Miners' candlestick patents

Born in Marseilles, Louis Simonin (1830–86) became a leading mining engineer of his age. He travelled widely on government and private commissions, particularly around the United S...

This chapter focuses on C. Francis Jenkins' inventions that he sold through several business startups. Until the late 1920s, Jenkins had no significant outside corporate sponsors. ...

Arguably the first celebrity scientist, and the epitome of the 'Romantic' natural philosopher, Sir Humphry Davy (1778–1829) was a brilliant lecturer whose popularising of science m...

Coal Dust on Your Feet is a historical ethnography of Shamokin, Pennsylvania and its surrounding borough of Coal Township. This anthracite coal fueled the industrial revolution and...

Set against the turbulent backdrop of the UK miners’ strike (1984–5), Billy Elliot (2000) follows eleven-year-old Billy as he pursues his dream of becoming a ballet dancer. Hailed ...

This introductory chapter gathers a number of local histories and suggests that although many Americans worshipped in churches and worked on shop floors, most lived in the space be...

This chapter takes an interesting proposition—that danger makes people particularly receptive to religion—and uses the examples of the supposed piety of miners and fishermen to exp...