Download or read book Coal Towns written by Crandall A. Shifflett and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using oral histories, company records, and census data, Crandall A. Shifflett paints a vivid portrait of miners and their families in southern Appalachian coal towns from the late nineteenth into the mid-twentieth century. He finds that, compared to their earlier lives on subsistence farms, coal-town life was not all bad. Shifflett examines how this view, quite common among the oral histories of these working families, has been obscured by the middle-class biases of government studies and the Edenic myth of preindustrial Appalachia propagated by some historians. From their own point of view, mining families left behind a life of hard labor and drafty weatherboard homes. With little time for such celebrated arts as tale-telling and quilting, preindustrial mountain people strung more beans than dulcimers. In addition, the rural population was growing, and farmland was becoming scarce. What the families recall about the coal towns contradicts the popular image of mining life. Most miners did not owe their souls to the company store, and most mining companies were not unusually harsh taskmasters. Former miners and their families remember such company benefits as indoor plumbing, regular income, and leisure activities. They also recall the United Mine Workers of America as bringing not only pay raises and health benefits but work stoppages and violent confrontations. Far from being mere victims of historical forces, miners and their families shaped their own destiny by forging a new working-class culture out of the adaptation of their rural values to the demands of industrial life. This new culture had many continuities with the older one. Out of the closely knit social ties they brought from farming communities, mining families created their own safety net for times of economic downturn. Shifflett recognizes the dangers and hardships of coal-town life but also shows the resilience of Appalachian people in adapting their culture to a new environment. Crandall A. Shifflett is an associate professor of history at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
Download or read book Coal Class and Color written by Joe William Trotter and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry written by Joe William Trotter and published by . This book was released on 2024-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays by the foremost labor historian of the Black experience in the Appalachian coalfields. This collection brings together nearly three decades of research on the African American experience, class, and race relations in the Appalachian coal industry. It shows how, with deep roots in the antebellum era of chattel slavery, West Virginia's Black working class gradually picked up steam during the emancipation years following the Civil War and dramatically expanded during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From there, African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry highlights the decline of the region's Black industrial proletariat under the impact of rapid technological, social, and political changes following World War II. It underscores how all miners suffered unemployment and outmigration from the region as global transformations took their toll on the coal industry, but emphasizes the disproportionately painful impact of declining bituminous coal production on African American workers, their families, and their communities. Joe Trotter not only reiterates the contributions of proletarianization to our knowledge of US labor and working-class history but also draws attention to the gender limits of studies of Black life that focus on class formation, while calling for new transnational perspectives on the subject. Equally important, this volume illuminates the intellectual journey of a noted labor historian with deep family roots in the southern Appalachian coalfields.
Download or read book Coalcracker Culture written by Harold W. Aurand and published by Susquehanna University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The knowledge that they traded their lives for a job generated an overarching fear of losing their income."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Mining for the Nation written by Jody Pavilack and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Examines the politics of coal miners in Chile during the 1930s and '40s, when they supported the Communist Party in a project of cross-class alliances aimed at defeating fascism, promoting national development, and deepening Chilean democracy"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Life Work and Rebellion in the Coal Fields written by David Corbin and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1880 and 1922, the coal fields of southern West Virginia witnessed two bloody and protracted strikes, the formation of two competing unions, and the largest armed conflict in American labor history--a week-long battle between 20,000 coal miners and 5,000 state police, deputy sheriffs, and mine guards. These events resulted in an untold number of deaths, indictments of over 550 coal miners for insurrection and treason, and four declarations of martial law. Corbin argues that these violent events were collective and militant acts of aggression interconnected and conditioned by decades of oppression. His study goes a long way toward breaking down the old stereotypes of Appalachian and coal mining culture. This second edition contains a new preface and afterword by author David A. Corbin.
Download or read book Coal Country written by Ewan Gibbs and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The flooding and subsequent closure of Scotland's last deep coal mine in 2002 brought a centuries long saga to an end. Villages and towns across the densely populated Central Belt owe their existence to coal mining's expansion during the nineteenth century and its maturation in the twentieth. Colliery closures and job losses were not just experienced in economic terms: they had profound implications for what it meant to be a worker, a Scot and a resident of an industrial settlement. Coal Country presents the first book-length account of deindustrialization in the Scottish coalfields. It draws on archival research using records from UK government, the nationalized coal industry and trade unions, as well as the words and memories of former miners, their wives and children that were collected in an extensive oral history project. Deindustrialization progressed as a slow but powerful march across the second half of the twentieth century. In this book, big changes in cultural identities are explained as the outcome of long-term economic developments. The oral testimonies bring to life transformations in gender relations and distinct generational workplaces experiences. This book argues that major alterations to the politics of class and nationhood have their origins in deindustrialization. The adverse effects of UK government policy, and centralization in the nationalized coal industry, encouraged miners and their trade union to voice their grievances in the language of Scottish national sovereignty. These efforts established a distinctive Scottish national coalfield community and laid the foundations for a devolved Scottish Parliament. Coal Country explains the deep roots of economic changes and their political reverberations, which continue to be felt as we debate another major change in energy sources during the 2020s.
Download or read book Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields written by Richard J. Callahan and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2008-11-20 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring themes of work and labor in everyday life, Richard J. Callahan, Jr., offers a history of how coal miners and their families lived their religion in eastern Kentucky's coal fields during the early 20th century. Callahan follows coal miners and their families from subsistence farming to industrial coal mining as they draw upon religious idioms to negotiate changing patterns of life and work. He traces innovation and continuity in religious expression that emerged from the specific experiences of coal mining, including the spaces and social structures of coal towns, the working bodies of miners, the anxieties of their families, and the struggle toward organized labor. Building on oral histories, folklore, folksongs, and vernacular forms of spirituality, this rich and engaging narrative recovers a social history of ordinary working people through religion.
Download or read book Coal Cultures written by Derrick Price and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-08-19 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coal is the commodity that powered the technologies that made the modern world. It also brought about unique communities marked by a high degree of social solidarity and self-help. Mining was central to working class life, drawing rural populations into industrial labour, but it often took place in picturesque landscapes, so that its black spoil heaps became a central symbol of the degradation of pastoral life by the demands of an extractive industry. Throughout Europe and the USA photographers have pictured the characteristic landscapes of the industry, and continue to do so as strip mining devastates huge areas of land. Not only landscape photography but also documentary, portraiture, photojournalism and art photography have been used in order to portray mines and miners. This book presents three interlinked strands of investigation. The first is the way in which the production of coal created paradigmatic communities grounded in particular landscapes. The second concerns the role of photography in exploring, delineating and critiquing mining communities. This in turn involves an examination of the aesthetic and social characteristics of a number of genres of photography. Lastly, it considers the growth and decline of these sites, the geographic shift of the industry to other places, and the re-presentation of traditional localities through the lens of the heritage industry and industrial tourism.
Download or read book Classes and Cultures written by Ross McKibbin and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1998 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book McKibbin investigates the ways in which class culture characterised English society and intruded every aspect of life, during the period 1918-1951. He also shows the increasing effects of Americanisation on this culture.
Download or read book Soul Full of Coal Dust written by Chris Hamby and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2020-08-18 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a devastating and urgent work of investigative journalism, Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hamby uncovers the tragic resurgence of black lung disease in Appalachia, its Big Coal cover-up, and the resilient mining communities who refuse to back down. Decades ago, a grassroots uprising forced Congress to enact long-overdue legislation designed to virtually eradicate black lung disease and provide fair compensation to coal miners stricken with the illness. Today, however, both promises remain unfulfilled. Levels of disease have surged, the old scourge has taken an aggressive new form, and ailing miners and widows have been left behind by a dizzying legal system, denied even modest payments and medical care. In this devastating and urgent work of investigative journalism, Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hamby traces the unforgettable story of how these trends converge in the lives of two men: Gary Fox, a black lung-stricken West Virginia coal miner determined to raise his family from poverty, and John Cline, an idealistic carpenter and rural medical clinic worker who becomes a lawyer in his fifties. Opposing them are the lawyers at the coal industry’s go-to law firm; well-credentialed doctors who often weigh in for the defense, including a group of radiologists at Johns Hopkins; and Gary’s former employer, Massey Energy, the region’s largest coal company, run by a cantankerous CEO often portrayed in the media as a dark lord of the coalfields. On the line in Gary and John’s longshot legal battle are fundamental principles of fairness and justice, with consequences for miners and their loved ones throughout the nation. Taking readers inside courtrooms, hospitals, homes tucked in Appalachian hollows, and dusty mine tunnels, Hamby exposes how coal companies have not only continually flouted a law meant to protect miners from deadly amounts of dust but also enlisted well-credentialed doctors and lawyers to help systematically deny much-needed benefits to miners. The result is a legal and medical thriller that brilliantly illuminates how a band of laborers — aided by a small group of lawyers, doctors and lay advocates, often working out of their homes or in rural clinics and tiny offices – challenged one of the world's most powerful forces, Big Coal, and won. A deeply troubling yet ultimately triumphant work, Soul Full of Coal Dust is a necessary and timely book about injustice and resistance.
Download or read book Culture Crash written by Scott Timberg and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that United States' creative class is fighting for survival and explains why this should matter to all Americans.
Download or read book Everybody was Black Down There written by Robert H. Woodrum and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1930 almost 13,000 African Americans worked in the coal mines around Birmingham, Alabama. They made up 53 percent of the mining workforce and some 60 percent of their union's local membership. At the close of the twentieth century, only about 15 percent of Birmingham's miners were black, and the entire mining workforce had been sharply reduced. Robert H. Woodrum offers a challenging interpretation of why this dramatic decline occurred and why it happened during an era of strong union presence in the Alabama coalfields. Drawing on union, company, and government records as well as interviews with coal miners, Woodrum examines the complex connections between racial ideology and technological and economic change. Extending the chronological scope of previous studies of race, work, and unionization in the Birmingham coalfields, Woodrum covers the New Deal, World War II, the postwar era, the 1970s expansion of coalfield employment, and contemporary trends toward globalization. The United Mine Workers of America's efforts to bridge the color line in places like Birmingham should not be underestimated, says Woodrum. Facing pressure from the wider world of segregationist Alabama, however, union leadership ultimately backed off the UMWA's historic commitment to the rights of its black members. Woodrum discusses the role of state UMWA president William Mitch in this process and describes Birmingham's unique economic circumstances as an essentially Rust Belt city within the burgeoning Sun Belt South. This is a nuanced exploration of how, despite their central role in bringing the UMWA back to Alabama in the early 1930s, black miners remained vulnerable to the economic and technological changes that transformed the coal industry after World War II.
Download or read book Classes Cultures and Politics written by Clare V. J. Griffiths and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-07 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume investigates the fields in British history that have been illustrated by the works of Ross McKibbin. Written by a distinguished team of scholars, it examines McKibbin's life and thought, and explores the implications of his arguments.
Download or read book Coal Class Community written by Len Richardson and published by Auckland University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Geographically isolated and long regarded as the "quintessential" proletarians, industrial bogeymen and revolutionaries, coal miners occupy an important place in the history of industrial radicalism in New Zealand. Looking behind the stereotypes, this study tells a story about New Zealand's industrial past, with clear identification of the central issues and attention to the colorful personalities involved.
Download or read book Cultural Studies written by Ien Ang and published by Routledge. This book was released on 1992-11-12 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Disability in Industrial Britain written by Mike Mantin and published by Disability History. This book was released on 2020-01-06 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines disability and disabled people in British coalmining, an industry with high levels of injury and disease and where, as one outsider noted, streets 'thronged with the maimed and mutilated'.
