Growing Up in Coal Country - Hardcover

Bartoletti, Susan Campbell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395778476 ISBN 13: 9780395778470

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1996

Synopsis

Based on personal interviews, newspaper accounts, mining inspection records, and other original sources, a portrait of life in the Pennsylvania coal mines and "patch villages" tells the heartbreaking but life-affirming story of children and adults for whom this region represented a way of life.

About this title

About the Author:

Susan Campbell Bartoletti is the award-winning author of several books for young readers, including Black Potatoes: The Story of the Great Irish Famine, 18451850, winner of the Robert F. Sibert Medal. She lives in Moscow, Pennsylvania.

From Booklist:

Gr. 5 and up. With compelling black-and-white photographs of children at work in the coal mines of northeastern Pennsylvania about 100 years ago, this handsome, spacious photo-essay will draw browsers as well as students doing research on labor and immigrant history. The story of these boys' lives are a part of Russell Freedman's general overview Kids at Work (1994) and of Betsy Harvey Kraft's biography Mother Jones (1995); but there's a wealth of personal detail and family story here that focuses on what it was like in the mines and in the homes and communities of these working children. Lewis Hines' famous pictures will grab readers, and Bartoletti has also gathered dozens of archival photos and heartbreaking oral histories. They show what it was like for eight-year-old breaker boys sorting coal surrounded by deafening noise and black clouds of dust, steam, and smoke; what it was like to be a mule driver underground; what it meant to be a spragger, a butty, a nipper. Drawing on personal interviews, archival tapes and transcripts, and a wide range of historical resources, Bartoletti finds heartfelt memories of long hours, hard labor, and extremely dangerous working conditions, as well as lighter accounts of spirited rebellion, mischief, and bonding. The immigrant experience is an integral part of this "coal culture": the strength of ethnic groups and the prejudice against them, and their banding together to form strong labor unions. As with most fine juvenile nonfiction, this will also have great appeal for adults. Hazel Rochman

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0395778476
• ISBN 13: 9780395778470
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128