Answer:
look below
Step-by-step explanation:
The rapidly increasing use of coal in the late nineteenth century required hundreds of thousands of workers to dig that coal out of the ground, sort and load it into railroad cars, and ship it to the urban and industrial centers that consumed it. Most coalfields were sparsely populated compared to the cities they supplied. Workers had to be recruited and lured to the coal camps. Company representatives traveled across the agricultural south, recruiting Black workers from former plantation areas as a new wave of white violence followed the collapse of Reconstruction. Recruiters also went to struggling towns in Southern and Eastern Europe, paying voyage fares for men who promised to work in the coal mines on arrival. By the turn of the twentieth century, close to half a million workers—mostly men and boys, but also some women in smaller, family mines—toiled in the American coalfields.The reality of the coal camp often looked very different from what had been promised. Pay was low, and the company, which often owned miners’ housing and ran the supply store, frequently controlled their cost of living. Miners were paid by the ton, and conflicts frequently arose over the process of weighing the coal. The industry’s cyclical nature meant that mining employment also could be irregular and precarious. Coal camp living conditions were often squalid, with social life dominated by the company and basic freedoms of speech, movement, and assembly restricted by private mine guards and company-paid sheriffs.Mining coal was incredibly dangerous work. During the industrial coal boom between 1880 and 1923, more than 70,000 miners died on the job. Many more perished from occupational diseases, but weren’t tallied in official statistics. Miners were crushed to death in roof collapses, killed by gas explosions and by machinery, and more. In the first decade of the twentieth century, three major mine disasters—one each in Utah, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania—killed 201, 362 and 239 miners respectively. The West Virginia and Pennsylvania disasters occurred within two weeks of each other in 1907, during the winter period that miners called “explosion season” because the dry air amplified the dangers from methane and coal dust. More common were deadly and frequent disasters that took miners’ lives in ones and twos, but never made headlines. As urban energy intensification made cities safer, healthier, and more convenient during the Progressive Era, the everyday violence of the energy system was largely hidden from view in rural mining communities.