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The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and Its Expanding Berkeley Pit

by Brian James Leech

University of Nevada Press, 2018
Cloth: 978-1-943859-42-9 | eISBN: 978-0-87417-598-1 | Paper: 978-1-948908-29-0
Library of Congress Classification HD9539.C7
Dewey Decimal Classification 338.27430978668

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Winner of the Mining History Association Clark Spence Award for the Best Book in Mining History, 2017-2018

Brian James Leech provides a social and environmental history of Butte, Montana’s Berkeley Pit, an open-pit mine which operated from 1955 to 1982. Using oral history interviews and archival finds, The City That Ate Itself explores the lived experience of open-pit copper mining at Butte’s infamous Berkeley Pit. Because an open-pit mine has to expand outward in order for workers to extract ore, its effects dramatically changed the lives of workers and residents. Although the Berkeley Pit gave consumers easier access to copper, its impact on workers and community members was more mixed, if not detrimental.

The pit’s creeping boundaries became even more of a problem. As open-pit mining nibbled away at ethnic communities, neighbors faced new industrial hazards, widespread relocation, and disrupted social ties. Residents variously responded to the pit with celebration, protest, negotiation, and resignation. Even after its closure, the pit still looms over Butte. Now a large toxic lake at the center of a federal environmental cleanup, the Berkeley Pit continues to affect Butte’s search for a postindustrial future.

REVIEWS

“The City That Ate Itselfbrings together environmental history, labor history, social history, and history of technology in an entirely novel and highly compelling way. Many historians have taken on one or more of these topics in analyzing the history of Butte, yet none has brought them together as skillfully as Leech does here. Moreover, Leech’s focus on the postwar period is still fairly rare in the literature and highly valuable. The scholarship here is superb. Leech has immersed himself in both the primary and secondary material, and almost every page bristles with footnotes derived from entirely original archival research.”

— Timothy J. LeCain

“The City that Ate Itself: A Social and Environmental History of Butte, Montana and Its Expanding Berkeley Pit is an in-depth history of Butte, Montana, that focuses on its infamous open-pit copper mine, the Berkeley Pit. Overall, the book’s scholarship is impeccable. Leech makes a persuasive case that Butte’s modern history has been dominated by the switch to open pit mining and the growing Berkeley Pit. While Butte has received a good deal of attention from social historians and historians of western mining, Leech’s focus on the modern open pit era of mining is genuinely new. Leech’s manuscript also makes outstanding use of oral history interviews as a source base. He has clearly devoted an enormous of amount of time and effort to research so many oral histories, even conducting many of them himself. The oral histories allow him to bring a fresh perspective to the social and cultural dimensions of open pit mining and community change. Other books in this field have emphasized technological changes or policy shifts, but the oral histories allow Leech to really get at the lived experience of those individuals in Butte who lived beside the growing Berkeley Pit.”

— Jeffrey T. Manuel

"The City That Ate Itself is an important contribution to the historical scholarship on resource extraction and industrial communities in North America, a literature that has grown significantly in size and sophistication in the past twenty years or so. Well written and well illustrated, the book makes novel links between the urban social history of the city (and experiences of its residents) and the “envirotechnical” landscapes of large-scale mineral production. In doing so, this study generates insights relevant to the environmental history and historical geography of mines and their cities well beyond Butte."

— H-NET Reviews

The City That Ate Itself makes a valuable contribution not only to Butte and Montana history, but also to the scholarship of the transition that many communities must undergo as they move into post-industrial futures.

— Montana The Magazine of Western History

His [Leech’s] discussion is the fairest, least judgmental, and least anti-corporate assessment of environmental damages that I have read. But what makes this book so special is that Leech understands that the Pit undid and re-did everything and that it touched every aspect of life in Butte... His is a cautionary tale, to be sure, but one with lessons that extend far beyond Butte.

— Utah Historical Quarterly

The City That Ate Itself is a deeply researched, carefully contextualized, and thoughtfully constructed book. By turning our attention to the ways mining, the environment, and social change are mutually constituted and interdependent, Leech joins with the recent work of other environmental historians—notably Thomas Andrews, Timothy LeCain, and Jeffrey Manuel—who have helped us reimagine the centrality of mining and minerals in forging the American past.

— Pacific Historical Review

Leech has written a comprehensive history of Butte's difficult path and a sympathetic investigation into what keeps the city going despite continuing challenges...Leech tells Butte's story in impressive detail with commendable nuance...His book reads like first-rate journalism, carefully accumulating relevant facts and letting the reader draw conclusions.

— Economic History Review

There is considerably more going on in The City That Ate Itself than can be covered in a short review: open pit work’s effects on male workers’ sense of camaraderie, independence, and status; the impacts of noise, hazards, and displacement on social geography; excellent technical descriptions of evolving mining methods. Suffice it to say, the book is a significant contribution to understanding the history of “an industrial center in the middle of the rural West,” (4) and, in a larger context, provides a template to investigate the social and environmental histories of other industrial cities across the Great Plains and mountain regions.

— Great Plains Research

With The City That Ate Itself Leech offers a vital addition not only to historiographies focused on Butte or mining in general, but also to our understanding of the history of the American West. This monograph offers a blueprint that future researchers may follow when examining the rise and decline of similar extractive communities, not only across the region, but nationally and even globally. As it stands, The City That Ate Itself should be a welcome addition to the collection of anyone even tangentially interested in this topic.

— Western Historical Quarterly

… a good read and useful for understanding Butte history, open-pit mining, and how American cities coped with the post-industrial era.

— Technology and Culture

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