Download or read book Lost Coal Country of Northeastern Pennsylvania written by Lorena Beniquez and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2017-08-07 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lost Coal Country of Northeastern Pennsylvania documents the region's disappearing anthracite history, which shaped the legacy of the United States of America and the industrial revolution. The coal mines, breakers, coal miners' homes, and railroads have all steadily disappeared. With only one coal breaker left in the entire state, it was time to record what would soon be lost. Unfortunately, one piece of history that persists is underground fires that ravage communities like Centralia. Blazing for over 50 years, the flames of Centralia will not be doused anytime soon. Images featured in the book include the St. Nicholas coal breaker, Huber coal breaker, Steamtown National Historic Site, Lackawanna Coal Mine Tour, Eckley Miners' Village, Centralia, and the Knox Mine disaster. A hybrid history book and travel guide, Lost Coal Country of Northeastern Pennsylvania is one final recounting of what is gone and what still remains.
Download or read book The Face of Decline written by Thomas Dublin and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania once prospered. Today, very little mining or industry remains, although residents have made valiant efforts to restore the fabric of their communities. In The Face of Decline, the noted historians Thomas Dublin and Walter Licht offer a sweeping history of this area over the course of the twentieth century. Combining business, labor, social, political, and environmental history, Dublin and Licht delve into coal communities to explore grassroots ethnic life and labor activism, economic revitalization, and the varied impact of economic decline across generations of mining families. The Face of Decline also features the responses to economic crisis of organized capital and labor, local business elites, redevelopment agencies, and state and federal governments. Dublin and Licht draw on a remarkable range of sources: oral histories and survey questionnaires; documentary photographs; the records of coal companies, local governments, and industrial development corporations; federal censuses; and community newspapers. The authors examine the impact of enduring economic decline across a wide region but focus especially on a small group of mining communities in the region's Panther Valley, from Jim Thorpe through Lansford to Tamaqua. The authors also place the anthracite region within a broader conceptual framework, comparing anthracite's decline to parallel developments in European coal basins and Appalachia and to deindustrialization in the United States more generally.
Download or read book Early Coal Mining in the Anthracite Region written by John Stuart Richards and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2002 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four distinct anthracite coal fields encompass an area of 1,700 square miles in the northeastern portion of Pennsylvania. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, underground coal mining was at its zenith and the work of miners was more grueling and dangerous than it is today. Faces blackened by coal and helmet lamps lit by fire are no longer parts of the everyday lives of miners in the region. Early Coal Mining in the Anthracite Region is a journey into a world that was once very familiar. These vintage photographs of collieries, breakers, miners, drivers, and breaker boys illuminate the dark of the anthracite mines. The pictures of miners, roof falls, mules, and equipment deep underground tell the story of the hard lives lived around the hard coal. Above ground, breaker boys toiled in unbearable conditions inside the noisy, vibrating, soot-filled monsters known as coal breakers.
Download or read book Lost Coal Country of Northeastern Pennsylvania written by Lorena Beniquez and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2017-08-07 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lost Coal Country of Northeastern Pennsylvania documents the region's disappearing anthracite history, which shaped the legacy of the United States of America and the industrial revolution. The coal mines, breakers, coal miners' homes, and railroads have all steadily disappeared. With only one coal breaker left in the entire state, it was time to record what would soon be lost. Unfortunately, one piece of history that persists is underground fires that ravage communities like Centralia. Blazing for over 50 years, the flames of Centralia will not be doused anytime soon. Images featured in the book include the St. Nicholas coal breaker, Huber coal breaker, Steamtown National Historic Site, Lackawanna Coal Mine Tour, Eckley Miners' Village, Centralia, and the Knox Mine disaster. A hybrid history book and travel guide, Lost Coal Country of Northeastern Pennsylvania is one final recounting of what is gone and what still remains.
Download or read book Dirty Mines written by John Fitzgerald and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-02-13 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIRTY MINES is a story about coal mining in Pennsylvania. For the first time many of the jobs performed by boys, as young as 8 years old, are described in detail. Cesar D'Angelo was 10 when his father was killed in the mines. Cesar, the oldest boy in his family, had to take his father's place working for the coal company. His first job was working high up in the dangerous coal breakers. At the age of 12 he went down into the blackish, coal dusted mines to begin his long mining career. His first job was sitting in the dark alone for 10 to 12 hours a day as a door keeper. Later he became a spragger, mule driver, and had various other jobs until becoming a lifetime coal miner. DIRTY MINES also addresses the rich history of this era; including the miscarriage of justice towards the Molly Maguires in their fight for union rights and the environmental disaster at the Knox Coal company that ended coal mining in North Eastern Pennsylvania. This is a family story about the last generation of Scranton coal miners. It is a fascinating and warm narrative of sacrifice, humor, and love. A revealing story about a forgotten way of life in difficult times, with very little pay in horrible working conditions. It's an anecdotal story of courage and tenacity of poor deprived coal miners that struggled to make a better life for their children. Their historic sacrifices are being passed on to a new generation, so their unique heritage will never be forgotten.
Download or read book Sewn in Coal Country written by Robert P. Wolensky and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2020-04-24 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the mid-1930s, Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal industry was facing a steady decline. Mining areas such as the Wyoming Valley around the cities of Wilkes-Barre and Pittston were full of willing workers (including women) who proved irresistibly attractive to New York City’s “runaway shops”—ladies’ apparel factories seeking lower labor and other costs. The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) soon followed, and the Valley became a thriving hub of clothing production and union activity. This volume tells the story of the area’s apparel industry through the voices of men and women who lived it. Drawing from an archive of over sixty audio-recorded interviews within the Northeastern Pennsylvania Oral and Life History Collection, Sewn in Coal Country showcases sixteen stories told by workers, shop owners, union leaders, and others. The interview subjects recount the ILGWU-led movement to organize the shops, the conflicts between the district union and the national office in New York, the solidarity unionism approach of leader Min Matheson, the role of organized crime within the business, and the failed efforts to save the industry in the 1980s and 1990s. Robert P. Wolensky places the narratives in the larger context of American clothing manufacturing during the period and highlights their broader implications for the study of labor, gender, the working class, and oral history. Highly readable and thoroughly enlightening, this significant contribution to the study of labor history and women’s history will appeal to anyone interested in the relationships among workers, unions, management, and community; the effects of economic change on an area and its residents; the role of organized crime within the industry; and Pennsylvania history—especially the social history of industrialization and deindustrialization during the twentieth century.
Download or read book Fire Underground written by David Dekok and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2009-10-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How a modern-day mine disaster has turned a Pennsylvania community into a ghost town * For much of its history, Centralia, Pennsylvania, had a population of around 2,000. By 1981, this had dwindled to just over 1,000—not unusual for a onetime mining town. But as of 2007, Centralia had the unwelcome distinction of being the state's tiniest municipality, with a population of nine. The reason: an underground fire that began in 1962 has decimated the town with smoke and toxic gases, and has since made history. Fire Underground is the completely updated classic account of the fire that has been raging under Centralia for decades. David DeKok tells the story of how the fire actually began and how government officials failed to take effective action. By 1981 the fire was spewing deadly gases into homes. A twelve-year-old boy dropped into a steaming hole as a congressman toured nearby. DeKok describes how the people of Centralia banded together to finally win relocation funds—and he reveals what has happened to the few remaining residents as the fiftieth anniversary of the fire's beginning nears.
Download or read book Anthracite Roots written by Joseph W. Leonard and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "By sharing the experiences, triumphs and tragedies of my own family, in this book I provide a personal look at what life was like in the early coal-mining industry and how that industry has evolved and improved to become one of America's most important industries."--Page 12.
Download or read book Growing Up in Coal Country written by Susan Campbell Bartoletti and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1996 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes what life was like, especially for children, in coal mines and mining towns in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Download or read book Anthracite s Demise and the Post Coal Economy of Northeastern Pennsylvania written by Thomas Keil and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-12-11 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the anthracite coal trade's emergence and legacy in the five counties that constituted the core of the industry, the authors explain the split in the modes of production between entrepreneurial production and corporate production and the consequences of each for the two major anthracite regions. This book argues that the initial conditions in which the anthracite industry developed led to differences in the way workers organized and protested working conditions and the way in which the two regions were affected by the decline of the industry and two subsequent waves of deindustrialization. The authors examine the bourgeois class formation in the coal regions and its consequences for differential regional growth and urbanization. This is given context through their investigation of class conflict in the region and the struggle of workers to build a stable union that would represent their interests, as well as the struggles within the union that finally emerged as the dominant force (the United Mine Workers of American) between conservative business unionists and progressive forces. Lastly, the authors explore the demise of anthracite as the dominant industry, the attempt to attract replacement industries, the subsequent two waves of deindustrialization in the region, and the current economic conditions that prevail in the former coal counties and the cities in them. This book includes a discussion of local politics and the emergence of a strong labor-Democratic tie in the northern anthracite region and a weaker tie between labor and the Democratic party in the central and southern fields.
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 229 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 When the Mines Closed written by Thomas Dublin and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania, five hundred square miles of rugged hills stretching between Tower City and Carbondale, harbored coal deposits that once heated virtually all the homes and businesses in Eastern cities. At its peak during World War I, the coal industry here employed 170,000 miners, and supported almost 1,000,000 people. Today, with coal workers numbering 1,500, only 5,000 people depend on the industry for their livelihood. Between these two points in time lies a story of industrial decline, of working people facing incremental and cataclysmic changes in their world. When the Mines Closed tells this story in the words of men and women who experienced these dramatic changes and in more than eighty photographs of these individuals, their families, and the larger community.Award-winning historian Thomas Dublin interviewed a cross-section of residents and migrants from the region, who gave their own accounts of their work and family lives before and after the mines closed. Most of the narrators, six men and seven women, came of age during the Great Depression and entered area mines or, in the case of the women, garment factories, in their teens. They describe the difficult choices they faced, and the long-standing ethnic, working-class values and traditions they drew upon, when after World War II the mines began to shut down. Some left the region, others commuted to work at a distance, still others struggled to find employment locally.The photographs taken by George Harvan, a lifelong resident of the area and the son of a Slovak-born coal miner, document residents' lives over the course of fifty years. Dublin's introductory essay offers a brief history of anthracite mining and the region and establishes a broader interpretive framework for the narratives and photographs.
Download or read book Relics of Anthracite in Northeastern Pennsylvania written by Michael G. Rushton and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Anthracite coal was mined in Northeastern Pennsylvania throughout the nineteen and twentieth centuries. The industry was a major employer in the region. It has been fifty to sixty years since the decline of the industry, and the coal breakers are now gone, but images and memories remain. Author Michael G. Rushton, an amateur photographer and industrial archaeologist, grew up in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton area; there, the remains of the anthracite and railroad industry formed his playground. In this book, he guides readers through the history of anthracite mining in Northeastern Pennsylvania through the display of numerous images related to the industry."
Download or read book In the Valley of the Kings written by Terrence Holt and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2010-08-24 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stories that range from outer space to the Egyptian desert.
Download or read book The Hollow Ground written by Natalie S. Harnett and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-05-13 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We walk on fire or air, so Daddy liked to say. Basement floors too hot to touch. Steaming green lawns in the dead of winter. Sinkholes, quick and sudden, plunging open at your feet. The underground mine fires ravaging Pennsylvania coal country have forced eleven-year-old Brigid Howley and her family to seek refuge with her estranged grandparents, the formidable Gram and the black lung stricken Gramp. Tragedy is no stranger to the Howleys, a proud Irish-American clan who takes strange pleasure in the "curse" laid upon them generations earlier by a priest who ran afoul of the Molly Maguires. The weight of this legacy rests heavily on a new generation, when Brigid, already struggling to keep her family together, makes a grisly discovery in a long-abandoned bootleg mine shaft. In the aftermath, decades-old secrets threaten to prove just as dangerous to the Howleys as the burning, hollow ground beneath their feet. Inspired by real-life events in Centralia and Carbondale, where devastating coal mine fires irrevocably changed the lives of residents, The Hollow Ground is an extraordinary debut with an atmospheric, voice-driven narrative and an indelible sense of place. Lovers of literary fiction will find in Harnett's young, determined protagonist a character as heartbreakingly captivating as any in contemporary literature.
Download or read book Pennsylvania in Public Memory written by Carolyn Kitch and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-06-26 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What stories do we tell about America’s once-great industries at a time when they are fading from the landscape? Pennsylvania in Public Memory attempts to answer that question, exploring the emergence of a heritage culture of industry and its loss through the lens of its most representative industrial state. Based on news coverage, interviews, and more than two hundred heritage sites, this book traces the narrative themes that shape modern public memory of coal, steel, railroading, lumber, oil, and agriculture, and that collectively tell a story about national as well as local identity in a changing social and economic world.
Download or read book A Legacy of Coal written by Margaret M. Mulrooney and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
