Author: Thomas L. Dublin
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501707299
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
The anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania once prospered. Today, very little mining or industry remains, although residents have made valiant efforts to restore the fabric of their communities. In The Face of Decline, the noted historians Thomas Dublin and Walter Licht offer a sweeping history of this area over the course of the twentieth century. Combining business, labor, social, political, and environmental history, Dublin and Licht delve into coal communities to explore grassroots ethnic life and labor activism, economic revitalization, and the varied impact of economic decline across generations of mining families. The Face of Decline also features the responses to economic crisis of organized capital and labor, local business elites, redevelopment agencies, and state and federal governments. Dublin and Licht draw on a remarkable range of sources: oral histories and survey questionnaires; documentary photographs; the records of coal companies, local governments, and industrial development corporations; federal censuses; and community newspapers. The authors examine the impact of enduring economic decline across a wide region but focus especially on a small group of mining communities in the region's Panther Valley, from Jim Thorpe through Lansford to Tamaqua. The authors also place the anthracite region within a broader conceptual framework, comparing anthracite's decline to parallel developments in European coal basins and Appalachia and to deindustrialization in the United States more generally.
Author: John Stuart Richards
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 9780738509785
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 100
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Book Description
Four distinct anthracite coal fields encompass an area of 1,700 square miles in the northeastern portion of Pennsylvania. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, underground coal mining was at its zenith and the work of miners was more grueling and dangerous than it is today. Faces blackened by coal and helmet lamps lit by fire are no longer parts of the everyday lives of miners in the region. Early Coal Mining in the Anthracite Region is a journey into a world that was once very familiar. These vintage photographs of collieries, breakers, miners, drivers, and breaker boys illuminate the dark of the anthracite mines. The pictures of miners, roof falls, mules, and equipment deep underground tell the story of the hard lives lived around the hard coal. Above ground, breaker boys toiled in unbearable conditions inside the noisy, vibrating, soot-filled monsters known as coal breakers.
Author: Richard G. Healey
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 560
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Book Description
Introduction -- Recurrent and non-recurrent economic fluctuations at the national level -- Constraints on business decision-making-the impact of geology, topography and mining technology -- Prior investment in mining and transportation infrastructure -- Railroad expansion and corporate control -- Network development strategies and the articulation of the anthracite distribution region in interior markets -- Railroad expansion and corporate control II: tidewater markets, trunk line connections and comparative economic performance -- Waxing and waning markets I: sectoral shifts in the use of anthracite -- Waxing and waning markets II: the changing geography of market power -- Waxing and waning markets III : regional shifts, price behaviour and the changing size -- Composition of anthracite production -- Corporations, competition and the rise of the cartels I : precursors and pre-disposing factors to industry-wide combination -- Corporations, competition and the rise of the cartels II: the 1873 combination and its successors -- Developing and managing the coal estate -- Region building I: financing development in the mining economy -- Region building II: investment in new mining and railroad capacity -- Regional retrenchment: rationalization and reorganisation in the Schuylkill region 1872-1902 -- Regional dynamics, disequilibrium tendencies and regional economic development -- Notes for chapters 1-16 -- Preface to bibliography.
Author: Harold W. Aurand
Publisher: Susquehanna University Press
ISBN: 9781575910642
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 166
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Book Description
The knowledge that they traded their lives for a job generated an overarching fear of losing their income."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Joseph W. Leonard
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 9781596290501
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
"By sharing the experiences, triumphs and tragedies of my own family, in this book I provide a personal look at what life was like in the early coal-mining industry and how that industry has evolved and improved to become one of America's most important industries."--Page 12.
Author: Karol K. Weaver
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271068175
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 189
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Book Description
While much has been written about immigrant traditions, music, food culture, folklore, and other aspects of ethnic identity, little attention has been given to the study of medical culture, until now. In Medical Caregiving and Identity in Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Region, 1880–2000, Karol Weaver employs an impressive range of primary sources, including folk songs, patent medicine advertisements, oral history interviews, ghost stories, and jokes, to show how the men and women of the anthracite coal region crafted their gender and ethnic identities via the medical decisions they made. Weaver examines communities’ relationships with both biomedically trained physicians and informally trained medical caregivers, and how these relationships reflected a sense of “Americanness.” She uses interviews and oral histories to help tell the story of neighborhood healers, midwives, Pennsylvania German powwowers, medical self-help, and the eventual transition to modern-day medicine. Weaver is able to show not only how each of these methods of healing was shaped by its patrons and their backgrounds but also how it helped mold the identities of the new Americans who sought it out.
Author: Thomas J. Keil
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781611461756
Category : Anthracite coal industry
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This book focuses on the development and demise of the anthracite industry in northeastern Pennsylvania. It also examines attempts to secure replacement industries and the economic consequences of these actions.
Author: Janet MacGaffey
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 1611485142
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 339
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Book Description
Coal Dust on Your Feet is a historical ethnography of Shamokin, Pennsylvania and its surrounding borough of Coal Township. This anthracite coal fueled the industrial revolution and its miners generated the rise of organized labor, both of which make the region of northeast Pennsylvania one of great economic and historic importance. The ethnographic field site of the study spans a century and a half as it looks at the history and ties to the home countries of the immigrants who established and worked the coal mines. Details of individual lives and family histories enliven accounts of industry and the struggles of the unions, means of livelihood, ethnicity, associational life and ceremonial occasions. It will be of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, scholars of urban studies and labor historians, and contributes to the canon of literature on community and sense of place. The study focuses on the rise and decline of the mining industry, on the ethnic groups that formed the town’s neighborhoods, and on the changes that have taken place in ethnicity, religion, class and community. It covers the period of prosperity when the factories of the New York garment industry moved into town for the middle years of the twentieth century and made Shamokin a shopping mecca. Today, the town is decimated by economic decline and population loss, but ethnicity remains an identity option and still has economic content. The strong sense of place of the people of the town rooted in their cultural and militant heritage, has given rise to a wider community of former residents who return to visit, participate in events and buy ethnic foods and cultural items. This wider community of belonging and identity helps to boost morale, sense of community and economy, in what is now primarily a retirement town with commuters traveling to work in nearby cities.
Author: Pamela MacArthur
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 9780738503417
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 132
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Book Description
John Henry O'Hara, the American author from Pottsville, Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, was so engrossed by the coal-rich "Anthracite Region" that he wrote about it in his professional work and personal correspondence for most of his life. The history, geography, and society of the area, particularly within a thirty-mile radius of Pottsville, were put under a microscope throughout O'Hara's career. John O'Hara's Anthracite Region covers the exciting period from the 1880s to 1945 in the coal region of Pennsylvania. John Henry O'Hara investigated, studied, and recorded the most intimate aspects of the upper class of his "Pennsylvania Protectorate" from his first novel, Appointment in Samarra, onwards. From the "Aristocrats'" escape to Eagles Mere, Sullivan County to the amusement parks such as Tumbling Run and Marlin Park in the "Anthracite Region," O'Hara captured every detail of the upper class's way of life. The social enclaves such as The Out Door Club, The Pottsville Club, and The Schuylkill Country Club did not escape O'Hara's pen in such novels as Ten North Frederick and The Lockwood Concern. These places, the people, and their fashionable attire, automobiles, houses, and schools are all captured within this unique photographic layout of O'Hara's work that wonderfully re-creates the history of this region.
Author: George Gershon Korson
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512817376
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344
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Book Description
This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.
