| Book Review | Environmental History, 13.1

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 13.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Hard as the Rock Itself: Place and Identity in the American Mining Town. By David Robertson. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2006. Mining the American West series. xiv + 216. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $50.00.

This handsome and well-written book explores an apparent paradox that its author stumbled across while engaged in fieldwork in environmental geography as a budding graduate student. Robertson writes that he was puzzled by the presence of deeply held connections to place among residents of environmentally devastated landscapes in former mining centers of the U.S. West, and he began to wonder why and how mining communities persist beyond "their industrial usefulness" (p. 3). Combing the tools of landscape history and cultural geography, and utilizing a wonderfully rich set of personal interviews, Robertson's book presents three detailed case studies of three very different post-mining communities—Toluca, Illinois, Cokedale, Colorado, and Pitcher, Oklahoma—where he uncovered some answers in similar stories of economic boom, economic decline, deindustrialization, and community persistence.

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