Bituminous coal miners in Central Pennsylvania were among the most militant and class-conscious workers in the United States in the post-World War I era. Class-Conscious Coal Miners examines the development of working-class consciousness as they fought to sustain their union, jobs, communities, and work pejoratives, what they described as the Miner's Freedom, against mechanization and operator open shop drives in the 1920s. Their struggles brought them into conflict with coal companies, a pro-business federal government, and the business-unionist leadership of the United Mine Workers of America. After the collapse of the bituminous coal industry in Central Pennsylvania starting in the 1950s, working-class consciousness gradually diminished until, in the present century, there has been a marked shift toward political conservatism.

A class analysis of policing practices and state regulatory power in the long British coal miners' strike of 1984-85, based upon the voices of the miners themselves. Green (law, U. of Southampton) describes the political consciousness of the politically criminalized and the changes in that consciousness resulting from repressive policing and social regulation. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Much has been written over the years about life in the coal mines of Appalachia. Not surprisingly, attention has focused mainly on the experiences of male miners. In Daughters of the Mountain, Suzanne Tallichet introduces us to a cohort of women miners at a large underground coal mine in southern West Virginia, where women entered the workforce in the late 1970s after mining jobs began opening up for women throughout the Appalachian coalfields. Tallichet's work goes beyond anecdotal evidence to provide complex and penetrating analyses of qualitative data. Based on in-depth interviews with female miners, Tallichet explores several key topics, including social relations among men and women, professional advancement, and union participation. She also explores the ways in which women adapt to mining culture, developing strategies for both resistance and accommodation to an overwhelmingly male-dominated world.

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.