LMN is delighted to announce our sixth and final Resisting Mining Book Club of 2025 with guest speaker Megan Black, who will be speaking about her book The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power (Harvard University Press, 2018).

About the book:

When one thinks of the history of U.S. global expansion, the Department of the Interior rarely comes to mind. Its very name declares its narrow portfolio. Yet The Global Interior reveals that a government organ best known for managing domestic natural resources and operating national parks has constantly supported and projected American power.

Interior’s first task was to oversee settler colonialism in the American West. When that seemed complete, the department maintained its role but expanded its reach. Megan Black’s detailed analysis shows how, throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the Department of the Interior cultivated and exploited its image as an innocuous scientific-research and environmental-management organisation in order to drive and satisfy America’s insatiable demand for raw materials. Interior continues to operate in indigenous lands, from coal mining on the Crow reservation to oil leasing on the Blackfeet reservation. It pushes the boundaries of territoriality through offshore drilling and, in the guise of sharing expertise with the underdeveloped world, it has led lithium surveys in Afghanistan. Indeed, Interior is now more than global: the department now manages a satellite that prospects natural resources in outer space.

Black demonstrates that in a period marked by global commitments to self-determination, Interior helped the United States maintain key benefits of empire without the burden of playing the imperialist villain. As other expansionist justifications—manifest destiny, hemispheric pacification, Cold War exigencies—fell by the wayside, Interior ensured that the environment itself would provide the foundational logic of American hegemony.

Megan will give an introductory lecture which will be followed by a Q&A. You do not need to have read the book to attend this meeting. However, registered attendees will be sent extracts in advance.

About the author:

Megan Black is an Associate Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a historian of US environmental management, foreign relations, science and technology studies, capitalism, and settler colonialism. Her book, The Global Interior, received four top prizes in history, and her articles have appeared in numerous journals. Her teaching interests span the fields of environmental history, foreign relations history, history of capitalism, science and technology studies, and histories of the U.S. West and settler colonialism. Her new book project follows a community in Colorado who battled a powerful international corporation intent on blasting through their mountain in search of a mineral of increasing importance to 1970s globalization.