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Book Review
| Company Towns of the Pacific Northwest. By Linda Carlson. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003. viii + 286 pp. Illustrations, map, notes, bibliography, index. $22.50, paper.)
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It is easy to malign company towns as paternalistic and hence oppressive forms of community. Linda Carlson does not take the easy route. Instead, her book on company towns of the Pacific Northwest recognizes the limits of the popular stereotype. She convincingly illustrates that no one description fits all cases. "But for every generalization, there are exceptions," she notes when comparing towns built by small companies with those by larger corporations (p. 209). |
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The result of Carlson's considerable research is a valuable study of life in company towns in all its basic variations. "Between the last decades of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth century, employers in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho built thousands of communities. The houses and stores and schools, the mines and mills and factories went up on company land, for company employees" (p. 3). Even today a few communities in the Pacific Northwest continue to be privately owned. |
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