Is There Such a Thing as a Sustainable Mining Boom?

An Early-20th-Century Copper Company Has Lessons for the Industry Today

In the Western U.S. and the north of Chile, large-scale mining has produced similar landscapes of extraction: open-pit and underground mines, smelter stacks, and large masonry structures. Transportation networks connected remote places to the world market, while many labor camps evolved into complex and vibrant communities. They also left their footprint on the natural environment: Polluted water and toxic fumes have made many of these sites inhabitable.

No other company left such a strong imprint in the mining regions of the Americas as the Anaconda Copper Mining Company—a “monstruous and complex …

A Letter From Santiago, Where Chileans Are Seeking a New Constitution | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

A Letter From Santiago, Where Chileans Are Seeking a New Constitution

Hopes Are High for Transforming the Country’s Democracy, but the Risks May Be Even Higher

Chile is raising hopes and winning praise worldwide as it elects delegates to a new convention with the goal of replacing the current constitution, a 1980 product of Augusto Pinochet’s …

How Concentration Camp Prisoners Found Comfort in Imaginary Feasts

From Ravensbrück to Mao’s Labor Camps, Inmates Recited Family Recipes to Preserve Their Humanity

When the Soviet Union sent Dmitri Likhachev to an offshore detention camp in February 1928, the Russian scholar was crammed onto a train car with other prisoners and handed a …