In Coal in Our Veins, Erin Thomas employs historical research, autobiography, and journalism to intertwine the history of coal, her ancestors' lives mining coal, and the societal and environmental impacts of the United States' dependency on coal as an energy source. In the first part of her book, she visits Wales, native ground of British coal mining and of her emigrant ancestors. The Thomases' move to the coal region of Utah—where they witnessed the Winter Quarters and Castle Gate mine explosions, two of the worst mining disasters in American history—and the history of coal development in Utah form the second part. Then Thomas investigates coal mining and communities in West Virginia, near her East Coast home, looking at the Sago Mine collapse and more widespread impacts of mining, including population displacement, mountain top removal, coal dust dispersal, and stream pollution, flooding, and decimation. The book's final part moves from Washington D.C.—and an examination of coal, CO2, and national energy policy—back to Utah, for a tour of a coal mine, and a consideration of the Crandall Canyon mine cave-in, back to Wales and the closing of the oldest operating deep mine in the world and then to a look at energy alternatives, especially wind power, in West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

The coal mine at Mt. Harris, Colorado, opened in 1914. Mt. Harris was a model coal mining camp: the yards were large; there were sidewalks; water was furnished by the mine as was electricity, at 50 cents per room per month; the power went off at midnight; barns were furnished for those who wished to keep a cow. All children who helped clean sidewalks were given tickets to the town theater which was open on Wednesday and Saturday nights, a different movie each time in the show hall. Tickets cost 10 cents each. But in 1958 the once bustling coal town of Mt. Harris was a thing of the past. "I lived in Mt. Harris from my birth in 1940 until I was nearly 18 years old. Maybe Dad was right in saying it was just a dirty, little, coal mining town where there was always poverty before us but, for me, it was a happy time. It was all that Dad said it was but it was also a town connected to a very simple way of a way of life where it seemed that people really cared about each other." Barbara (Rutherford) Martin. This book describes living in that era and in that little town, and a way of life that will never again be replicated in our present age.

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