The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia's Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom

From before the dawn of the twentieth century until the arrival of the New Deal, one of the most protracted and deadly labor struggles in American history was waged in West Virginia.

On one side were powerful corporations and millionaire industrialists who bought political influence and paid for armed guards for their company towns.

On the other side were 50,000 mine workers, the nation's largest labor union, and the legendary "miners' angel," Mother Jones. Attempts to unionize were met with stiff resistance. Fundamental rights were bent and broken until the violence evolved from bloody skirmishes to open armed conflict. The fight for civil rights and unionization sparked a political crisis verging on civil war that stretched from the creeks and hollows to the courts and the US Senate. In

The Devil is Here in These Hills, celebrated labor historian James Green tells the story of West Virginia and coal like never before.

Reviews An ambitious, vivid account . . . A vital and anecdotally rich history of the struggle to organize coal miners in West Virginia . . . Green presents readers with a refreshingly nuanced and fuller depiction of this class of workers than previously conceived . . . The Devil Is Here in These Hills is ambitious in scope [and] fast-moving."
Minneapolis Star Tribune

The story James Green has to tell in The Devil Is Here in These Hills . . . is among the best and largely forgotten American stories."
New York Times

James Green provides what could be the best history of events in West Virginia from 1892 to 1933, especially in the coalfields."
Charleston Gazette (West Virginia)
The Devil is Here in These Hills provides much needed perspective on the economic, social and political issues that still confound the Mountaineer State. . . . The author's nuanced treatment . . . is the way history should be written. . . . Mr. Green's thorough research and steady analysis . . . gives this backwoods struggle between capital and labor the due it deserves. He tells a dark, often despairing story from a century ago that rings true today."
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Deepens our understanding of . . . well-known labor conflicts . . . The Devil Is Here in These Hills not only succeeds in bringing together heretofore disparate episodes in coal miners' struggles for social justice but convincingly connects these moments and movements to a central theme: a people's fight to exercise freedom of speech and freedom of association in the workplaces where the rights of property owners had reigned supreme.'"
Journal of American History

A lively and accessible history of the West Virginia mine wars and the struggle for the United Mine Workers of America union from the 1890s through the 1920s. This is the most authoritative book written on this bloody and turbulent chapter of US history since David Allan Corbin's 1981 Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields."
Choice

James Green has resurrected an important, searing piece of our heritageand just the kind of thing your high school American History teacher didn't teach you. His lively and moving account of the West Virginia mine wars is a reminder of how painfully long people in this country had to fight to gain even barely decent wages and working conditions. And, as today's gap between the 1% and everyone else grows ever wider, the era of the robber barons he evokes so well doesn't seem that far away."
Adam Hochschild, author of To End All Wars and King Leopold's Ghost