Books about Anthracite from Amazon.com

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..
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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..
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The lives of coal miners in the United States, like the black rock they cut from the earth, are wrought by the forces of time and pressure Risking crippling injury and death, generations of miners have tunneled down from the surface and emerged at the end of each exhausting day with the fuel needed to drive the nation’s industry. Their sacrifices are great, their glories unheralded. With this stirring account, author and former coal miner Joseph W. Leonard III provides a means for understanding and fully appreciating the crucial work these brave men have done throughout the years. The mining tradition in Leonard's family spans five generations in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, home to some of our country's richest deposits of anthracite coal. His family's stories illustrate with touching candor the plight of many thousands of Coal Belt families who stood proud through years of watching their sons, fathers, and husbands descend down the shafts into darkness. Leonard recalls with stunning detail the unforgiving conditions—cave-ins, explosions, and choking dust—that he and his forebears endured in the mines. Also captured are poignant tales of the kindness and compassion that permeated mining communities in the face of so much hardship. The intense struggles and quiet successes in Anthracite Roots are a testament to the unsung heroes of America’s coal mines and the work they have done to power a nation..
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Tales of the Mine Country is a collection of memories from the author's childhood in the Pennsylvania coal region of Shamokin during the 1930's. Some tales are true, some only partly so, but they all are authentic oral history..
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Anthracite Lads offers to prove that the notorious Molly Maguire organization never existed.Newspapers from the 1870s report that a Irish gang known as the Molly Maguires was controlling the nations energy supply through murder and arson in Pennsylvanias coal region. A lone Pinkerton detective allegedly infiltrated the Mollies. When he testified against them in Court, the nations press was joyful. Twenty accused Mollies were hanged. But the books author, William H. Burke, insists the detective lied about infiltrating the Mollies. Burke demonstrates the detective, himself, first formed the gang then used it on behalf of powerful business interests to discredit labor unions.Burke is from a hard-coal mining family who survived the Molly era. He knew that no fable was needed to explain the violence blamed n the Mollies. To him, the detective's story made no sense. A trial lawyer, he went back through old transcripts, detectives reports and the admissions of Alan Pinkerton, himself. He shows how these primary documents prove there was a conspiracy. But not of working men. It was of business interests led bu the Reading Railroad.This book does a great job of tearing the Pinkerton/Gowen case to pieces. You should all run out and buy a copy and get the real deal scoop on the Mollies. -- Patrick Campbell, foremost Molly Maguire historian and grand nephew of hanged Molly leader..
Price: $16.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]