Download or read book The Great Coalfield War written by George Stanley McGovern and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A definitive study of the Ludlow massacre and events leading up to it. This story has much drama and struggle, and it holds some crucial lessons about industrial strife and about how viciously brutal AmericaÂs capitalists were a couple of generations ago." -- Los Angeles Times -- "The effect of this work is simply enraging, for the reality that the documentation evokes, both of wickedness and of the suffering that that wickedness caused, is intolerable." -- The New Yorker -- In the early 20th century, Colorado yielded more than a million tons of coal annually -- hacked and blasted out by immigrants from Eastern Europe living in crudely built towns owned by powerful mine operators. The companies owned the stores, ran the schools, churches, hospitals, and saloons, and bribed the region's lawmen to keep union organizers out. Mine safety was all but unheard-of when in 1913 mine explosions killed more than four hundred workers in just two of the mines. The United Mineworkers' Union infiltrated the towns, and thirteen thousand miners and their families made one mass exodus to establish a tent colony near the rail outpost at Ludlow. Months of fighting between the miners and company gunmen assisted by the Colorado State National Guard culminated in the Ludlow Massacre where tents were set afire, suffocating women and children who had sought shelter in storage pits beneath tent floorboards. The resultant public scandal compelled Washington to intervene, but it would take years before Colorado's coal miners gained union protection. The Great Coalfield War is a part of western history and an especially important part in view of today's declining union enrollments and the national movement to deregulate workplace safety laws and the federal agencies that enforce them. --Midwest Book Review

Download or read book Killing for Coal written by Thomas G. Andrews and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-01 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a spring morning in 1914, in the stark foothills of southern Colorado, members of the United Mine Workers of America clashed with guards employed by the Rockefeller family, and a state militia beholden to Colorado’s industrial barons. When the dust settled, nineteen men, women, and children among the miners’ families lay dead. The strikers had killed at least thirty men, destroyed six mines, and laid waste to two company towns. Killing for Coal offers a bold and original perspective on the 1914 Ludlow Massacre and the “Great Coalfield War.” In a sweeping story of transformation that begins in the coal beds and culminates with the deadliest strike in American history, Thomas Andrews illuminates the causes and consequences of the militancy that erupted in colliers’ strikes over the course of nearly half a century. He reveals a complex world shaped by the connected forces of land, labor, corporate industrialization, and workers’ resistance. Brilliantly conceived and written, this book takes the organic world as its starting point. The resulting elucidation of the coalfield wars goes far beyond traditional labor history. Considering issues of social and environmental justice in the context of an economy dependent on fossil fuel, Andrews makes a powerful case for rethinking the relationships that unite and divide workers, consumers, capitalists, and the natural world.

Download or read book The Archaeology of Class War written by Karin Larkin and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2009-11-15 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Archaeology of Class War weaves together material culture, documents, oral histories, landscapes, and photographs to reveal aspects of the strike and life in early twentieth-century Colorado coalfields unlike any standard documentary history. Excavations at the site of the massacre and the nearby town of Berwind exposed tent platforms, latrines, trash dumps, and the cellars in which families huddled during the attack. Myriad artifacts--from canning jars to a doll's head--reveal the details of daily existence and bring the community to life.

Download or read book Strike written by Lois Ruby and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the bloodiest labor dispute in U.S. history burst forth in 1913 in the coal fields of Southern Colorado, the miners knew whom to praise and the owners knew whom to blame. Mary Harris, known from New York to Colorado as Mother Jones, could incite a riot or calm a crowd with her powerful oratory. Mary Harris "Mother" Jones dedicated her life to helping workers organize unions to negotiate, even demand, better wages and working conditions. In the Colorado Coal Field War, did her call to STRIKE! help or harm? Were the deaths of mothers and children at Ludlow too high a price to pay for unionizing?

Download or read book Killing for Coal written by Thomas G. Andrews and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a spring morning in 1914, in the stark foothills of southern Colorado, members of the United Mine Workers of America clashed with guards employed by the Rockefeller family, and a state militia beholden to Colorado’s industrial barons. When the dust settled, nineteen men, women, and children among the miners’ families lay dead. The strikers had killed at least thirty men, destroyed six mines, and laid waste to two company towns. Killing for Coal offers a bold and original perspective on the 1914 Ludlow Massacre and the “Great Coalfield War.” In a sweeping story of transformation that begins in the coal beds and culminates with the deadliest strike in American history, Thomas Andrews illuminates the causes and consequences of the militancy that erupted in colliers’ strikes over the course of nearly half a century. He reveals a complex world shaped by the connected forces of land, labor, corporate industrialization, and workers’ resistance. Brilliantly conceived and written, this book takes the organic world as its starting point. The resulting elucidation of the coalfield wars goes far beyond traditional labor history. Considering issues of social and environmental justice in the context of an economy dependent on fossil fuel, Andrews makes a powerful case for rethinking the relationships that unite and divide workers, consumers, capitalists, and the natural world.

Download or read book The Great Coalfield War Ill with Photographs and with Maps by S H Bryant written by George S. MacGovern and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Shadow of the Mine written by Huw Beynon and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2024-03-19 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No one personified the age of industry more than the miners. The Shadow of the Mine tells the story of King Coal in its heyday – and what happened to mining communities after the last pits closed. The Shadow of the Mine tells the story of King Coal in its heyday, the heroics and betrayals of the Miners’ Strike, and what happened to mining communities after the last pits closed. No one personified the age of industry more than the miners. Coal was central to the British economy, powering its factories and railways. It carried political weight, too. In the eighties the miners risked everything in a year-long strike against Thatcher’s shutdowns. Their defeat doomed a way of life. The lingering sense of abandonment in former mining communities would be difficult to overstate. Yet recent electoral politics has revolved around the coalfield constituencies in Labour’s Red Wall. Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson draw on decades of research to chronicle these momentous changes through the words of the people who lived through them. This edition includes a new postscript on why Thatcher’s war on the miners wasn’t good for green politics. ‘Excellent’ NEW STATESMAN ‘Brilliant’ TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT ‘Enlightening’ GUARDIAN

Download or read book Coal Wars written by Source Wikipedia and published by Booksllc.Net. This book was released on 2013-09 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 33. Chapters: 1920 Alabama coal strike, Battle of Blair Mountain, Battle of Evarts, Battle of Virden, Bituminous Coal Miners' Strike of 1894, Coal Creek War, Coal Strike of 1902, Colorado Coalfield War (1913-1914), Columbine Mine massacre, Harlan County War, Hartford Coal Mine Riot, Herrin massacre, Illinois Coal Wars, Lattimer massacre, Ludlow Massacre, Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike of 1912, Pana Massacre, Westmoreland County coal strike of 1910-1911, West Virginia Coal Wars. Excerpt: The Ludlow Massacre was an attack by the Colorado National Guard and Colorado Fuel & Iron Company camp guards on a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners and their families at Ludlow, Colorado on April 20, 1914. The massacre resulted in the violent deaths of between 19 and 25 people; sources vary but all sources include two women and eleven children, asphyxiated and burned to death under a single tent. The deaths occurred after a daylong fight between militia and camp guards against striking workers. Ludlow was the deadliest single incident in the southern Colorado Coal Strike, lasting from September 1913 through December 1914. The strike was organized by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) against coal mining companies in Colorado. The three largest companies involved were the Rockefeller family-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Company (CF&I), the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company (RMF), and the Victor-American Fuel Company (VAF). In retaliation for Ludlow, the miners armed themselves and attacked dozens of mines over the next ten days, destroying property and engaging in several skirmishes with the Colorado National Guard along a 40-mile front from Trinidad to Walsenburg. The entire strike would cost between 69 and 199 lives. Thomas Franklin Andrews described it as the "deadliest strike in the history of the United States." The Ludlow Massacre...

Download or read book Buried Unsung written by Zeese Papanikolas and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Louis Tikas was a union organizer killed in the battle between striking coal miners and stateømilitia in Ludlow, Colorado, in 1914. In Buried Unsung he stands for a whole generation of immigrant workers who, in the years before World War I, found themselves caught between the realities of industrial America and their aspirations for a better life.

Download or read book King Coal written by Upton Sinclair and published by Standard Ebooks. This book was released on 2023-05-01T21:43:50Z with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: King Coal explores the lives of coal miners in early 20th century America. The story follows a privileged student who takes a job as a miner to gain firsthand experience of harsh conditions and mistreatment of workers. The protagonist is shocked by what he discovers and becomes an advocate for the miners, leading them in their fight against the mine owners and the political system that supports them. Sinclair’s writing style is known for its vivid descriptions and its ability to bring to life the characters and their struggles. Like much of his work, King Coal is a fictitious account of real issues. The novel is based on the author’s research in Colorado during the coal strikes of 1913–14, and is considered a classic of the muckraking genre that exposed the social and economic problems of the time. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

Download or read book Black Coal Miners in America written by Ronald L. Lewis and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-07-11 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the early day of mining in colonial Virginia and Maryland up to the time of World War II, blacks were an important part of the labor force in the coal industry. Yet in this, as in other enterprises, their role has heretofore been largely ignored. Now Roland L. Lewis redresses the balance in this comprehensive history of black coal miners in America. The experience of blacks in the industry has varied widely over time and by region, and the approach of this study is therefore more comparative than chronological. Its aim is to define the patterns of race relations that prevailed among the miners. Using this approach, Lewis finds five distractive systems of race relations. There was in the South before and after the Civil War a system of slavery and convict labor -- an enforced servitude without legal compensation. This was succeeded by an exploitative system whereby the southern coal operators, using race as an excuse, paid lower wages to blacks and thus succeeded in depressing the entire wage scale. By contrast, in northern and midwestern mines, the pattern was to exclude blacks from the industry so that whites could control their jobs and their communities. In the central Appalachians, although blacks enjoyed greater social equality, the mine operators manipulated racial tensions to keep the work force divided and therefore weak. Finally, with the advent of mechanization, black laborers were displaced from the mines to such an extent that their presence in the coal fields in now nearly a thing of the past. By analyzing the ways race, class, and community shaped social relations in the coal fields, Black Coal Miners in America makes a major contribution to the understanding of regional, labor, social, and African-American history.

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 The Devil Is Here in These Hills written by James Green and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2015-02-03 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The most comprehensive and comprehendible history of the West Virginia Coal War I’ve ever read.” —John Sayles, writer and director of Matewan On September 1, 1912, the largest, most protracted, and deadliest working-class uprising in American history was waged in West Virginia. On one side were powerful corporations whose millions bought armed guards and political influence. On the other side were fifty thousand mine workers, the nation’s largest labor union, and the legendary “miners’ angel,” Mother Jones. The fight for unionization and civil rights sparked a political crisis that verged on civil war, stretching from the creeks and hollows of the Appalachians to the US Senate. Attempts to unionize were met with stiff resistance. Fundamental rights were bent—then broken. The violence evolved from bloody skirmishes to open armed conflict, as an army of more than fifty thousand miners finally marched to an explosive showdown. Extensively researched and vividly told, this definitive book about an often-overlooked chapter of American history, “gives this backwoods struggle between capital and labor the due it deserves. [Green] tells a dark, often despairing story from a century ago that rings true today” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette).

Download or read book The Opposition to the Great War in Wales 1914 1918 written by Aled Eirug and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2018-10-05 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study is the first thorough analysis of the extent of the opposition to the Great War in Wales, and is the most extensive study of the anti-war movement in any part of Britain. It is, therefore, a significant contribution to our understanding of people’s responses to the conflict, and the difficulty of mobilising the population for total war. The anti-war movement in Wales and beyond developed quickly from the initial shock of the declaration of war, to the civil disobedience of anti-war activists and the industrial discontent excited by the Russian Revolution and experienced in areas such as the south Wales coalfield in 1917. The differing responses to the war within Wales are explored in this book, which charts how the pacifist tradition of nineteenth-century Welsh Nonconformity was quickly overturned. The two main elements of the anti-war movement are analysed in depth: the pacifist religious opposition, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the Nonconformist dissidents who were particularly influential in north and west Wales; and the political opposition concentrated in the Independent Labour Party and among the radical left within the South Wales Miners’ Federation.

Download or read book The Coal Miner s War written by Randall R. Reese and published by Rock On Press. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Louis Tikas flees to Ludlow, Colorado to heal after his wife and child were murdered by strikebreakers in the Pennsylvania Coal Strike of 1910. As anger ignites toward the Colorado coal field corporations and the coal miners threaten to strike, Louis is determined to stay out of the inevitable battle between the workers and the company thugs sent in to wreak havoc on the strikers and their families, until the beautiful and strong-willed Mary Dunn and her 10-year-old son Carson arrive and are caught in the crossfire.

Download or read book Blood Runs Coal The Yablonski Murders and the Battle for the United Mine Workers of America written by Mark A. Bradley and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vivid account of “one of the most shocking episodes in organized labor’s blood-soaked history” (Steve Halvonik, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette). In the early hours of New Year’s Eve 1969, in the small soft coal mining borough of Clarksville, Pennsylvania, longtime trade union insider Joseph “Jock” Yablonski and his wife and daughter were brutally murdered in their old stone farmhouse. Behind the assassination was the corrupt president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), Tony Boyle, who had long embezzled UMWA funds, silenced intra-union dissent, and served the interests of Big Coal companies—and would do anything to maintain power. The most infamous crimes in the history of American labor unions, the Yablonski murders catalyzed the first successful rank-and-file takeover of a major labor union in modern US history. Blood Runs Coal is an extraordinary portrait of one of the nation’s major unions on the brink of historical change.

Download or read book My Heart Lies Here written by Laurie Marr Wasmund and published by . This book was released on 2012-08-01 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1913, the United Mine Workers of America led a daring strike against John D. Rockefeller's Colorado Fuel & Iron Company that would end in war. In this novel of the Ludlow Massacre, a young woman learns the true meaning of love, sacrifice, and what it means to be an American. Newly arrived in Colorado, Christian Scott is caught in a web of divided loyalties. Torn between her dedication to her brother, Alex, who clings to his proud Scottish heritage, and her love of Pearl, a spirited orphan whose flight from abuse and poverty lands her on the Scotts' doorstep, Christian experiences heartbreak when the two become enemies. At the same time, she secretly joins with a passionate Greek miner on a dangerous course of resistance against the coal company and the brutal Colorado National Guard that threatens to destroy everything--and everyone--she loves.