Copper Camp is a Montana classic. First published in 1943 and long out of print, Copper Camp is available again, bigger and better than ever with 25 new historical photos chosen specifically for this edition. Copper Camp contains hundreds of brawling, bawdy, over-the-top, laugh-out-loud stories about Butte during the height of the copper mining in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Each story is told with keen wit, love, and appreciation for the world’s greatest copper camp and the people who lived, loved, played, and worked there. Writers for the Works Projects Administration compiled the stories. Their aim was to reveal “the wealth of human interest held within the folds of the ‘richest hill on earth.’ Instead of the Copper Kings, here are the kids and characters, ministers, miners, mothers, girls from the line, bankers, and barkeeps. Of such stuff as strikes, parades, politics and people – above all, of rawboned, lively, honest-to-God people – is a mining camp composed; and Butte, in the opinion of many experts, if THE mining camp. Copper Camp has been described as “a roaring human document that is as strong, and important as the town of Butte, Montana.” If you want to understand Butte, then read this book. If you want to experience the sheer joy of a wonderful book that takes you to a totally different time and place, then Copper Camp is for you, too.

Stories about life in Butte during its fabulous mining heyday.

Undermining Race rewrites the history of race, immigration, and labor in the copper industry in Arizona. The book focuses on the case of Italian immigrants in their relationships with Anglo, Mexican, and Spanish miners (and at times with blacks, Asian Americans, and Native Americans), requiring a reinterpretation of the way race was formed and figured across place and time. Phylis Martinelli argues that the case of Italians in Arizona provides insight into “in between” racial and ethnic categories, demonstrating that the categorizing of Italians varied from camp to camp depending on local conditions—such as management practices in structuring labor markets and workers’ housing, and the choices made by immigrants in forging communities of language and mutual support. Italians—even light-skinned northern Italians—were not considered completely “white” in Arizona at this historical moment, yet neither were they consistently racialized as non-white, and tactics used to control them ranged from micro to macro level violence. To make her argument, Martinelli looks closely at two “white camps” in Globe and Bisbee and at the Mexican camp of Clifton-Morenci. Comparing and contrasting the placement of Italians in these three camps shows how the usual binary system of race relations became complicated, which in turn affected the existing race-based labor hierarchy, especially during strikes. The book provides additional case studies to argue that the biracial stratification system in the United States was in fact triracial at times. According to Martinelli, this system determined the nature of the associations among laborers as well as the way Americans came to construct “whiteness.”

“I realize that I am a soldier of production whose duties are as important in this war as those of the man behind the gun.” So began the pledge that many home front men took at the outset of World War II when they went to work in the factories, fields, and mines while their compatriots fought in the battlefields of Europe and on the bloody beaches of the Pacific. The male experience of working and living in wartime America is rarely examined, but the story of men like these provides a crucial counter-narrative to the national story of Rosie the Riveter and GI Joe that dominates scholarly and popular discussions of World War II. In Meet Joe Copper, Matthew L. Basso describes the formation of a powerful, white, working-class masculine ideology in the decades prior to the war, and shows how it thrived—on the job, in the community, and through union politics. Basso recalls for us the practices and beliefs of the first- and second-generation immigrant copper workers of Montana while advancing the historical conversation on gender, class, and the formation of a white ethnic racial identity. Meet Joe Copper provides a context for our ideas of postwar masculinity and whiteness and finally returns the men of the home front to our reckoning of the Greatest Generation and the New Deal era.

Atlases accompany 1885-1891, 1894,1895, 1897-1904.

This is the first book devoted to Montana's long history of industrial newspaper ownership and the consequences for democracy. The work also reveals the costs paid by owners and their journalists, whose credibility eroded as their increasingly constricted newspapers lapsed into ambivalence and indifference. The story offers a timeless study of the conflict between commerce and the notion of a free and independent press.