The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 84, July 1980 - April, 1981 Page: 374
502 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
ver, and other metals underground in the West in the 1860-1910
period" (Wyman, Hard Rock Epic, p. ix).
Brown is somewhat less expansive than this. His book is briefer, and
it is more directly concerned with the miners' experience, lifestyle, and
social order. Hence, although such institutional topics as management
policy and unionism are treated, the main themes of this book are who
the miners were, what they experienced, and what they contributed.
The best passages are those dealing with the ethnic composition of the
workforce, the methods and hazards of working underground, the so-
cial life of the mining camps, and the workers' positive and negative
interactions with management. The author stresses the contributions
which the hard-rock men made in opening the Mountain West, and he
concludes that they won a living which compared well with other in-
dustrial workers of the period.
Hard-Rock Miners is a well-researched book, heavily based upon
primary sources, such as those collected at the Western History Collec-
tion of the University of Colorado and at the Western History Re-
search Center of the University of Wyoming. It is also a well-informed
and objective treatment, which handles such volatile topics as man-
agerial .exploitation and working-class radicalism dispassionately. On
the negative side, the author's restriction of his study to the "inter-
mountain" region seems somewhat questionable, since he has thus
omitted not only California, but also the states of Idaho and Montana,
both of which had important mining-labor movements and both of
which can be considered "intermountain." Despite this drawback, the
book is a good one, well researched and written and insightful in its
treatment of a fascinating way of life that is no more.
Montana State University MICHAEL P. MALONE
Retreat From Reconstruction, 1869-1879. By William Gillette. (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. Pp. xiv+463. Pref-
ace, bibliography, index. $27.50.)
This political history of Reconstruction rests on massive research in
the papers of participants, government records, contemporary journals,
and newspapers. The focus is on the second administration of Ulysses
S. Grant, with considerable attention given to the liberal Republican
movement of 1872, the disputed election of 1876, and the civil rights
legislation that came between those years. The author details local
events in Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, and Alabama, and has374
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 84, July 1980 - April, 1981, periodical, 1980/1981; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101225/m1/422/: accessed May 16, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.