Bisbee, Arizona...July 12, 1917...6:30 a.m.... Just after dawn, two thousand armed vigilantes took to the streets of this remote Arizona mining town to round up members and sympathizers of the radical Industrial Workers of the World. Before the morning was over, nearly twelve hundred alleged Wobblies had been herded onto waiting boxcars. By day's end, they had been hauled off to New Mexico. While the Bisbee Deportation was the most notorious of many vigilante actions of its day, it was more than the climax of a labor-management war—it was the point at which Arizona donned the copper collar. That such an event could occur, James Byrkit contends, was not attributable so much to the marshaling of public sentiment against the I.W.W. as to the outright manipulation of the state's political and social climate by Eastern business interests. In Forging the Copper Collar, Byrkit paints a vivid picture of Arizona in the early part of this century. He demonstrates how isolated mining communities were no more than mercantilistic colonies controlled by Eastern power, and how that power wielded control over all the Arizona's affairs—holding back unionism, creating a self-serving tax structure, and summarily expelling dissidents. Because the years have obscured this incident and its background, the writing of Copper Collar involved extensive research and verification of facts. The result is a book that captures not only the turbulence of an era, but also the political heritage of a state.

Bisbee, Arizona...July 12, 1917...6:30 a.m.... Just after dawn, two thousand armed vigilantes took to the streets of this remote Arizona mining town to round up members and sympathizers of the radical Industrial Workers of the World. Before the morning was over, nearly twelve hundred alleged Wobblies had been herded onto waiting boxcars. By day's end, they had been hauled off to New Mexico. While the Bisbee Deportation was the most notorious of many vigilante actions of its day, it was more than the climax of a labor-management war—it was the point at which Arizona donned the copper collar. That such an event could occur, James Byrkit contends, was not attributable so much to the marshaling of public sentiment against the I.W.W. as to the outright manipulation of the state's political and social climate by Eastern business interests. In Forging the Copper Collar, Byrkit paints a vivid picture of Arizona in the early part of this century. He demonstrates how isolated mining communities were no more than mercantilistic colonies controlled by Eastern power, and how that power wielded control over all the Arizona's affairs—holding back unionism, creating a self-serving tax structure, and summarily expelling dissidents. Because the years have obscured this incident and its background, the writing of Copper Collar involved extensive research and verification of facts. The result is a book that captures not only the turbulence of an era, but also the political heritage of a state.

This comprehensive history of copper mining tells the full story of the industry that produces one of America's most important metals. The first inclusive account of U.S. copper in one volume, Copper for America relates the discovery and development of America's major copper-producing areasÑthe eastern United States, Tennessee, Michigan, Montana, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and AlaskaÑfrom colonial times to the present. Starting with the predominance of New England and the Middle Atlantic states in the early nineteenth century, Copper for America traces the industry's migration to Michigan in mid-century and to Montana, Arizona, and other western states in the late nineteenth century. The book also examines the U.S. copper industry's decline in the twentieth century, studying the effects of strong competition from foreign copper industries and unforeseen changes in the national and global copper markets. An extensively documented chronicle of the rise and fall of individual mines, companies, and regions, Copper for America will prove an essential resource for economic and business historians, historians of technology and mining, and western historians.

A dramatic account of the first one hundred days of FDR's presidency traces the transformation that took place throughout the federal government in the wake of unprecedented bank failures, unemployment, and poverty levels, in a history that also cites the pivotal contributions of the thirty-second president's inner circle. 40,000 first printing.

Now newly updated, America's Kingdom debunks the many myths that now surround the United States's special relationship with Saudi Arabia, also known as "the deal": oil for security. Exploding the long-established myth that the Arabian American Oil Company, Aramco, made miracles happen in the desert, Robert Vitalis shows how oil led the US government to follow the company to the kingdom, and how oil and Aramco quickly became America's largest single overseas private enterprise. From the establishment in the 1930s of a Jim Crow system in the Dhahran oil camps, to the consolidation of America's Kingdom under the House of Fahd, the royal faction that still rules today, this is a meticulously researched account of Aramco as a microcosm of the colonial order.

This is the story of immigrant copper workers and their attempts to organize at the turn of the century in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and El Paso, Texas. These Mexican and European laborers of widely varying backgrounds and languages had little social, economic, or political power. Yet they achieved some surprising successes in their struggles—all in the face of a racist society and the unbridled power of the mine owners. Mellinger's book is the first regional history of these ordinary working people—miners, muckers, millhands, and smelter workers—who labored in the thousands of mountain and desert mining camps across the western heartland early in this century. These men, largely uneducated, frequently moving from camp to camp, subjected to harsh and dangerous conditions, often poorly paid, nevertheless came together for a common purpose. They came from Mexico, from the U.S. Hispanic Southwest, and from several European countries, especially from Greece, Italy, the former Yugoslavia, and Spain. They were far from a homogeneous group. Yet, in part because they set aside ethnic differences to pursue cooperative labor action, they were able to make demands, plan strikes, carry them out, and sometimes actually win. They also won the aid of the Western Federation of Miners and the more radical Industrial Workers of the World. After initial rejection, they were eventually accepted by mainstream unionists. Mellinger discusses towns, mines, camps, companies, and labor unions, but this book is largely about people. In order to reconstruct their mining-community lives, he has used little-known union and company records, personal interviews with old-time workers and their families, and a variety of regional sources that together have enabled him to reveal a complex and significant pattern of social, economic, and political change in the American West.