| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 39.1

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 39.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

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

Too often, studies on American mining towns focus on how the specific extractive element drove local economies and social cultures. Most of the time, the news is not good, for stories of exhilarating prosperity and heartrending failure dominate traditional historic interpretations. In Hard as the Rock Itself, geographer David Robertson takes a fresh interpretive route. In this model comparative study, he looks at the way senses of place and identity forged the community cultures and social legacies of three geographically and culturally disparate hard rock mining towns: Cokedale, Colorado; Toluca, Illinois; and Picher, Oklahoma.

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