Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
197
result(s) for
"Coal mines and mining Social aspects."
Sort by:
Mining couture : a manifesto for common wear
\"Mining Couture: A Manifesto for Common Wear is a collaborative art project between the artists Barber Swindells and Leicestershire County Council's Snibston Discovery Museum, exploring the relationship between coal mining and fashion and its surprisingly rich cultural history. Featuring essays, interviews and discussions, illustrated with photographs, maps, video stills and more, Mining Couture is a unique study that merges history, fashion art and contemporary life. Delving into the notion of 'common wear' and focusing on its social context, the book is brought to life through first-hand written recollections by miners and industry workers, including an interview with the 1972 National Coal Queen Margaret Dominiak, alongside participation with contemporary artists and curators\"--Publisher's web site.
Book
Mining Coal and Undermining Gender
Though mining is an infamously masculine industry, women make up 20 percent of all production crews in Wyoming's Powder River Basin-the largest coal-producing region in the United States. How do these women fit into a working culture supposedly hostile to females? This is what anthropologist Jessica Smith Rolston, herself a onetime mine worker and the daughter of a miner, set out to discover. Her answers, based on years of participant-observation in four mines and extensive interviews with miners, managers, engineers, and the families of mine employees, offer a rich and surprising view of the working \"families\" that miners construct. In this picture, gender roles are not nearly as straightforward-or as straitened-as stereotypes suggest.Gender is far from the primary concern of coworkers in crews. Far more important, Rolston finds, is protecting the safety of the entire crew and finding a way to treat each other well despite the stresses of their jobs. These miners share the burden of rotating shift work-continually switching between twelve-hour day and night shifts-which deprives them of the daily rhythms of a typical home, from morning breakfasts to bedtime stories. Rolston identifies the mine workers' response to these shared challenges as a new sort of constructed kinship that both challenges and reproduces gender roles in their everyday working and family lives.Crews' expectations for coworkers to treat one another like family and to adopt an \"agricultural\" work ethic tend to minimize gender differences. And yet, these differences remain tenacious in the equation of masculinity with technical expertise, and of femininity with household responsibilities. For Rolston, such lingering areas of inequality highlight the importance of structural constraints that flout a common impulse among men and women to neutralize the significance of gender, at home and in the workplace.At a time when the Appalachian region continues to dominate discussion of mining culture, this book provides a very different and unexpected view-of how miners live and work together, and of how their lives and work reconfigure ideas of gender and kinship.
eBook
Carbon ideologies : no good alternative. Volume II
\"The second volume of William T. Vollmann's epic book about the factors and human actions that have led to global warming begins in the coal fields of West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, where \"America's best friend\" is not merely a fuel, but a \"heritage.\" Over the course of four years Vollmann finds hollowed out towns with coal-polluted streams and acidified drinking water; makes covert visits to mountaintop removal mines; and offers documented accounts of unpaid fines for federal health and safety violations and of miners who died because their bosses cut corners to make more money. To write about natural gas, Vollmann journeys to Greeley, Colorado, where he interviews anti-fracking activists, a city planner, and a homeowner with serious health issues from fracking. Turning to oil production, he speaks with, among others, the former CEO of Conoco and a vice president of the Bank of Oklahoma in charge of energy loans, and conducts furtive roadside interviews of guest workers performing oil-related contract labor in the United Arab Emirates. As with its predecessor, No Immediate Danger, this volume seeks to understand and listen, not to lay blame-except in a few corporate and political cases where outrage is clearly due. Vollmann is a carbon burner just like the rest of us; he describes and quantifies his own power use, then looks around him, trying to explain to the future why it was that we went against scientific consensus, continually increasing the demand for electric power and insisting that we had no good alternative.\" Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Here and There
The global economy threatens the uniqueness of places, people, and experience. In Here and There Bill Conlogue tests the assumption that literature and local places matter less and less in a world that economists describe as “flat,” politicians believe has “globalized,” and social scientists imagine as a “global village.” Each chapter begins at home, journeys elsewhere, and returns to the author’s native and chosen region, northeastern Pennsylvania. Through the prisms of literature and history, the book explores tensions and conflicts within the region, tensions and conflicts created by national and global demand for the area’s resources: fertile farmland, forest products, anthracite coal, and college-educated young people. Making connections between local and global environmental issues, Here and There uses the Pennsylvania watersheds of urban Lackawanna and rural Lackawaxen to highlight the importance of understanding and protecting the places we call home.
eBook
Removing Mountains
In this rich ethnography of life in Appalachia, Rebecca R. Scott examines mountaintop removal in light of controversy and protests from environmental groups calling for its abolishment. Removing Mountains demonstrates that the paradox that faces this community—forced to destroy their land to make a wage—raises important questions related to the environment, American national identity, place, and white working-class masculinity.
eBook
Welsh Americans
In 1890, more than 100,000 Welsh-born immigrants resided in the United States. A majority of them were skilled laborers from the coal mines of Wales who had been recruited by American mining companies. Readily accepted by American society, Welsh immigrants experienced a unique process of acculturation. In the first history of this exceptional community, Ronald Lewis explores how Welsh immigrants made a significant contribution to the development of the American coal industry and how their rapid and successful assimilation affected Welsh American culture.Lewis describes how Welsh immigrants brought their national churches, fraternal orders and societies, love of literature and music, and, most important, their own language. Yet unlike eastern and southern Europeans and the Irish, the Welsh--even with their \"foreign\" ways--encountered no apparent hostility from the Americans. Often within a single generation, Welsh cultural institutions would begin to fade and a new \"Welsh American\" identity developed.True to the perspective of the Welsh themselves, Lewis's analysis adopts a transnational view of immigration, examining the maintenance of Welsh coal-mining culture in the United States and in Wales. By focusing on Welsh coal miners,Welsh Americansilluminates how Americanization occurred among a distinct group of skilled immigrants and demonstrates the diversity of the labor migrations to a rapidly industrializing America.
eBook
Colonization and Community
In Colonization and Community John Belshaw takes a new look at British Columbia's first working class, the men, women, and children beneath and beyond the pit-head. Beginning with an exploration of emigrant expectations and ambitions, he investigates working conditions, household wages, racism, industrial organization, gender, schooling, leisure, community building, and the fluid identity of the British mining colony, the archetypal west coast proletariat. By connecting the story of Vancouver Island to the larger story of Victorian industrialization, he delineates what was distinctive and what was common about the lot of the settler society. Belshaw breaks new ground, challenging the easy assumptions of transferred British political traditions, analyzing the colonial at the household level, and revealing the emergent communities of Vancouver Island as the cradle of British Columbian working-class culture.
eBook
Reckoning at Eagle Creek
Cultural historian Jeff Biggers takes us to the dark amphitheatre ruins of his family's nearly 200-year-old hillside homestead that has been strip-mined on the edge of the first federally recognized Wilderness Site in southern Illinois. In doing so, he not only comes to grips with his own denied backwoods heritage, but also chronicles a dark and missing chapter in the American experience: the historical nightmare of coal outside of Appalachia, serving as an exposé of a secret legacy of shame and resiliency.
eBook
Making the Most of Tomorrow
Most, one of the most impressive historical cities of Northern Bohemia, was destroyed in the sixties and seventies for coal mining. When plans to redevelop the city began, hope and expectations ran high; in the end, however, Most became a symbol for the heartless incompetence of Czechoslovak communism.In this book, Matěj Spurný explores the historical city of Most from the nineteenth century into the years following World War II, investigating the decision to destroy it as well as the negotiations concerning the spirit of the proposed new city. Situating postwar Most in the context of cultural and social shifts in Czechoslovakia and Europe as a whole, Spurný traces the path a medieval city took to become a showcase of brutalist architecture and the regime’s technicist inhumanity. But the book, like the city of Most itself, does not end in tragedy. Fusing architectural and political history with urban and environmental studies, Spurný’s tale shows the progress that can be made when Czechs confront the crimes of the past—including the expulsion of local Germans and the treatment of the Romani minority—and engage with rational, contemporary European concepts of urban renewal.
eBook