Books
Leech is completing a new book titled Imaginary Mines: Monster Movies, Sad Songs, Tough-Guy TV, & Other Places Mining Appears in American Pop Culture.
Previous books include:
The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and Its Expanding Berkeley Pit. University of Nevada Press. 2018. Mining & Society Series. (Received the Clark Spence Award for the Best Book in Mining History, 2017-2018.)
Feasts and Festivals: The Story of Winter Traditions at Augustana College (Rock Island, IL: Augustana Historical Society and East Hall Press, November 2023). A short book that contains some of my writing as well as writing and interviews completed by students in my oral history course.
Public writing
Sometimes Leech gets to write short pieces for a broad audience, including the following.
“Zombie Mines and Bloody Valentines,” Network in Canadian Environmental History, February 2020.
Selected Scholarly Articles & Chapters
As with most academics, many of Leech’s publications can be found in academic journals, although non-historians would be surprised at how readable most history is!
“Canary in the Coal Mine: From Mine Safety Technique to Animal Metaphor,” Comparative American Studies: An International Journal 21, no. 1-2 (2024): 85-100.
“Sweet Solution, Sticky Situation: Mill Technology, Organized Labor, and the Midwestern Origins of High Fructose Corn Syrup,” Middle West Review 10, no. 1 (Fall 2023): 93-126.
“Feeling Senti-metal: Frontier Nostalgia, Mining Masculinity, and Corporate Landscapes in the U.S. American Reality Series TV Series Gold Rush,” in To the Last Drop: Affective Economies of Extraction and Sentimentality, eds. Axelle Germanaz, Daniela Gutiérrez Fuentes, Sarah Marak, Paul Heike (Berlin and Bielefeld, Germany: Verlag, 2023), 137-162.
“Butte Undermined: Complaint Files, Community Activism, and the Slow Violence of Mine Subsidence in Butte, Montana, 1940-1990,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 72, no. 2 (Summer 2022): 21-37.
“Confronting Kennecott: The Lost City of Bingham Canyon and the History of Mining-Induced Resettlement,” in Born with a Copper Spoon: A Global History of Copper and How It Fed the Modern World, eds. Robrecht Declercq, Hans Otto Froland, and Duncan Money (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, November 2022), 183-203.
“Making Locals through Local Agriculture: Citizenship and Urban Gardens in Rock Island, Illinois, 1913-2018,” with Christopher Strunk, Food, Culture & Society 24, no. 5 (November 2021): 639-662.
“Surveying the Minds: New Trends and Key Classics in Mining History,” with Eric C. Nystrom, The Mining History Journal 27, no. 1 (December 2020): 40-54.
“Nuclear Free Montana: Grassroots Environmentalism and Montana’s Antinuclear Initiatives,” in Nature and the Iron Curtain: Environmental Policy and Social Movements in Communist and Capitalist Countries, 1945-1990, eds. Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and J.R. McNeill (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 116-136.
“Competition, Community, and Entertainment: The Anaconda Company’s Promotion of Mine Safety in Butte, Montana, 1915-1942,” The Mining History Journal 24, no. 1 (2017): 19-39. (Received the John Townley Award for Best Article Published in the Mining History Journal in 2017.)
“Protest, Power, and the Pit: Fighting Open-Pit Mining in Butte, Montana,” Montana The Magazine of Western History 62, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 24-43. (Received the Vivian A. Palladin Award for best article published in Montana: The Magazine of Western History in 2012.)
“Boom, Bust, and the Berkeley Pit: How Insiders and Outsiders Viewed the Mining Landscape of Butte, Montana,” IA: The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archaeology 37, no. 1-2 (2011): 153-170.
Book and Media Reviews
Leech writes a lot of reviews. Below are a few of them:
Review of Martin Stupich, Ore and Empire: Conquistadors to Guggenheims on the Camino Real (University of New Mexico Press, 2025), H-Environment, H-Net Reviews, February 2026.
Review of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, directed by Gil Kenan. Environmental History 30, no. 4 (October 2025): 746-748.
Review of Andrew Gulliford, Bears Ears: Landscape of Refuge and Resistance (University of Utah Press, 2022), Journal of American History 111, no. 1 (June 2024): 134-135.
Review of Jeremy Zallen, American Lucifers: The Dark History of American Light, 1750-1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), The American Historical Review 129, no. 1 (March 2024): 311–312.
Participant in “Megan Black, The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power,” H-Environment Roundtable 13, no. 3 (March 2023).
Review of John Sandlos and Arn Keeling. Mining Country: A History of Canada’s Mines and Miners. (Toronto: James Lorimer & Company, 2021), Network in Canadian History and Environment, July 14, 2022.
Review of Coal County, USA: Miners for Democracy in Utah and the West (University of Utah Press, 2019), H-Environment, H-Net Reviews, April 2021.
“Even Bigger than the Great Lakes: On Nancy Langston’s Sustaining Lake Superior.” Review of Nancy Langston, Sustaining Lake Superior: an Extraordinary Lake in a Changing World (Yale University Press, 2017), Cleveland Review of Books, December 26, 2019.
Collaborative Projects
Leech is involved in collaborative scholarly projects, including the following:
H-Net, 2026 Editorial Project Fellowship, for a collaborative workshop on the Extractive Midwest. Co-editors Sarah Mittlefehldt, Hayden Nelson, Jeff Schramm, and myself will use this fellowship to develop an edited volume on extraction in the American Midwest.
Energy History Working Group, Co-Convener since 2021, Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, Philadelphia, PA. (International, year-round working group, sharing and evaluating works in progress every month). Co-convened with Sarah Stanford McIntyre and Robert Lifset.