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.

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.

The racialization of immigrant labor and the labor strife in the coal and textile communities in northeastern Pennsylvania appears to be an isolated incident in history. Rather this history can serve as a touchstone, connecting the history of the exploited laborers to today’s labor in the global economy. By drawing parallels between the past and present – for example, the coal mines of the nineteenth-century northeastern Pennsylvania and the sweatshops of the twenty-first century in Bangladesh – we can have difficult conversations about the past and advance our commitment to address social justice issues.

On September 10, 1897, a group of 400 striking coal miners--workers of Polish, Slovak, and Lithuanian descent or origin--marched on Lattimer, Pennsylvania. There, law enforcement officers fired without warning into the protesters, killing nineteen miners and wounding thirty-eight others. The bloody day quickly faded into history. Paul A. Shackel confronts the legacies and lessons of the Lattimer event. Beginning with a dramatic retelling of the incident, Shackel traces how the violence, and the acquittal of the deputies who perpetrated it, spurred membership in the United Mine Workers. By blending archival and archaeological research with interviews, he weighs how the people living in the region remember--and forget--what happened. Now in positions of power, the descendants of the slain miners have themselves become rabidly anti-union and anti-immigrant as Dominicans and other Latinos change the community. Shackel shows how the social, economic, and political circumstances surrounding historic Lattimer connect in profound ways to the riven communities of today. Compelling and timely, Remembering Lattimer restores an American tragedy to our public memory.

The Routledge International Handbook of Heritage and Politics surveys the intersection of heritage and politics today and helps elucidate the political implications of heritage practices. It explicitly addresses the political and analyses tensions and struggles over the distribution of power. Including contributions from early-career scholars and more established researchers, the Handbook provides global and interdisciplinary perspectives on the political nature, significance and consequence of heritage and the various practices of management and interpretation. Taking a broad view of heritage, which includes not just tangible and intangible phenomena, but the ways in which people and societies live with, embody, experience, value and use the past, the volume provides a critical survey of political tensions over heritage in diverse social and cultural contexts. Chapters within the book consider topics such as: neoliberal dynamics; terror and mobilisations of fear and hatred; old and new nationalisms; public policy; recognition; denials; migration and refugeeism; crises; colonial and decolonial practice; communities; self- and personhood; as well as international relations, geopolitics, soft power and cooperation to address global problems. The Routledge International Handbook of Heritage and Politics makes an intervention into the theoretical debate about the nature and role of heritage as a political resource. It is essential reading for academics and students working in heritage studies, museum studies, politics, memory studies, public history, geography, urban studies and tourism.

The economy has been brutal to American workers for several decades. The chance to give one's children a better life than one's own -- the promise at the heart of the American Dream -- is withering away. While onlookers assume those suffering in marginalized working-class communities will instinctively rise up, the 2016 election threw into sharp relief how little we know about how the working-class translate their grievances into politics. In We're Still Here, Jennifer M. Silva tells a deep, multi-generational story of pain, place, and politics that will endure long after the Trump administration. Drawing on over 100 interviews with black, white, and Latino working-class residents of a declining coal town in Pennsylvania, Silva reveals how the decline of the American Dream is lived and felt. The routines and rhythms of traditional working-class life such as manual labor, unions, marriage, church, and social clubs have diminished. In their place, she argues, individualized strategies for coping with pain, and finding personal redemption, have themselves become sources of political stimulus and reaction among the working class. Understanding how generations of Democratic voters come to reject the social safety net and often politics altogether requires moving beyond simple partisanship into a maze of addiction, joblessness, family disruption, violence, and trauma. Instead, Silva argues that we need to uncover the relationships, loyalties, longings, and moral visions that underlie and generate the civic and political disengagement of working-class people. We're Still Here provides powerful, on the ground evidence of the remaking of working-class identity and politics that will spark new tensions but also open up the possibility for shifting alliances and new possibilities.

Once a busy if impoverished center for the anthracite coal industry, northeastern Pennsylvania exists today as a region suffering inexorable decline--racked by economic hardship and rampant opioid abuse, abandoned by young people, and steeped in xenophobic fear. Paul A. Shackel merges analysis with oral history to document the devastating effects of a lifetime of structural violence on the people who have stayed behind. Heroic stories of workers facing the dangers of underground mining stand beside accounts of people living their lives in a toxic environment and battling deprivation and starvation by foraging, bartering, and relying on the good will of neighbors. As Shackel reveals the effects of these long-term traumas, he sheds light on people’s poor health and lack of well-being. The result is a valuable on-the-ground perspective that expands our understanding of the social fracturing, economic decay, and anger afflicting many communities across the United States. Insightful and dramatic, The Ruined Anthracite combines archaeology, documentary research, and oral history to render the ongoing human cost of environmental devastation and unchecked capitalism.