Battle of Blair Mountain

In 1921, some 10,000 West Virginia coal miners - outraged over years of brutality and exploitation - picked up their Winchesters and marched against their tormentors, the powerful mine owners who ruled their corrupt state. For ten days, the miners fought a pitched battle against an opposing legion of deputies, state police and makeshift militia. Only the intervention of a Federal expeditionary force ended this undeclared war. In "The Battle of Blair Mountain", Robert Shogan shows this long-neglected slice of American history to be a saga of the conflicting political, economic and cultural forces that shaped the power structure of twentieth-century America.