Laurie Mercier is a professor of history at Washington State University Vancouver. She is the author of Speaking History: Oral Histories of the American Past, 1865-Present.
Winner of the Clark C. Spence Award, the Mining History
Association, 2004.
"An important and evocative story of community unionism, the values
of solidarity and mutual support, and the creative agency of men
and women working together and, at times, against one another in
making a living and a life. . . . The seamlessness with which
Mercier weaves the tensions and possibilities of gender, class,
ethnic and labor relations into the larger community story is
particularly impressive."--Janet L. Finn, Oregon Historical
Quarterly
"Mercier's Anaconda demonstrates the great potential of a
community study-- she respectfully probes the bonds and divisions
of a vibrant town and in the process places Anaconda within a
broader regional and national framework."--Journal of American
History
"With painstaking attention to ethnic, gender, and class dynamics,
and utilizing rich archival and oral history sources, Laurie
Mercier has produced a finely written and richly excavated study of
the century-long relationship between the powerful Anaconda Copper
Mining Company (ACM) and the local working-class community it
helped create."--Indiana Magazine of History
"In Laurie Mercier's Anaconda, the smelter city once
called the ‘City of Whispers' rings with the voices of working
people whose community unionism contested corporate control and
whose memories challenge corporate history. Subtle, sophisticated,
passionately human, Anaconda recasts in local textures
the opposing claims of class, capital, and gender in the cold war
West."--Elizabeth Jameson, author of All That Glitters: Class,
Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek
"Anaconda is a splendid study of one of the most neglected
topics in western history. In richly textured prose laced with the
voices of dozens of Anacondans, Laurie Mercier reveals the
intricate twinings of gender and class that enabled this
working-class community to resist the conservative and confining
ideologies of cold war America. This is a work that will help
rewrite post-World War II western history."--Mary Murphy, author
of Mining Cultures: Men, Women, and Leisure in Butte, 1914-41
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