Writing Labor History - Steve Watkins & Rosemary Feurer

We delve into writing labor history with Steve Watkins, author of "The Mine Wars: The Bloody Fight for Workers’ Rights in the West Virginia Coalfields," a riveting true story of the West Virginia coal miners who ignited the largest labor uprising in American history. Watkins is joined by labor historian Rosemary Feurer.
This conversation took place during the American Writers Festival on May 19, 2024 and was recorded live. To learn more about the American Writers Festival, click here: americanwriter...
About "The Mine Wars:"
In May of 1920, in a small town in the mountains of West Virginia, a dozen coal miners took a stand. They were sick of the low pay in the mines. The unsafe conditions. The brutal treatment they endured from mine owners and operators. The scrip they were paid-instead of cash-that could only be used at the company store.
They had tried to unionize, but the mine owners dug in. On that fateful day in May 1920, tensions boiled over and a gunfight erupted-beginning a yearlong standoff between workers and owners.
The miners pleaded, then protested, then went on strike; the owners retaliated with spying, bribery, and threats. Violence escalated on both sides, culminating in the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest labor uprising in United States history.
In this gripping narrative nonfiction book, meet the resolute and spirited people who fought for the rights of coal miners, and discover how the West Virginia Mine Wars paved the way for vital worker protections nationwide. More than a century later, this overlooked story of the labor movement remains urgently relevant.
About the panelists:
STEVE WATKINS is an award-winning author of twelve books for young readers, including "Down Sand Mountain," which won the 2009 Golden Kite Award for young adult fiction. He also writes books for grown-ups, and won a Pushcart Prize for one of the stories in his collection "My Chaos Theory." He is co-editor of the online ideas and features magazine "Pie & Chai," a former English professor at the University of Mary Washington, a longtime yoga instructor, and father of four daughters. He and his family live in Fredericksburg, VA.
ROSEMARY FEURER’S research and teaching interests focus on understanding the political economy of social conflict. She focuses on labor movements and conflict within the context of U.S. capitalist development spatially, socially and economically during the late nineteenth and twentieth century. Her new work follows the story that made for violent conflict in Illinois and also helped to make it the strongest unionized state in the nation, tentatively entitled "The Illinois Mine Wars, 1860-1930." It covers the epic conflicts that helped to define Illinois as one of the strongest labor states in the nation. She is also working on a new biography of Mother Jones, the renowned labor activist and agitator of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. She has always connected her research to public history projects, including tours, electronic media, oral history and video production. Feurer is the author of "Against Labor: How U.S. Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism and Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900-1950."