Good afternoon AskHistorians, After listening to the new Tyler Childers’ album, Long Violent History, I have started to read about the various labor wars centered on the coal fields of Appalachia—West Virginia in particular.
Can anyone here recommend a book or two that takes a deep dive into this topic? I am fascinated and would love to learn more!
The Devil is Here in These Hills by James Green is a good start. Fairly broad in its focus, it discusses the recent history of West Virginia mining from the 1890s or so forward, covering the two major mine wars and their aftermath.
The Battle of Blair Mountain by Robert Shogan is another recent book ~2004 iirc. It's a bit more tightly focused on the Blair Mountain aspect, but it shares a lot of space with Green's work.
Supplementary to those, Gun Thugs, Rednecks, and Radicals ed. by David Alan Corbin is a collection of documents and primary sources that might be of interest.
My interaction with this specific topic is a bit limited, but I can vouch for at least these.
I like Childers. Man's got a great voice. Kentucky should be proud.
For a broad view that includes the economic forces, Ronald D Eller's Miners, Millhands and Mountaineers: Industrialization in the Appalachian South gives a good account of how outside money poured into the region after the Civil War to buy up mineral rights and develop the coal fields, and the often grim and sometimes violent results.
While it's hard to avoid the essential story of a region looted by outsiders, quite a lot of writing on the subject pays strict homage to the UMW, and often paints a too- simple picture of Noble Union vs Evil Operators and the destruction of a magic, beautiful land and culture. Crandall A Shiflett 's Coal Towns takes exception to that, arguing that rural Appalachia had economic strife from too many people trying to live on too little good land long before the northern coal companies moved in. He also strongly suggests that sometimes the company coal towns - at least the later ones- offered better living conditions than the typical mountain shacks. I don't think Shiflett is broadly correct ( he relied a bit much on the rosy memories of people who recalled their lives in the coal towns as children) but he has some good points. Before there were coal companies, there were still problems just with having a lot of subsistence agriculture on a too-vertical landscape..