Blog for Week of October 28th

 I thought the city of Potosí in current-day Bolivia was very similar to many towns in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. People tend to live around where the money is, and in both Michigan's U.P. and Potosí, there was labor needed for the mining industry. Although Potosí and the U.P. had very different primary mining resources available in copper and silver, the results of the mining industry remained the same. Large populations developed around the mining communities because that was where resources were most necessary. Additionally, many of the miners in both Potosí and the U.P. had to deal with extremely difficult conditions. A lot of the work was done by immigrants or people who had come from far away for the work. The miners did not have many other choices other than to work in the mines because of their social statuses and backgrounds. Consequently, the mining industry in both communities created booming trade industries. The Upper Peninsula would grow as a series of mining towns and the logging industry would also expand. Potosí became a centralized location for trade since so many people and resources were located there. I find that the connections between Potosí and the U.P. are surprisingly similar. The fact that two vastly different areas of the world in different time periods went through comparable results is remarkable. In human history, patterns often repeat themselves as long as different communities share the smallest similarities. Although Michigan's U.P. had a completely different language, climate, and demographic, the mining industry brought results similar to those in Potosí.