Download or read book Coal Town written by Toby Smith and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Organized at the turn of the century in northeast New Mexico, Dawson grew into one of the Southwest's major coal producers. It was once a bustling town of more than 6,000 people. Run by the Phelps Dodge Corporation, Dawson also became a place that was different than any other company town. Coal Town tells the story of the ordinary people of Dawson, it follows the town's rough-and-tumble beginnings through its glory years just before World War I. It tracks the community's struggles during the Depression, and, finally, its demise in 1950.
Download or read book St Clair written by Anthony Wallace and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012-09-19 with total page 780 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Located near the southern edge of the Pennsylvania anthracite, the town of St. Clair in the early half of the 19th century seemed to be perfectly situated to provide fuel to the iron and steel industry that was the heart of the Industrial Revolution in America. It was a time of unprecedented promise and possibility for the region, and yet, in the years between 1830 and 1880, only grandiose illusions flourished there. St. Clair itself succumbed early on to a devastating economic blight, one that would in time affect anthracite mining everywhere. In this dramatic work of social history, Anthony F. C. Wallace re-creates St. Clair in those years when expectations collided with reality, when the coal trade was in chronic distress, exacerbated by the epic battles between the forces of labor and capital. As he did in his Bancroft Prize-winning Rockdale, Wallace uses public records and private papers to reconstruct the operation of an anthracite colliery and the life of a working-man’s town totally dependent upon it. He describes the labor hierarchy of the collieries, the communal spirit that sprang up in the outlying mine patches, the polyglot immigrant life in the taverns and churchs, and the workingmen’s societies that provided identity to the miners and gave relief to families in distress. He examines the birth of the first effective miners’ union and documents the escalating antagonism between Irish immigrant workers—mostly Catholic—and the Protestant middle classes who owned the collieries. Wallace reveals the blindness, greed, and self-congratulation of the mine owners and operators. These “heroes” of the entrepreneurial wars disregarded geologists’ warnings that the coal seams south of St. Clair were virtually inaccessible and, at best, extremely costly to mine, and then blamed their economic woes on the lack of a high tariff on imported British iron. To cut costs, they ignored the most basic and safety engineering practices and then blamed “the careless miner” and “Irish hooligans” for the catastrophic accidents that resulted. In thrall to a great dream of wealth and power, they plunged ahead to bankruptcy while the miners paid with their lives. St. Clair is a rich and illuminating work of scholarship—an engrossing portrait of a disaster-prone industry (a portrait that stands as a sober warning to the nuclear-power industry) and of the tragic hubris of a ruling class that brough ruin upon a Pennsylvania coal town at a crucial moment in its history.
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 Run written by Tawni O'Dell and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-06-07 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With her eagerly awaited second novel, Tawni O'Dell takes readers back to the coal-mining country of western Pennsylvania. Set in a town ravaged and haunted by a mine explosion that took the lives of 96 men, Coal Run explores the life of local deputy and erstwhile football legend, "The Great Ivan Z.," as he prepares for a former teammate's imminent release from prison. As the week unfolds and Ivan struggles to confront his demons, he reveals himself to be a man whose conscience is burdened by a long-held and shocking secret.
Download or read book Coaltown Jesus written by Ron Koertge and published by Candlewick Press. This book was released on 2015-03-10 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Jesus shows up in Walker’s life, healing triumphs over heartbreak in Koertge’s finest and funniest novel yet. Walker shouldn’t have been so surprised to find Jesus standing in the middle of his bedroom. After all, he’d prayed for whoever was up there to help him, and to help his mom, who hadn’t stopped crying since Noah died two months ago. But since when have prayers actually been answered? And since when has Jesus been so . . . irreverent? But as astounding as Jesus’ sudden appearance is, it’s going to take more than divine intervention for Walker to come to terms with his brother’s sudden death. Why would God take seventeen-year-old Noah when half of the residents in his mom’s nursing home were waiting to die? And why would he send Jesus to Coaltown, Illinois, to pick up the pieces? In a spare and often humorous text, renowned poet Ron Koertge tackles some of life’s biggest questions — and humanizes the divine savior in a way that highlights the divinity in all of us.
Download or read book Coaltown Blues written by Mervyn Thompson and published by Victoria University Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Blocton written by Charles Edward Adams and published by University Alabama Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Normal0falsefalsefalseMicrosoftInternetExplorer4Blocton chronicles the history of a community built on coal. In 1883 two entrepreneurs--Truman Aldrich, a New York engineer, and Cornelius Cadle, a former Union Army officer--created the Cahaba Coal Mining Company and built a railroad eight miles into the wilderness of northern Bibb County to tap thick veins of coal deep underground. There, they built the town of Blocton and beside the town rose a sister suburb, West Blocton. In 1892 the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company took control of the Blocton mines, and fifteen years later US Steel swallowed the Tennessee company. Blocton coal was in high demand during World War I and production continued. By the end of the 1920s, however, a devastating fire, mine closure, and the stock market crash devastated the area. Blocton is more than a history of wealthy men, great deeds, greater crises, and giant corporations. It recounts the hopes and dreams, accomplishments and everyday tragedies of the miners, housewives, store keepers, teachers, and all the people who gave personality and perseverance to the community.
Download or read book History of Tesla written by Dan L. Mosier and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Heat and Light written by Jennifer Haigh and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Haigh returns to the Pennsylvania town at the center of her iconic novel Baker Towers in this ambitious, achingly human story of modern America and the conflicting forces at its heart—a bold, moving drama of hope and desperation, greed and power, big business and small-town families. Forty years ago, Bakerton coal fueled the country. Then the mines closed, and the town wore away like a bar of soap. Now Bakerton has been granted a surprise third act: it sits squarely atop the Marcellus Shale, a massive deposit of natural gas. To drill or not to drill? Prison guard Rich Devlin leases his mineral rights to finance his dream of farming. He doesn’t count on the truck traffic and nonstop noise, his brother’s skepticism or the paranoia of his wife, Shelby, who insists the water smells strange and is poisoning their frail daughter. Meanwhile his neighbors, organic dairy farmers Mack and Rena, hold out against the drilling—until a passionate environmental activist disrupts their lives. Told through a cast of characters whose lives are increasingly bound by the opposing interests that underpin the national debate, Heat and Light depicts a community blessed and cursed by its natural resources. Soaring and ambitious, it zooms from drill rig to shareholders’ meeting to the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to the ruined landscape of the “strippins,” haunting reminders of Pennsylvania’s past energy booms. This is a dispatch from a forgotten America—a work of searing moral clarity from one of the finest writers of her generation, a courageous and necessary book.
Download or read book Thurber Texas written by John S. Spratt and published by TX A&m-McWhiney Foundation. This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Thurber coal district sprang to life in the late 1880s in northern Erath County, Texas, some seventy miles west of Fort Worth. The mines were opened by the Texas & Pacific Coal Company to fuel the locomotives of its railway, whose tracks crossed the state from Marshall to El Paso. The company also built the town of Thurber to service the mines. It then imported workers from distant points, eventually including some twenty nationalities, whose old country ways contrasted sharply with neighboring farm life. John Spratt grew to manhood in Mingus, just three miles north of Thurber during the 1920s. His chronicle of the Thurber district is not only a nostalgic trip back in time but also a case study of the impact of technological change on one part of modern America.
Download or read book An Archaeology of Structural Violence written by Michael Roller and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using evidence of historical changes in landscape, community life, and material culture from a coal mining company town in the Anthracite Coal Region of Northeast Pennsylvania, Michael Roller introduces an archaeological approach to the structural violence on workers, citizens, and consumers that developed across the twentieth century. The study begins with an analysis of a moment of explicit violence at the end of the nineteenth century, an event known as the Lattimer Massacre, in which as many as nineteen immigrant miners were shot by a posse of local businessmen. From this touchstone, material history and theoretical contexts across the twentieth century are documented in a manner both locally specific and broadly generalizable.
Download or read book St Clair a Nineteenth century Coal Town s Experience with a Disaster prone Industry written by Anthony F. C. Wallace and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicles the rise and fall of a Pennsylvanian coal town, the center of violent confrontations between labor and capital.
Download or read book Coal written by Duane Lockard and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Entwined in the personal story of this coal miner's son who became a Princeton political scientist is Lockard's critique of how the coal industry has behaved as a corporate citizen and how it exemplifies corporate power in American life.
Download or read book Baker Towers written by Jennifer Haigh and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-03-17 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bakerton is a community of company houses and church festivals, of union squabbles and firemen's parades. Its neighborhoods include Little Italy, Swedetown, and Polish Hill. For its tight-knit citizens -- and the five children of the Novak family -- the 1940s will be a decade of excitement, tragedy, and stunning change. Baker Towers is a family saga and a love story, a hymn to a time and place long gone, to America's industrial past, and to the men and women we now call the Greatest Generation. It is a feat of imagination from an extraordinary voice in American fiction, a writer of enormous power and skill.
Download or read book Canary in the Coal Mine written by Dr. William Cooke and published by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One doctor’s courageous fight to save a small town from a silent epidemic that threatened the community’s future—and exposed a national health crisis. When Dr. Will Cooke, an idealistic young physician just out of medical training, set up practice in the small rural community of Austin, Indiana, he had no idea that much of the town was being torn apart by poverty, addiction, and life-threatening illnesses. But he soon found himself at the crossroads of two unprecedented health-care disasters: a national opioid epidemic and the worst drug-fueled HIV outbreak ever seen in rural America. Confronted with Austin’s hidden secrets, Dr. Cooke decided he had to do something about them. In taking up the fight for Austin’s people, however, he would have to battle some unanticipated foes: prejudice, political resistance, an entrenched bureaucracy—and the dark despair that threatened to overwhelm his own soul. Canary in the Coal Mine is a gripping account of the transformation of a man and his adopted community, a compelling and ultimately hopeful read in the vein of Hillbilly Elegy, Dreamland, and Educated.
Download or read book Seattle s Coal Legacy written by John M. Goodfellow and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2019 with total page 1 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the 1880s, Seattle became a major coal port in the United States. By 1908, Puget Sound was the third-largest coal port, after New York and Baltimore. For Seattle, the major coal mines were in Issaquah, New Castle, Renton, and Black Diamond, with many other smaller mines throughout King County. Until the petroleum revolution, Seattle exported most of its coal to San Francisco. Because of coal, Seattle became a center for skilled engineers, machinists, and miners for the maritime, manufacturing, mining, and railroad industries, differentiating itself from other lumber towns on Puget Sound. Seattle's Coal Legacy is the story of a frontier town going through an industrial revolution in its own time. The skills and knowledge developed during the coal era--engineering, finance, transportation, manufacturing, etc.--made Seattle the major city it is today."-- Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Lost Superior written by and published by . This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Buildings in the Town of Superior, Colorado, that have been torn down or moved since the town's industrial coal mine closed in 1945.
