Books about Boomtown from Amazon.com

This book examines how small towns best prosper by leveraging their resources and working with local and state officials to break through the "one-company town" mindset to attract industry and new business relocations. In the book, Jack Schultz identifies seven and one-half factors that small towns must employ to attract new business relocations or spur new business start-ups, including a collective vision, local support and an entrepreneurial spirit..
Price: $16.75 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Anthropology

A revealing inquiry into how global culture is lived locally

Every summer for almost forty years, tens of thousands of Moroccan emigrants from as far away as Norway and Germany have descended on the duty-free smugglers' cove/migrant frontier boomtown of Nador, Morocco. David McMurray investigates the local effects of the multiple linkages between Nador and international commodity circuits, and analyzes the profound effect on everyday life of the free flow of bodies, ideas, and commodities into and out of the region.

Combining immigration and population statistics with street-level ethnography, In and Out of Morocco covers a wide range of topics, including the origin and nature of immigrant nostalgia, the historical evolution of the music of migration in the region, and the influence of migrant wealth on social distinctions in Nador. Groundbreaking in its attention to the performative aspects of life in a smuggling border zone, the book also analyzes the way in which both migration and smuggling have affected local structures of feeling by contributing to the spread of hyperconsumption. The result is a rare and revealing inquiry into how the global culture is lived locally.

David A. McMurray is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Oregon in Corvallis..
Price: $14.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Imagine a place where everyone's favorite thing to do is blow stuff up . . . that's Boomtown

This is a humerous mystery and adventure story that kids (especially boys) will love to read! Boomtown is the home of Chang's Famous Fireworks factory, the Slush Olympics, the "Fighting Slugs" football team, rocket reindeer, and flying barber chairs. Boomtown is a humorous tall tale about a fictional town and its odd residents, written to capture the attention and inspire the imagination of intermediate readers. It's a fun read. However, underneath the humorous veneer, Boomtown asks and answers the question, "What does a healthy community look like?" The main characters struggle as they learn to trust their neighbors.

Visit the Web site www.visitboomtown.com for more information on the book, author, free teacher guides, and more! But stay away from the chickens!

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Price: $7.85 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The image of Old West saloons as sites of violence and raucous entertainment has been perpetuated by film and legend, but the true story of such establishments is far more complex. In Boomtown Saloons, archaeologist Kelly J. Dixon recounts the excavation of four historic saloon sites in Nevada's Virginia City, one of the West's most important boomtowns, and shows how the physical traces of this handful of disparate drinking places offer a new perspective on authentic life in the mining West.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Comstock Lode's mineral wealth attracted people from all over the world. At its peak, Virginia City had a cosmopolitan population of over 20,000 people. Like people everywhere, they sought to pass their leisure time in congenial company, often in one or another of the four saloons studied here. Dixon's account of the role these four establishments played in the social and economic life of Virginia City offers keen insight into the businesses and people who made up the backdrop of a mining boomtown. The saloons in this study were quieter than legend would have us believe; they served relatively distinct groups and offered their customers a place of refuge, solidarity, and social contact with peers in a city where few people had longtime ties or initially any close contacts.

Boomtown Saloons also offers an equally vivid portrait of the modern historical archaeologist who combines time-honored digging, reconstruction, and analysis methods with such cutting-edge technology as DNA analysis of saliva traces on a 150-year-old pipestem and chemical analysis of the residue in discarded condiment bottles. The book is illustrated with historical photographs and maps, as well as photographs of artifacts uncovered during the excavations of the four sites. Dixon's sparkling text and thoughtful interpretation of evidence reveal an unknown aspect of daily life in one of the West's most storied boomtowns and demonstrate that, contrary to legend, the traditional western saloon served an vital and complex social role in its community..
Price: $21.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

First published in 1989, Boomtown Blues examines the remarkable 100-year history of oil shale development and chronicles the social, environmental, and financial havoc created by the industry’s continual cycles of boom and bust..
Price: $22.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The dawn of the 1950s signaled a boom time for many American cities, flush with new families in the years after World War II. In Clifton, founded in 1917, far-flung western farms were transformed into a new suburbia. The pace of growth was so fast that, decades later, one official would bluntly say, “Clifton wasn’t planned. It just happened.” Decades earlier, there had been a false start. In Clifton’s Allwood, a development of a promised 4,500 Tudor-style homes, construction was interrupted, as elsewhere, by the onslaught of the Great Depression. But the boomtown years would come. People who called this 12-square-mile town home were a reflection of the times and swelled with pride as they cheered the high-energy, high-stepping Clifton Mustang Band and as they watched the 1967 jubilee parade..
Price: $12.25 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The 1920s oil boom changed every aspect of life in the sleepy town of Breckenridge, Texas - employment, social activities, housing, religion, and education - and with these changes came the beginnings of modern American culture. Jazz-Age Boomtown depicts the social history of small-town America and the oil boom phenomenon in a stunning photographic essay. Photographer Basil Clemons photographed not only the oil fields but also many other aspects of Breckenridge's boom - views of main streets, fires, floods, the circus, movie theaters, sporting events, schools, ranches, shops, and restaurantscapturing the essence of the boomtown atmosphere. Clemons, the town's only professional photographer and most eccentric resident, traveled to California, the Pacific Northwest, and Alaska before returning to Texas in 1919 and settling in Breckenridge. His pictures reflect the transformation of rural to urban values in the early twentieth century, providing a visual history of modern American culture..
Price: $6.67 [Notify me when price goes down.]