This is more than a book review. Jonah Walters uses the Bootleg Coal Rebellion as a starting place for his own exploration of Anthracite Coal Region history. He makes some great points in literary style. Specifically, before anthracite was an industrial fuel it was being used to forge flintlock rifles, used to war against native people. He also points out that the Region today is as nostalgic for war as it is for coal. Perhaps the young ideolological men it supplied to the American military have been at least as important as coal. American war, thus, is the backdrop to the history of the bootleg miners.
🔗Rock-Fuel and Warlike People: On Mitch Troutman’s “The Bootleg Coal Rebellion” #
In an essay that takes off from Mitch Troutman’s “The Bootleg Coal Rebellion: The Pennsylvania Miners Who Seized an Industry,” native son Jonah Walters finds something entirely too innocent about the tales told about the anthracite industry’s origins.
Jonah Walters is a writer from Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and currently a postdoctoral fellow in the BioCritical Studies Lab at UCLA. His reporting and criticism have appeared in Full Stop, The Guardian, Jacobin, and elsewhere.