Gwendolyn Lockman
PhD, The University of Texas at Austin, 2023

“Greening a Copper City: Parks, Mining, and Community in Butte, Montana, 1879-2020,” examines one mining community for nearly 150 years to tell its urban, environmental, and cultural history through its parks. I argue that community members, mining companies, and government officials leveraged parks as tools for remediation agendas seeking to fix social, economic, and environmental problems in Butte. This interdisciplinary study employs methods from labor history, leisure and recreative studies, environmental humanities, and garden and landscape studies to tell a layered history of people, place, and policy. Key sources include archival collections of government documents, maps, personal papers, tickets, programs, and ephemera, as well as census and vital records, oral histories, newspaper and magazine articles, literature, and photographs.