Download or read book The Smokeless Coal Fields of West Virginia written by William Purviance Tams (Jr.) and published by . This book was released on 1963 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 Bringing Down the Mountains written by Shirley Stewart Burns and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coal is West Virginia's bread and butter. For more than a century, West Virginia has answered the energy call of the nation--and the world--by mining and exporting its coal. In 2004, West Virginia's coal industry provided almost forty thousand jobs directly related to coal, and it contributed $3.5 billion to the state's gross annual product. And in the same year, West Virginia led the nation in coal exports, shipping over 50 million tons of coal to twenty-three countries. Coal has made millionaires of some and paupers of many. For generations of honest, hard-working West Virginians, coal has put food on tables, built homes, and sent students to college. But coal has also maimed, debilitated, and killed. Bringing Down the Mountains provides insight into how mountaintop removal has affected the people and the land of southern West Virginia. It examines the mechanization of the mining industry and the power relationships between coal interests, politicians, and the average citizen. Shirley Stewart Burns holds a BS in news-editorial journalism, a master's degree in social work, and a PhD in history with an Appalachian focus, from West Virginia University. A native of Wyoming County in the southern West Virginia coalfields and the daughter of an underground coal miner, she has a passionate interest in the communities, environment, and histories of the southern West Virginia coalfields. She lives in Charleston, West Virginia.
Download or read book The Road to Blair Mountain written by Charles B. Keeney and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Keeney delivers a riveting and propulsive story about a nine-year battle to save sacred ground that was the site of the largest labor uprising in American history. . . . He unveils a powerful playbook on successful activism that will inspire countless others for generations to come." --Eric Eyre, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic In 1921 Blair Mountain in southern West Virginia was the site of the country's bloodiest armed insurrection since the Civil War, a battle pitting miners led by Frank Keeney against agents of the coal barons intent on quashing organized labor. It was the largest labor uprising in US history. Ninety years later, the site became embroiled in a second struggle, as activists came together to fight the coal industry, state government, and the military- industrial complex in a successful effort to save the battlefield--sometimes dubbed "labor's Gettysburg"--from destruction by mountaintop removal mining. The Road to Blair Mountain is the moving and sometimes harrowing story of Charles Keeney's fight to save this irreplaceable landscape. Beginning in 2011, Keeney--a historian and great-grandson of Frank Keeney--led a nine-year legal battle to secure the site's placement on the National Register of Historic Places. His book tells a David-and-Goliath tale worthy of its own place in West Virginia history. A success story for historic preservation and environmentalism, it serves as an example of how rural, grassroots organizations can defeat the fossil fuel industry.
Download or read book Appalachia s Coal Mined Landscapes written by Carl E. Zipper and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-11-25 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book collects and summarizes current scientific knowledge concerning coal-mined landscapes of the Appalachian region in eastern United States. Containing contributions from authors across disciplines, the book addresses topics relevant to the region’s coal-mining history and its future; its human communities; and the soils, waters, plants, wildlife, and human-use potentials of Appalachia’s coal-mined landscapes. The book provides a comprehensive overview of coal mining’s legacy in Appalachia, USA. It book describes the resources of the Appalachian coalfield, its lands and waters, and its human communities – as they have been left in the aftermath of intensive mining, drawing upon peer-reviewed science and other regional data to provide clear and objective descriptions. By understanding the Appalachian experience, officials and planners in other resource extraction- affected world regions can gain knowledge and perspectives that will aid their own efforts to plan and manage for environmental quality and for human welfare. Appalachia's Coal-Mined Landscapes: Resources and Communities in a New Energy Era will be of use to natural resource managers and scientists within Appalachia and in other world regions experiencing widespread mining, researchers with interest in the region’s disturbance legacy, and economic and community planners concerned with Appalachia’s future.
Download or read book The Book of the Dead written by Muriel Rukeyser and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in response to the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster of 1931 in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, The Book of the Dead is an important part of West Virginia's cultural heritage and a powerful account of one of the worst industrial catastrophes in American history. The poems collected here investigate the roots of a tragedy that killed hundreds of workers, most of them African American. They are a rare engagement with the overlap between race and environment in Appalachia. Published for the first time alongside photographs by Nancy Naumburg, who accompanied Rukeyser to Gauley Bridge in 1936, this edition of The Book of the Dead includes an introduction by Catherine Venable Moore, whose writing on the topic has been anthologized in Best American Essays.
Download or read book Monongah written by J. Davitt McAteer and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the Monongah, West Virginia mine disaster, the West Virginia University Press is honored to carry Davitt McAteer's definitive history of the worst industrial accident in U.S. history. Monongah documents the events that led to the explosion, which claimed hundreds of lives on the morning of December 6, 1907. Nearly thirty years of exhaustive research have led McAteer to the conclusion that close to 500 men and boys--many of them immigrants--lost their lives that day, leaving hundreds of women widowed and more than one thousand children orphaned. McAteer delves deeply into the personalities, economic forces, and social landscape of the mining communities of north central West Virginia at the beginning of the twentieth century. The tragedy at Monongah led to a greater awareness of industrial working conditions, and ultimately to the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969, which Davitt McAteer helped to enact.
Download or read book The Buffalo Creek Disaster written by Gerald M. Stern and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2008-05-06 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "suspenseful and completely absorbing story" (San Francisco Chronicle) of how survivors of the worst coal-mining disaster in history triumphed over corporate irresponsibility—written by the young lawyer who took on their case and won. One Saturday morning in February 1972, an impoundment dam owned by the Pittston Coal Company burst, sending a 130 million gallon, 25 foot tidal wave of water, sludge, and debris crashing into southern West Virginia's Buffalo Creek hollow. It was one of the deadliest floods in U.S. history. 125 people were killed instantly, more than 1,000 were injured, and over 4,000 were suddenly homeless. Instead of accepting the small settlements offered by the coal company's insurance offices, a few hundred of the survivors banded together to sue.
Download or read book Proceedings of the West Virginia Coal Mining Institute written by West Virginia Coal Mining Institute and published by . This book was released on 1908 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Gods of Howl Mountain written by Taylor Brown and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2018-03-20 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bootlegger Rory Docherty has returned home to the fabled mountain of his childhood - a misty wilderness that holds its secrets close and keeps the outside world at gunpoint. Slowed by a wooden leg and haunted by memories of the Korean War, Rory runs bootleg whiskey for a powerful mountain clan in a retro-fitted '40 Ford coupe. Between deliveries to roadhouses, brothels, and private clients, he lives with his formidable grandmother, evades federal agents, and stokes the wrath of a rival runner.
Download or read book History of West Virginia Old and New written by James Morton Callahan and published by . This book was released on 1923 with total page 1192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Death in Mud Lick written by Eric Eyre and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Critics’ Top Ten Book of the Year * 2021 Edgar Award Winner Best Fact Crime * A Lit Hub Best Book of The Year From a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter at the Charleston Gazette-Mail, a “powerful,” (The New York Times) urgent, and heartbreaking account of the corporate greed that pumped millions of pain pills into small Appalachian towns, decimating communities. In a pharmacy in Kermit, West Virginia, 12 million opioid pain pills were distributed in just three years to a town with a population of 382 people. One woman, after losing her brother to overdose, was desperate for justice. Debbie Preece’s fight for accountability for her brother’s death took her well beyond the Sav-Rite Pharmacy in coal country, ultimately leading to three of the biggest drug wholesalers in the country. She was joined by a crusading lawyer and by local journalist, Eric Eyre, who uncovered a massive opioid pill-dumping scandal that shook the foundation of America’s largest drug companies—and won him a Pulitzer Prize. Part Erin Brockovich, part Spotlight, Death in Mud Lick details the clandestine meetings with whistleblowers; a court fight to unseal filings that the drug distributors tried to keep hidden, a push to secure the DEA pill-shipment data, and the fallout after Eyre’s local paper, the Gazette-Mail, the smallest newspaper ever to win a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, broke the story. Eyre follows the opioid shipments into individual counties, pharmacies, and homes in West Virginia and explains how thousands of Appalachians got hooked on prescription drugs—resulting in the highest overdose rates in the country. But despite the tragedy, there is also hope as citizens banded together to create positive change—and won. “A product of one reporter’s sustained outrage [and] a searing spotlight on the scope and human cost of corruption and negligence” (The Washington Post) Eric Eyre’s intimate portrayal of a national public health crisis illuminates the shocking pattern of corporate greed and its repercussions for the citizens of West Virginia—and the nation—to this day.
Download or read book Ludie s Life written by Cynthia Rylant and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2006 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of a woman's life in a hardscrabble coal-mining town written in narrative poetry.
Download or read book Digging Our Own Graves written by Barbara Ellen Smith and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Employment and production in the Appalachian coal industry have plummeted over recent decades. But the lethal black lung disease, once thought to be near-eliminated, affects miners at rates never before recorded. Digging Our Own Graves sets this epidemic in the context of the brutal assault, begun in the 1980s and continued since, on the United Mine Workers of America and the collective power of rank-and-file coal miners in the heart of the Appalachian coalfields. This destruction of militancy and working class power reveals the unacknowledged social and political roots of a health crisis that is still barely acknowledged by the state and coal industry. Barbara Ellen Smith’s essential study, now with an updated introduction and conclusion, charts the struggles of miners and their families from the birth of the Black Lung Movement in 1968 to the present-day importance of demands for environmental justice through proposals like the Green New Deal. Through extensive interviews with participants and her own experiences as an activist, the author provides a vivid portrait of communities struggling for survival against the corporate extraction of labor, mineral wealth, and the very breath of those it sends to dig their own graves.
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 Canary in the Coal Mine written by Madelyn Rosenberg and published by Holiday House. This book was released on 2013-04-12 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bitty is a canary whose courage more than makes up for his diminutive size. Of course, as a miner bird who detects deadly gas leaks in a West Virginia coal mine during the Depression, he is used to facing danger. Tired of perilous working conditions, he escapes and hops a coal train to the state capital to seek help in improving the plights of miners and their canaries. In the tradition of E.B. White, George Selden, and Beverly Cleary's Ralph S. Mouse, Madelyn Rosenberg has written a singular novel full of unforgettable characters.
Download or read book Robert C Byrd written by Robert C. Byrd and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 872 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
