This Bass Connections project aimed to analyze coal’s rise and subsequent fall through the lenses of history and economics, with a special emphasis on how coal entwined energy, the environment and community over the course of the past 200 years. This team pursued two student-led research goals. The first was to employ content analysis, combing through print media from the 1960s and 1970s, to better understand the values, priorities, and assumptions that undergirded the debate over surface mining in Central Appalachia in the run-up to the 1977 passage of the Surface Mining Control and Regulation Act (SMCRA). The second was to analyze data from the census and U.S. Bureau of Labor to outline migration trends within Central Appalachian coal counties between 2000 and 2017 during coal booms and busts.

Timing

Fall 2019 – Spring 2020

This Team in the News

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See earlier related team, Coal in America: Chronicling and Analyzing its Economic and Social History (2018-2019), and Story+ project, Coal & America: Stories from the Central Appalachian Coalfields (2018).

Image: Coal train, by Chris Collins, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0