Seattles Coal Legacy

In the 1880s, Seattle became a major coal port in the United States. By 1908, Puget Sound was the third-largest coal port, after New York and Baltimore. For Seattle, the major coal mines were in Issaquah, New Castle, Renton, and Black Diamond, with many other smaller mines throughout King County. Until the petroleum revolution, Seattle exported most of its coal to San Francisco. Because of coal, Seattle became a center for skilled engineers, machinists, and miners for the maritime, manufacturing, mining, and railroad industries, differentiating itself from other lumber towns on Puget Sound. Seattle's Coal Legacy is the story of a frontier town going through an industrial revolution in its own time. The skills and knowledge developed during the coal era-engineering, finance, transportation, manufacturing, etc.-made Seattle the major city it is today.

Set in the ruins of his family's strip-mined homestead in the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois, award-winning journalist and historian Jeff Biggers delivers a deeply personal portrait of the overlooked human and environmental costs of our nation's dirty energy policy. Beginning with the policies of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, chronicling the removal of Native Americans and the hidden story of legally sanctioned black slavery in the land of Lincoln, Reckoning at Eagle Creek vividly describes the mining wars for union recognition and workplace safety, and the devastating consequences of industrial strip-mining. At the heart of our national debate over climate change and the crucial transition toward clean energy, Biggers exposes the fallacy of "clean coal" and shatters the marketing myth that southern Illinois represents the "Saudi Arabia of coal." Reckoning at Eagle Creek is ultimately an exposé of "historicide," one that traces coal's harrowing legacy through the great American family saga of sacrifice and resiliency and the extraordinary process of recovering our nation's memory.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Since before Seattle voters decided in 1902 to build their own lighting plant, City Light has been a source of fierce civic pride for its independence from "foreign" corporations, its impressive public works projects, and its consistently low electricity rates. It has also been a headache for competitors, managers, and politicians. In the first years of the electric age, when Seattle was still a hard-scrable frontier town, power was supplied by a revolving cast of small private utilities remembered mostly for frequent mergers with rivals and mediocre service at high cost. The failure of the privately owned water company to deliver enough of its product to quell Seattle's Great Fire of 18889 got city officials and residents thinking about an alternative utility model--municipal ownership. Voters quickly approved a municipal wter system, and within a decade had laid the groundwork for an electric utility. City Light quickly began a campaign of dam construction that for most of the twentieth century provided Seattle with the cheapest electricity of any major city in the country. This brisk history traces the utility's origins to 1889 and follows its story through the national energy crisis of 2000-2001 up to the present. It is a quintissentially Northwest story.

Coal has transformed societies, and shaped the fate of nations. It launched empires and triggered wars. Above all, it fuelled the Industrial Revolution in Britain, propelling the rise of a small rural kingdom into the greatest commercial empire in the world. Taking us on a rich historical journey that begins on the banks of the river Tyne, Barbara Freese explores the profound role coal has played in human history, and continues to play in today's world. The first half of the book is set in Britain, and tells how coal transformed Britain and ushered in the industrial age. The rest of the book looks at America and China, at the birth of the unions, and the closing of the mines, and at the energy industry today. With oil prices on the rise and no end in sight to our insatiable appetite for energy, the world is turning again to coal.

Traces the history of coal mining in the United States from early times until 1920, and assesses the impact of working conditions on the miners' militant labor movement