The Independent Collier: Some Recent Studies of Nineteenth Century Coalmining Communities in Britain and the United States

Abstract

Until fairly recently the new labor history has devoted relatively little atten tion to coalminers, despite the fact that by the end of the nineteenth century they constituted the largest body of workers employed in industry on either side of the Atlantic. Thus on the English side the standard history of the miners until the 1960s was R. Page Arnot's useful but narrowly institutional The Miners. In America McAlister Coleman's Men and Coal and McDonald and Lynch's Coal Miners' Unions had a similar appeal. There have been a number of U.S. area studies, such as R. D. Ward's and W. W. Rogers' Labor Revolt in Alabama (1965); several new biographies, including Dubofsky's and Van Tine's admirable John L. Lewis, (1977); and various doctoral theses. These include David A. Corbin's Southern West Virginia Coal Miners. Sociocultural Study of Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields, 1890-1922 (University of Maryland, 1978); and Michael R. McCormick's A Comparative Study of Coalmining Communities in Northern Il linois and Southeastern Ohio in the Late Nineteenth Century ' ' (Ohio State Univer