This is a companion volume to Lankton's Cradle to the Grave: Life, Work, and Death at the Lake Superior Copper Mines (OUP/USA 1991). That book dealt with work experience and technological change in the Lake Superior -- Upper Michigan region. Beyond the Boundaries focuses on the people of this region and how the copper mining affected their daily lives. It is much more social history than it is technological history.

Beyond the Boundaries is a companion volume to Larry Lankton's Cradle to Grave: Life, Work, and Death at the Lake Superior Copper Mines, winner of the Great Lakes History Prize. That book dealt with work experience and technological change in the Lake Superior-Upper Michigan region, while Beyond the Boundaries focuses on the people of this region and how the copper mining affected their daily lives.

Concentrating on technology, economics, labor, and social history, Cradle to Grave documents the full life cycle of one of America's great mineral ranges from the 1840s to the 1960s. Lankton examines the workers' world underground, but is equally concerned with the mining communities on the surface. For the first fifty years of development, these mining communities remained remarkably harmonious, even while new, large companies obliterated traditional forms of organization and work within the industry. By 1890, however, the Lake Superior copper industry of upper Michigan started facing many challenges, including strong economic competition and a declining profit margin; growing worker dissatisfaction with both living and working conditions; and erosion of the companies' hegemony in a district they once controlled. Lankton traces technological changes within the mines and provides a thorough investigation of mine accidents and safety. He then focuses on social and labor history, dealing especially with the issue of how company paternalism exerted social control over the work force. A social history of technology, Cradle to Grave will appeal to labor, social and business historians.

This title details a century and a half of copper mining along Upper Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula, from the arrival of the first incorporated mines in the 1840s until the closing of the last mine in the mid-1990s. In "Hollowed Ground", author Larry Lankton tells the story of two copper industries on Lake Superior - native copper mining, which produced about 11 billion pounds of the metal from the 1840s until the late 1960s, and copper sulfide mining, which began in the 1950s and produced another 4.4 billion pounds of copper through the 1990s. In addition to documenting companies and their mines, mills, and smelters, Hollowed Ground is also a community study. It examines the region's population and ethnic mix, which was a direct result of the mining industry, and the companies' paternalistic involvement in community building. While this book covers the history of the entire Lake Superior mining industry, it particularly focuses on the three biggest, most important, and longest-lived companies: Calumet & Hecla, Copper Range, and Quincy. Lankton shows the extent of the companies' influence over their mining locations, as they constructed the houses and neighborhoods of their company towns, set the course of local schools, saw that churches got land to build on, encouraged the growth of commercial villages on the margin of a mine, and even provided pasturage for workers' milk cows and space for vegetable gardens. Lankton also traces the interconnected fortunes of the mining communities and their companies through times of bustling economic growth and periods of decline and closure. "Hollowed Ground" presents a wealth of images from Upper Michigan's mining towns, reflecting a century and a half of unique community and industrial history. Local historians, industrial historians, and anyone interested in the history of Michigan's Upper Peninsula will appreciate this informative volume.