“The most comprehensive and comprehendible history of the West Virginia Coal War I’ve ever read.” —John Sayles, writer and director of Matewan On Septem

"Keeney delivers a riveting and propulsive story about a nine-year battle to save sacred ground that was the site of the largest labor uprising in American hist

"Oral histories with participants in and observers of the Battle of Blair Mountain and other Appalachian mine wars of the 1920s and 1930s, supplemented with int

The West Virginia mine war of 1920-21, a major civil insurrection of unusual brutality on both sides, even by the standards of the coal fields, involved thousan