Harlan Miners Speak

Harlan Miners Speak PDF

Author: Members of the National Committee for the Defense

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-10-21

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0813185475

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The Dreiser Committee, including writers Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, and Sherwood Anderson, investigated the desperate situation of striking Kentucky miners in November 1931. When the Communist-led National Miners Union competed against the more conservative United Mine Workers of America for greater union membership, class resentment turned to warfare. Harlan Miners Speak, originally published in 1932, is an invaluable record that illustrates the living and working conditions of the miners during the 1930s. This edition of Harlan Miners Speak, with a new introduction by noted historian John C. Hennen, offers readers an in-depth look at a pivotal crisis in the complex history of this controversial form of energy production.

Hell in Harlan

Hell in Harlan PDF

Author: George J. Titler

Publisher:

Published: 2015-06

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780990535133

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George Joy Titler came to Harlan County, Kentucky, in 1937 to help the United Mine Workers of America labor union organize Harlan County's miners. For decades, the county's coal operators bitterly and violently resisted the UMWA's repeated organizing efforts in this remote southeastern Kentucky region. The coal operators' influence and power permeated the county's government and justice system, and stretched its reach to the Governor's office in Frankfort. The operators paid scores of sheriff deputies to intimidate, threaten, and kill organizers or miners who challenged their economic grip on the county. After four tumultous years, the UMWA organizers secured for Harlan's miners a fair contract. In this book, Titler recounts the history of Harlan County's labor troubles, and gives a first-hand account of his four harrowing years in "Bloody Harlan," where he and his friends survived car bombings, hotel bombings, machine gun ambushes, and other assasination attempts. His bravery and service on behalf of the miners and their families earned him a monacre befitting his personality: the "Bull of Harlan."

The Big Sandy

The Big Sandy PDF

Author: Carol Crowe-Carraco

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-12-14

Total Pages: 159

ISBN-13: 0813188989

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The Big Sandy River and its two main tributaries, the Tug and Levisa forks, drain nearly two million mountainous acres in the easternmost part of Kentucky. For generations, the only practical means of transportation and contact with the outside world was the river, and, as The Big Sandy demonstrates, steamboats did much to shape the culture of the region. Carol Crowe-Carraco offers an intriguing and readable account of this region's history from the days of the venturesome Long Hunters of the eighteenth century, through the bitter struggles of the Civil War and its aftermath, up to the 1970s, with their uncertain promise of a new prosperity. The Big Sandy pictures these changes vividly while showing how the turbulent past of the valley lives on in the region's present.