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Dissertation Information for Eric Lloyd Clements

NAME:
- Eric Lloyd Clements

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- Arizona State University (USA) (1997)

ADVISORS:
- Peter Iverson

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Philip VanderMeer
- Robert A. Trennert Jr.

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Bust: The social and political consequences of economic disaster in two Arizona mining communities

Abstract: The history of the American West is replete with stories of the boomtown. The settlement of the West has included the boom and bust of a legion of mining, farming, transportation and timbering communities. The boomtown has been celebrated and examined by everyone from town boosters and antiquarians to professional scholars. Its opposite condition, the busttown, which occurred almost as frequently, has received very little attention from anyone.

Despite the difficulties inherent in researching communities in decline, the effort to do so is worthwhile. The Western cycle of boom and bust has attracted the attention of everyone from the populists of the late nineteenth century to the New Western Historians of the late twentieth, as well as many others in between. Despite much commentary on the meaning of bust, to date historians have made little effort to study the process of bust through the case histories of towns so afflicted. The bust of the Western mining town has received no systematic consideration.

This study draws upon the work of community, urban, labor and mining historians, as well as the sociology of community distress and mass unemployment, to examine the decline of two Arizona mining communities. Tombstone, Arizona, a frontier silver-mining town, flourished in the early 1880s. Jerome, Arizona, a copper-mining community settled in the same period, had nearly fifty years of development, culminating in a final boom period during the 1920s. This dissertation examines the ten year periods of decline--1883 to 1892 in Tombstone, and 1930 to 1939 in Jerome--which followed the great boom days of these two towns. The first three chapters consider the historiography of bust, examine some of the research problems involved with this topic and these particular cases, and establish the histories of these two towns prior to their declines.

The following six chapters demonstrate how bust influenced these communities through the topical examination of their mining industries, economies, demography, social structures and relations, physical conditions, and their governance and leadership. In some cases bust wrought dramatic changes, while in others it had much more subtle, long-term impacts.

Chapter Ten illustrates how residents tried to mitigate the decline of their communities. Chapter Eleven concludes this study with short histories of the two towns since the periods under consideration, and a discussion of the significance of boom and bust in Western historiography and history.

MPACT Scores for Eric Lloyd Clements

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2010-06-22 13:31:11

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