| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Michael A. Amundson. Yellowcake Towns: Uranium Mining Communities in the American West. (Mining the American West.) Boulder: University Press of Colorado. 2002. Pp. xxiv, 204. $24.96.

Many authors have explored the atomic age in American history and culture, but few have studied the communities that mined and manufactured the key elements of atomic power. Michael A. Amundson compares the fates of four mining communities—Uravan, Colorado; Moab, Utah; Jeffrey City, Wyoming; and Grants, New Mexico—at the center of the mid-twentieth-century uranium boom. As part of the University Press of Colorado's new "Mining the American West" series, his book adds an important dimension to the familiar story of mining in the region. Uranium towns shared much with other mining communities: isolation, unpredictable markets, cultural identities joined to the industry, corporate consolidation, decline, and a toxic legacy. Yet they were unique in their pursuit of ore steeped in secrecy and potential danger and, Amundson argues, in their dependence on federal policies. 1

Changing federal policies for the domestic industry led to booms and bust for the uranium industry and its communities. The author focuses on this "colonialist" control rather than any human agency that might have shaped work or community life. He uncritically outlines Cold War demands for atomic ores and shows how, from World War II to the end of the federally subsidized market in 1970, the government controlled the uranium market for national security purposes. Government contracts assured corporate profits, and by 1958 production had expanded across eight western states. When federal supports were curtailed to open supplies to international markets, a short burst of commercial demand in the 1970s came to a dramatic end by the 1980s. . . .

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