultural analysis, environmental history, and STS. Any number of excellent works attest to this claim. Nevertheless, mining history has not recovered the level of exposure that it formerly enjoyed, and is decidedly 'Balkanized' at present, dispersed according to national and even intra-national or regional lines. To pioneering scholars like Lewis Mumford, Geoffrey Blainey, Modesto Bargalló, Rodman Paul, Ronald F. Tylecote or Helmut Wilsdorf, mining and metallurgy was 'big history'. Large societies for mining history certainly abound, filled with enthusiasts, preservationists, local historians, and scientists alike. But suggest a topic in mining history to most graduate students of history in search of a 'marketable' dissertation project today, and you may have to spend some time convincing.
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