New Article in Change Over Time

I am happy to have an article featured in the new issue of Change Over Time: An International Journal of Conservation and the Built Environment. This is a thematic issue, concerned with Landscapes of Extraction.  

My article, Contested Landscapes of Displacement: Oliver Iron and Minnesota's Hibbing District,  explores the ways that communities, the iron industry, and the state responded to iron mining development in Minnesota's Mesabi Range. As open pit mines expanded during the 1910s, all but two communities were forced to relocate to make way for an expanding mine. Archival records reveal that communities contested mining displacements, yet this social negotiation over mining is relatively absent in current interpretative discourse. Instead, state agencies have reimagined the mining landscape, filling former mines with trout and removing much of the built environment in an effort to promote a recreational landscape atop a postindustrial one. These actions have fostered a distorted collective memory of the region's past and an industrial landscape where historical features are treated as recreational areas rather than cultural resources.
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You can download the article, and peruse other interesting research from the special issue in the link above.