Describes what life was like, especially for children, in coal mines and mining towns in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The flooding and subsequent closure of Scotland's last deep coal mine in 2002 brought a centuries long saga to an end. Villages and towns across the densely populated Central Belt owe their existence to coal mining's expansion during the nineteenth century and its maturation in the twentieth. Colliery closures and job losses were not just experienced in economic terms: they had profound implications for what it meant to be a worker, a Scot and a resident of an industrial settlement. Coal Country presents the first book-length account of deindustrialization in the Scottish coalfields. It draws on archival research using records from UK government, the nationalized coal industry and trade unions, as well as the words and memories of former miners, their wives and children that were collected in an extensive oral history project. Deindustrialization progressed as a slow but powerful march across the second half of the twentieth century. In this book, big changes in cultural identities are explained as the outcome of long-term economic developments. The oral testimonies bring to life transformations in gender relations and distinct generational workplaces experiences. This book argues that major alterations to the politics of class and nationhood have their origins in deindustrialization. The adverse effects of UK government policy, and centralization in the nationalized coal industry, encouraged miners and their trade union to voice their grievances in the language of Scottish national sovereignty. These efforts established a distinctive Scottish national coalfield community and laid the foundations for a devolved Scottish Parliament. Coal Country explains the deep roots of economic changes and their political reverberations, which continue to be felt as we debate another major change in energy sources during the 2020s.

"Unearthing new ways of thinking about place, pedagogy, and the environment, "On the Measures" argues that place is unstable. To study dimensions of place, the book explores two working landscapes: 1) Scranton, Pennsylvania, an undermined, former coal-mining city, and 2) Marywood University, a Scranton institution that confronts the aftermath of mining. Scranton and Marywood have endured the narrative of extraction that the Anthracite Region once celebrated. Recounting removal of parts of this place to feed other places, the story defines loss here as gain there: the city and college have suffered but the United States has grown stronger. The tale ends badly, however, because the narrative arcs toward exhaustion; the storyline offers little about renewal. Growing up with this narrative, Scrantonians have been fleeing the city for decades; the dominant trend among young people has long been to learn here to move elsewhere. Too few environmental humanists have sufficiently examined the primary place where many work: the university. When they do, they often do not link the university to its local, regional, and national environmental contexts. In exploring where Conlogue teaches, he shows how bound up places of learning are with unsettling sites of resource extraction. Defending the study of literature and history, "On the Measures" shows university students that the disciplines they study are parts of an interdisciplinary web of meaning that includes the contexts of the places where they learn"--

"Franz Kline, one of the most celebrated painters of the twentieth century, once described his hometown as a "little Dutch settlement wrapped up in a cloud of coal dirt ... " He was referring to Lehighton, Pennsylvania, a railroad town nestled amid mountains rich with quartz and anthracite coal. And like the mineral deposits, Kline's later "action paintings" are infused with energy. The black-and-white lines command the kind of tension that transforms coal into diamonds, and single works have sold for over forty million dollars. Franz Kline in Coal Country is the first biography to examine Kline's formative years in Lehighton, Philadelphia, Boston, and London, before he became a founding member of the New York School, the ragtag group who stole the art world away from Paris after WWII. This book, according to Kline's sister, Dr. Louise Kline-Kelly, sets the record straight in more than one place. Compiled over three decades, Franz Kline in Coal Country also contains over 100 of his earliest drawings, cartoons, letters, photos, paintings, and linoleum-block prints. Most of these little-known works, rescued from the attics and scrapbooks of friends, appear here for the first time."

A child's trip to her grandmother's house located in a coal-mining region result in a memorable Christmas.

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.

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.