Thomas Dublin

The anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania, five hundred square miles of rugged hills stretching between Tower City and Carbondale, harbored coal deposits that once heated virtually all the homes and businesses in Eastern cities. At its peak during World War I, the coal industry here employed 170,000 miners, and supported almost 1,000,000 people. Today, with coal workers numbering 1,500, only 5,000 people depend on the industry for their livelihood. Between these two points in time lies a story of industrial decline, of working people facing incremental and cataclysmic changes in their world. When the Mines Closed tells this story in the words of men and women who experienced these dramatic changes and in more than eighty photographs of these individuals, their families, and the larger community. Award-winning historian Thomas Dublin interviewed a cross-section of residents and migrants from the region, who gave their own accounts of their work and family lives before and after the mines closed. Most of the narrators, six men and seven women, came of age during the Great Depression and entered area mines or, in the case of the women, garment factories, in their teens. They describe the difficult choices they faced, and the long-standing ethnic, working-class values and traditions they drew upon, when after World War II the mines began to shut down. Some left the region, others commuted to work at a distance, still others struggled to find employment locally. The photographs taken by George Harvan, a lifelong resident of the area and the son of a Slovak-born coal miner, document residents' lives over the course of fifty years. Dublin's introductory essay offers a briefhistory of anthracite mining and the region and establishes a broader interpretive framework for the narratives and photographs.

The 10 historical data files which make up this data set are based on a study of women working in the cotton textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts during the years 1826-1860. The study was done to explore the transformation of women's work in the first half of the 19th century and the attitudes and responses of women workers to these changes. The data were drawn from the payroll records of the Hamilton Manufacturing Company of Lowell, the 1836 Lowell Directory and supplement, and the federal manuscript censuses of 1850 and 1860. Information available in these files includes the names and addresses of women employed in all the major firms in Lowell, job status, days worked, earnings, literacy, school attendance, previous work experience, dates of entry and departure from the mill, and living situation. Several of the data files link workers found in the payroll records of different years. Computer-accessible data for these 10 studies are available at the Murray Center.