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When the Mines Closed: Stories of Struggles in Hard Times

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Description

The anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania, five hundred square miles of rugged hills stretching between Tower City and Carbondale, harbored coal deposits that once heated virtually all of the homes and businesses in Eastern cities. At its peak all the way through World War I, the coal industry here employed 170,000 miners, and supported almost 1,000,000 people. Lately, with coal workers numbering 1,500, only 5,000 people depend on the industry for their livelihood. Between these two cut-off dates lies a story of industrial decline, of working people facing incremental and cataclysmic changes in their world. When the Mines Closed tells this story in the words of women and men who experienced these dramatic changes and in more than eighty photographs of these individuals, their families, and the larger community.Award-winning historian Thomas Dublin interviewed a cross-section of residents and migrants from the region, who gave their own accounts of their work and circle of relatives lives before and after the mines closed. Among the narrators, six men and seven women, came of age all the way through the Great Depression and entered area mines or, in relation to the women, garment factories, in their teens. They describe the difficult choices they faced, and the long-standing ethnic, working-class values and traditions they drew upon, when after World War II the mines started to shut down. Some left the region, others commuted to work at a distance, still others struggled to find employment in the neighborhood.The photographs taken by George Harvan, a lifelong resident of the area and the son of a Slovak-born coal miner, document residents’ lives over the course of fifty years. Dublin’s introductory essay offers a brief history of anthracite mining and the region and establishes a broader interpretive framework for the narratives and photographs.

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