%1

Mine wars: Rearranging mountains in Appalachia

In the summers of 1920 and 1921 southern West Virginia was the scene of some of the most historically significant unrest in U.S. history. Yet today this history has been largely forgotten. Although I was raised in West Virginia, I first learned about these events as a nearly grown man when I saw the movie Matewan, John Sayles’s cinematic vision of the seminal events of the mine wars.

Keyword tags