Killing For Coal By Thomas Andrews Summary

Thomas G. Andrews book, Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War, merges labor and environmental history in an breakdown of the half century leading up to the most fierce and violent labor unrest of the post civil war era, which is the Colorado coal-miner strike of 1913-1914, the Ludlow battle/massacre and Ten Day Coalfield War. Thomas Andrews argues in his book that these incidents cannot be seen in isolation or as separate events, but as the climax of half a century of struggle within the lower class and immigrants of the nation. Andrews argues this through a specific treatment of the environment, particularly in the standard of the working conditions that the miners are subjected to and the relationship that the working people and their surrounding environment share. Andrews argues that the working condition of the Colorado mining fields has a crucial role in causing solidarity among miners and further straining tensions between owners and their workforce. In the …show more content…
Andrews also puts in first hand accounts that gave me a greater gasp of the transition with Palmer’s expedition finding, “A greater number of coal veins… in crossing the Raton mtn. than I have seen or heard of either in England or elsewhere in the United States.” (Killing for Coal, 2008). The change from “organic resources” to fossil fuels such as coal and oil as a key component to the changing of a third or second world country into a