Labor History

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  Organizing the Breathless: Cotton Dust, Southern Politics, and the Brown Lung Association

  In the 1970s, textile workers joined forces with a small band of grassroots activists and organizers and challenged the most powerful industrial interest in the heart of Dixie-the cotton textile manufacturers. They located disabled workers and organized them, employing the full range of interest- group tactics, and they creatively engaged in legislative, administrative, and judicial lobbying as well as protest actions-with remarkable success.

  Robert E. Botsch recounts the history of the Brown Lung Association and details the interaction of the major participants in the rise-and ultimately the failure-of the organization. A once all-powerful and politically dominant textile industry lost its ...Read More

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  Pennsylvania Mining Families: The Search for Dignity in the Coalfields

  In Pennsylvania Mining Families, Barry P. Michrina offers a luminous portrait of Pennsylvania coal miners and their response to economic oppression. He follows them from the great coal strike of 1927 through daily threats of injury and death in the mines to the departure of children and grandchildren as the industry has declined. Drawing on numerous first-hand interviews, as well as extensive archival research, he analyzes the change in work practices, the miners’ own views about their ever-evolving situation, and relationships between miners and mining companies—undercutting the stereotypical picture of the rebellious miner.

  Barry P. Michrina, professor of anthropology at ...Read More

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  The Real Disaster Is Above Ground: A Mine Fire and Social Conflict

  In the 1950s Centralia was a small town, like many others in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania. But since the 1960s, it has been consumed, outwardly and inwardly by a fire that has inexorably spread in the abandoned mines beneath it. The earth smokes, subsides, and breathes poisonous gases. No less destructive has been the spread of dissension and enmity among the townspeople. The Real Disaster Is Above Ground tells the story of the fire and the tragic failure of all efforts to counter it.

  This study of the Centralia fire represents the most thorough canvass of the documentary materials ...Read More

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  Eisenhower and Landrum-Griffin: A Study in Labor-Management Politics

  During the 1950s two Senate investigations, both highly publicized through the new medium of television, revealed the spread of racketeers and corruption among labor unions. Taking advantage of these sensational revelations, business interests, who for years had chafed against the federal government's pro-labor policies, mounted a campaign to curb labor's power. With the support of the business-oriented administration of Dwight Eisenhower, they pushed through Congress a new "reform" law—the Landrum-Griffin Act. In this book, R. Alton Lee, author of an earlier study of the Taft-Hartley law, offers the first detailed legislative history of this important act and with it an ...Read More

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  Black Coal Miners in America: Race, Class, and Community Conflict, 1780-1980

  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 ...Read More

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  Coal-Mining Safety in the Progressive Period: The Political Economy of Reform

  Through the first decade of the twentieth century, Americans looked upon industrial accidents with callous disregard; they were accepted as an unfortunate but necessary adjunct to industrial society. A series of mine disasters in December 1907 (including one in Monongah, West Virginia, which took a toll of 361 lives) shook the public, at least temporarily, out of its lethargy.

  In this award-winning study, author William Graebner traces the development of mine safety reform in the years immediately following these tragic events. Reform activities during the Progressive period centered on the Bureau of Mines and an effort to obtain uniform state ...Read More