By Matt Witt
World Wide Work
July 2023
The Bootleg Coal Rebellion by Mitch Troutman (PM Press). Based on interviews with participants, this is a heartening story of communities that organized themselves to meet economic needs when big corporations failed to do so. When big companies closed coal mines in eastern Pennsylvania during the Great Depression, miners created their own teams to get what coal they could from old works or to create new shafts, despite opposition from corporate interests and the courts, police, and banks.
