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Three miners with federal soldier prepare to surrender weapons.

What Made the Battle of Blair Mountain the Largest Labor Uprising in American History. Its legacy lives on today in the struggles faced by modern miners seeking workers’ rights

In the town of Matewan, the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum sits at the site of a historic battle which erupted in May of 1920, setting into motion a chain of events that led to the largest armed uprising in the United States since our civil war.

“Culture becomes not a haven of ideas or a fixed state of experience but a social imaginary erupting out of a storied cultural real.” (Stewart 1996, 63-4)

I remember the day when my father, a West Virginia University professor, accompanied some of his students to Charleston for Undergraduate Research Day at the Capitol in February 2018.

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