King Coal

King Coal presents the rich history of Alberta coal mining, and the people and culture that emerged out of the industry, from the 1870s through to the modern era. King Coal invites the reader to discover Alberta’s coal history, its triumphs and tragedies, and its legacy in the province today. Uniquely, the book’s carefully researched historical sources are augmented by a vision of the era imagined through a fictional account of the author’s coal mining ancestors, as well as a variety of poetry, song lyrics, archival and modern photographs, and appendices that contain maps, charts, and links to multiple museums and historic sites around the province. These features of the book complete a full portrait of miners and their families, presenting how they lived and worked, the innovations they created, the tragedies they endured, and the life cycles experienced in the towns where they lived—including those boom and bust towns that have disappeared from the Canadian landscape. Made to feel like insiders in a different time, readers will emerge from King Coal with an excellent view of the social side of coal mining in Alberta, a time in Canada’s history when Coal was King.

The town of Ladysmith was one of the most important coal-mining communities on Vancouver Island during the early twentieth century. The Ladysmith miners had a reputation for radicalism and militancy and engaged in bitter struggles for union recognition and economic justice, most notably during the Great Strike of 1912-14. This strike, one of the longest and most violent labour disputes in Canadian history, marked a watershed in the history of the town and the coal industry. When Coal Was King illuminates the origins of the 1912-14 strike by examining the development of the coal industry on Vancouver Island, the founding of Ladysmith, the experience of work and safety in the mines, the process of political and economic mobilization, and how these factors contributed to the development of identity and community. While the Vancouver Island coal industry and the strike have been the focus of a number of popular histories, this book goes beyond to emphasize the importance of class, ethnicity, gender, and community in creating the conditions for the emergence and mobilization of the working-class population. Informed by currend academic debates on the matter and within the discipline, this readable history takes into account extensive archival research, and will appeal to historians and others interested in the history of Vancouver Island.

Deep-mined coal is no longer produced in the United Kingdom - the last of the country's collieries was closed at the end of 2015, causing the sun to set on a vast industry that at one time boasted 3,000 mines and employed well over a million workers. The Rise and Fall of King Coal tells the fascinating story of coal... from its origins in prehistoric swamps to its early primitive mining methods and to its role as the mineral that fueled the Industrial Revolution and put the 'Great' into Britain. It explores the history and operation of the collieries and their railways, explains the location of the coalfields and examines the hazards, hardships, disputes and tragedies that were part of every miner's life. Finally, with Britain now possessing only a handful of opencast and tiny drift mines while still importing millions of tons of coal from overseas, the UK's energy policy is examined at a time when many Britons are worrying whether it is sufficiently fit for purpose.

King Coal presents the rich history of Alberta coal mining, and the people and culture that emerged out of the industry, from the 1870s through to the modern era. King Coal invites the reader to discover Alberta’s coal history, its triumphs and tragedies, and its legacy in the province today. Uniquely, the book’s carefully researched historical sources are augmented by a vision of the era imagined through a fictional account of the author’s coal mining ancestors, as well as a variety of poetry, song lyrics, archival and modern photographs, and appendices that contain maps, charts, and links to multiple museums and historic sites around the province. These features of the book complete a full portrait of miners and their families, presenting how they lived and worked, the innovations they created, the tragedies they endured, and the life cycles experienced in the towns where they lived—including those boom and bust towns that have disappeared from the Canadian landscape. Made to feel like insiders in a different time, readers will emerge from King Coal with an excellent view of the social side of coal mining in Alberta, a time in Canada’s history when Coal was King.

This is the story of the lives and deaths of coal miners in the Western United States in the early Twentieth Century. It is about Americans and immigrants in the land of the free, working as slaves, essentially. And then, their fight back. King Coal is a 1917 novel by Upton Sinclair that describes the poor working conditions in the coal mining industry in the western United States during the 1910s, from the perspective of a single protagonist, Hal Warner. As in his earlier work, The Jungle, Sinclair uses the novel to express his socialist viewpoint. The book is based on the 1913-1914 Colorado coal strikes and written just after the Ludlow massacre. The sequel to King Coal was posthumously published under the title, The Coal War. Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968) was an American writer and the 1934 Democratic party nominee for Governor of California who wrote nearly 100 books and other works in several genres. Sinclair's work was well known and popular in the first half of the 20th century, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943. In 1906, Sinclair acquired particular fame for his classic muck-raking novel The Jungle, which exposed labor and sanitary conditions in the U.S. meatpacking industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.