The Devil Is Here In These Hills

“The most comprehensive and comprehendible history of the West Virginia Coal War I’ve ever read.” —John Sayles, writer and director of Matewan On September 1, 1912, the largest, most protracted, and deadliest working-class uprising in American history was waged in West Virginia. On one side were powerful corporations whose millions bought armed guards and political influence. On the other side were fifty thousand mine workers, the nation’s largest labor union, and the legendary “miners’ angel,” Mother Jones. The fight for unionization and civil rights sparked a political crisis that verged on civil war, stretching from the creeks and hollows of the Appalachians to the US Senate. Attempts to unionize were met with stiff resistance. Fundamental rights were bent—then broken. The violence evolved from bloody skirmishes to open armed conflict, as an army of more than fifty thousand miners finally marched to an explosive showdown. Extensively researched and vividly told, this definitive book about an often-overlooked chapter of American history, “gives this backwoods struggle between capital and labor the due it deserves. [Green] tells a dark, often despairing story from a century ago that rings true today” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette).

This book offers a bold and original perspective on the 1914 Ludlow Massacre and the “Great Coalfield War.” In a story of transformation, Andrews illuminates the causes and consequences of the militancy that erupted in colliers’ strikes over the course of nearly half a century.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 Virginians had known about the mineral wealth buried beyond the Blue Ridge since the mid-eighteenth century, but it took another century and a half for industrialists to exploit the rich deposits of black gold laced through the mountains of the Allegheny Plateau. #2 When the French and Indian War ended in 1763, hundreds of colonial soldiers who fought for the British poured into the lush valleys beyond the Blue Ridge, taking land that the Cherokee people had occupied for centuries. #3 Moses Keeney, a pioneer who settled in what is now West Virginia, had a few sons who continued to farm, hunt, and cut lumber along Cabin Creek in a place called Eskdale. In the mid-nineteenth century, none of the Keeneys could foresee the changes that would come to their valley or the entire region. #4 The state of West Virginia was built on the coal industry. In the early twentieth century, agents acquired forty-five thousand acres of land in McDowell County using capital invested by partners from London, Philadelphia, and Staunton, Virginia. These capitalists then leased these lands to five mining companies ready to exploit the state’s purest coal deposits.

The ghost of a murdered pioneer woman wanders the Appalachian hills, searching for a way home. But others, including a city-bred scholar and an escaped killer, also roam these hills, each undertaking a very personal journey. When their paths cross, a long-hidden mystery is revealed, and with it a secret that will rock the Appalachians to their very core.

Describes what life was like, especially for children, in coal mines and mining towns in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Originally written in 1938 but never published due to its controversial nature, an insightful guide reveals the seven principles of good that will allow anyone to triumph over the obstacles that must be faced in reaching personal goals.

In 1656, a planter in colonial Maryland tortured and killed one of his slaves, an Angolan man named Antonio who refused to work the fields. Over three centuries later, a Detroit labor organizer named Simon Owens watched as strikebreakers wielding bats and lead pipes beat his fellow autoworkers for protesting their inhumane working conditions. Antonio and Owens had nothing in common but the color of their skin and the economic injustices they battled—yet the former is what defines them in America’s consciousness. In A Dreadful Deceit, award-winning historian Jacqueline Jones traces the lives of these two men and four other African Americans to reveal how the concept of race has obscured the factors that truly divide and unite us. Expansive, visionary, and provocative, A Dreadful Deceit explodes the pernicious fiction that has shaped American history.