“I want to say make no settlement until they sign up that every bloody murderer of a guard has got to go.”
This is the story of the largest uprising in the United States since the Civil War.
As unions spread across the Progressive-Era United States, West Virginia mine owners manage to keep them out. They have some good reasons (tough margins) and some less savory ones … like their preference for an oppressive “mine guard system” in “company towns” that effectively removes civil government and private ownership, and reduces the American citizens working in their mines to serfdom. Mother Jones inspires the miners to push back.
Over the course of a decade, that pushback turns bloody – especially in Mingo County. But the worst of it comes just after the Great War, as the miner’s hero, Police Chief Sid “Two Gun” Hatfield, is murdered in cold blood at McDowell County Courthouse. Now, all bets are off. 10,000 miners grab their guns, ready to get revenge and free incarcerated miners. But they’ll have to go through Sheriff Don Chafin’s forces first. The two sides clash at Blair Mountain as the US Army arrives with regiments and aviation squadrons.
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156: The Presidency of “Silent” Cal Coolidge
155: The Life & Times of Warren G. Harding & The Teapot Dome Scandal
154: An Epilogue Discussion with Ben Sawyer
152: The Second Ku Klux Klan: Racism, Anti-Semitism, & Anti-Catholicism in the 1920s
151: The First Red Scare - Bombings, The Palmer Raids, Eugene Debs, and J. Edgar Hoover
150: The Great War’s Aftermath: Coming Home, The Spanish Flu, & The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier
149: WWI Epilogue
148: Tales of Christmas from World War I (A Truce, Plum Pudding, and Love)
147: Peacemaking in Paris: The Treaty of Versailles
146: The Armistice of November 11, 1918
145: Halloween Special 2023: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
144: A Conversation with Ken Burns - Storytelling and the American Buffalo
143: The Meuse-Argonne Offensive (pt.2) – Breaking the Kriemhilde Line
142: The Meuse-Argonne Offensive (pt.1) – “The Lost Battalion”
141: Wartime Interlude
140: WWI Aviators: From the Lafayette Escadrille to the Red Baron and More
139: From Yeomen (F) to “Hello Girls:” American Women in World War I
138: The 15th New York/369th or The Harlem Hellfighters
137: The First Battle of the First American Army: St. Mihiel
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