San Antonio College Library

When the colorful western prospectors had made their strikes and moved on, they left behind them another, lesser known breed of men, the hard-rock miners. For six decades these men followed mining opportunities into the boom towns of the intermountain West and gouged from the depths of other men's wealth. In mines ranging from prospect holes to underground extractories, they picked and blasted, sometimes in shifts of twelve hours, and found not only...

It would be tempting to describe Gumboots as a South African version of Tap Dogs or even Lord of the Dance, and based solely on this recording, it wouldn't be that far off. The "gumboots" of the title refers to boots that South African mineworkers used to wear. Often adorned with bottle tops, they could also be used as percussive instruments as the workers performed a variety of dances. Most recently, they've been endorsed as a symbol of self-expression...

The life of miners in Mexico, their exploitation by capitalists and the role of the church in keeping them docile. A novel of protest, narrated by the son of a miner.

This documentary showing a day in the life of immigrant women chipping rocks into gravel outside Dar-es-Salaam, is both a protest against the oppression of African Women and a tribute to their resilience. In this film, the camera acts as a compassionate witness to a day in the life of Mozambican women refugees. We slowly come to recognize that these women are, in fact, parts of a giant machine, not just the quarry but the international economic system...

Presents an account of the 2010 San Jose mine rescue in Chile, in which all thirty-three miners miraculously survived, providing intimate details of life inside the mine as well as the dramatic rescue operation above ground.

The anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania, five hundred square miles of rugged hills stretching between Tower City and Carbondale, harbored coal deposits that once heated virtually all the homes and businesses in Eastern cities. At its peak during World War I, the coal industry here employed 170,000 miners, and supported almost 1,000,000 people. Today, with coal workers numbering 1,500, only 5,000 people depend on the industry for their livelihood....

Pitfall: When a miner leaves his employer and treks out with his young son to become a migrant worker, he finds himself moving from one eerie landscape to another, intermittently followed (and photographed) by an enigmatic man in a clean, white suit, and eventually coming face-to-face with his inescapable destiny. Woman in the dunes: An amateur entomologist leaves Tokyo to study an unclassified species of beetle that resides in a remote, vast desert....

"When thousands of stampeders raced to claim their share of the Klondike, reports already circulated that the Canadian gold fields were 'all filled up' and the gold-seekers faced a choice : work for wages at someone else's Klondike mine or search for gold on the American side of the international boundary. Those who chose the Koyukuk River came from as far away as Illinois, Michigan, and New York, and most were woefully unprepared for life above the...