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Whose Truth?
The West Virginia Coal Mine Wars


Resources


Below are a mix of educational, professional, commercial, and personal sites.  Be cautious to confirm dates and information on personal pages with reliable sources.  Italicized text indicates annotation text quoted directly from site.

Courses
West Virginia History, Ronald Lewis, WV University
Course site in West Virginia history; rich resource for timelines and photographs under "Course Materials" section.

Current Coal News
Coal Sludge
Oct 18, 2000 spill in eastern Kentucky.  NPR report.  See also  Buffalo Creek.

Coal Slurry
Coal Slurry NPR's Adam Hochberg reports on a coal mine pond that gave way in eastern Kentucky, releasing 250-million gallons of thick black sludge that polluted streams, killed fish and cut off drinking water supplies. Cleanup is under way. (5:45)

Appalshop's Community Media Initiative
In addition to the site's other resources, there is a prominent link from the home page to photos and press coverage of the Martin County coal sludge disaster.

Denise Giardina
Keller's notes and links for Storming Heaven

Author Lends Voice to Protest
West Virginia author Denise Giardina on Saturday urged state residents to take back their state from "King Coal" and work to abolish mountaintop removal mining.

Chat with Author Denise Giardina

Coffee with Denise Giardina

Slashing The Homemade Quilt in Denise Giardina's Storming Heaven
Cecelia Conoway
Giardina dramatizes four points of view, including gender differences: a mountain fellow who grows up with the old ways; a younger man born on the eve of industrialization; a modern mountain woman whose family lives in both worlds; and an Italian immigrant woman relocated in the coal camp. Their threatened lives are symbolized by tattered folklife motifs: a regendered midwife, a blasted stargazer, an exiled banjo songster, a slashed quilt, and a skewered butterfly. Nonetheless, the characters find strategies of resistance and continue to create cooperative social systems.

TNT Inks Exclusive Television Production Deal

Full-Text Articles About Mine Wars
West Virginia Mine Wars

compiled by the West Virginia State Archives

The United States Army and the Return to Normalcy in Labor Dispute Interventions: The Case of the West Virginia Coal Mine Wars, 1920-1921
by Clayton D. Laurie

Labor
An Eclectic List of Events in U.S. Labor History
 . . .In many instances, government troops were called out to crush strikes, at times firing on protesters. Presented below are a few of the many incidents in the (too often overlooked) tumultuous labor history of this country.

Labornet's Labor Quotes
Check out links to quotes from Mother Jones, Joe Hill, and Eugene Debs.

Holt Labor Library Internet Links
Index of Web resources including a list of "Electronic Archives." 

Indiana University's Division of Labor Studies

Includes a useful index of links to other labor sites.

Illinois Labor History Society
This site provides a number of some tangentially related materials under "Labor History Articles," including information on Mother Jones, women in the Knights of Labor, and a 1908 photograph of a young boy working a Welch, WV mine.  The site also provides an index to other labor sites.  Most significant, however, is what isn't here.  In a timeline and study plans in American Labor History for history teachers, West Virginia is not mentioned even once.

Publications by the I.W.W.
Great digital archive.

A Short History of American Labor
This brief history of more than 100 years of the modem trade union movement in the United States can only touch the high spots of activity and identify the principal trends of a "century of achievement." In such a condensation of history, episodes of importance and of great human drama must necessarily be discussed far too briefly, or in some cases relegated to a mere mention.

Storming Heaven
. . .dedicated to the radical and transformative politics of the Left. The source of the name is Marx's Letter to Dr. Kugelmann Concerning the Paris Commune, dated 12 April 1871, in which Marx said the Paris workers were "storming heaven."   

Strikebreakers: Scabs, Finks, and Violence
This "webliography" by Bennington student Kenyon Zimmer provides some useful links.  Of particular interest may be a link to a review of a recent book on the Baldwin-Felts Agency that questions their depiction as "gun-thugs" and proposes they were heroes.  There is also a link to Jack London's speech regarding scabs to the Oakland Socialist Party Local on April 5, 1903 and other socialist writings by London.

UMWA

We Always Remember
A Pamphlet of Materials on the Repression of the IWW in the first Red Scare in the United States of America, 1917 - 1920.

IWW, Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies)
In Matewan, Joe Kenehan tells Sephus, "I was with the Wobblies."  "Me too," Sephus replies," Back when it meant something."  

The Wobbly Spirit by Howard Zinn

Mountain Life: Information for Writers
McDowell Counties Recipes for Survival / The Bailey Family of Peel Chestnut Mountain

Music
The Labor Movement

History in Song's index of labor related songs including an index Songs of the Industrial Workers of the World and The Songs of Joe Hill.  The index for Songs from the mines is also of interest, though fewer songs date to the time of our study.

History, Images, and Media 
AltaVista Image Search

Please note that the default for the search is to search "Corbis Images." Although Corbis has a number of images of interest to the course,  if you want to search the Web as well, select the Web checkbox.  To eliminate Corbis or add additional photo archives, use the pulldown menu beside the "Partner Sites" label.  

American Memory:  Historical Collections for the National Digital Library
American memory is the online resource compiled by the Library of Congress National Digital Library Program. With the participation of other libraries and archives, the program provides a gateway to rich primary source materials relating to the history and culture of the United States. Over one million items from our historical collections are currently available online.

American Studies Crossroads Project: Reference and Research
Finding aids, directories, and indices for American Studies resources.

1920's
Despite no mention of the march on Blair Mountain, the site's timeline mentions the Matewan Massacre and provides a quick overview of larger cultural and political events going on in the U.S. and rest of the world.

Misc. West Virginia & Coal
Coal Glossary
Kentucky Department for Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement.

Coal Mining Links
Useful list of links provided by an an anonymous user who writes This list is a quirky collection of links I have encountered while searching the web for genealogical and historical resources concerning coalmining and coalminers. It is reflective of my personal interests and does not pretend to be comprehensive or objective. I do not list sites which do not have a genealogical or historical component..

Glossary of Coal Mining Terms
United States Department of Labor Office of Administrative Law Judges:  Judges Benchbook of the Black Lung Benefits Act.

Goldenseal
Goldenseal, the magazine of West Virginia traditional life, takes its stories from the recollections of West Virginians living throughout the state. Oral history fieldwork and documentary photography result in four issues per year with articles on subjects such as labor history, folklore, music, farming, religion, traditional crafts, food and politics.

Photos from West Virginia’s Mining History (early 1900's)
from the West Virginia Office of Miners' Health Safety and Training homepage.

Town of Matewan
Matewan Today.  Follow links to the "Battle of Matewan" and subsequent linked pages.  Of particular interest is a page that includes brief excerpts quoted from witnesses of the Matewan massacre.

West Virginia Coal Mines, A WVGenWeb Special Project
A terrific resource complete with photos, articles, interviews; the site include an entire page of links to materials relating to the coal wars.

West Virginia Histories Homepage
Primary resource here is an index of links to bibliographies by subject.

West Virginia Mine Disasters 1884 - Present
Date, company, mine, location, nature of accident, number of victims.

Sayle's Matewan
Internet Movie Database: Matewan

Mingo County, West Virginia, 1920. Coal miners, struggling to form a union, are up against company operators and gun thugs; Black and Italian miners, brought in by the company to break the strike, are caught between the two forces. Union activist and ex-Wobbly Joe Kenehan, sent to help organize the union, determines to bring the local, Black, and Italian groups together. Drawn from an actual incident; the characters of Sid Hatfield, Cabell Testerman, C. E. Lively, and Few Clothes Johnson were based on real people.

Matewan
Made for $4 million but looking as if it cost three times that amount, MATEWAN is the finest work so far from America's best-known independent filmmaker, John Sayles. This film has the look and feel of a classic, yet surprisingly many critics-so often longing for the movies of the past-found fault with it for just that reason.

Washington Post Review
Riddled with labor rhetoric, this coal-dusted tragedy wavers between well-acted propaganda and historical burlesque. Rambo's reactionism seems almost subtle by contrast.

This rather dismal review critiques the film's stereotypes while using the following language with no sense of irony.

Shot in bleak, bituminous blues and set to the ballads of the hills, "Matewan" captures the countryside and the ancient, echoing spell of the worn-down Appalachians. It serves as a portrait of the people, with their ruined faces and their odd, isolated English.  But it doesn't conjure the dark danger of digging for dirty ore, the hell of a life bent double and buried alive. Instead, it dramatizes a strike, the making of a local union and the miners as incipient union men.

The review is interesting for a number of reasons, especially for considering the reviewer's rhetoric and attitude toward the topic.  Compare this reviewer's take to  Sayle's description of what he hoped to capture in the film.