"Face Boss tells a story that few people have heard: what it is really like to labor inside the dark and dangerous world of a vast underground coal mine. With unflinching honesty, Michael Guillerman recalls his nearly eighteen years of working as both a union miner and a salaried section foreman - or "face boss" - at the Peabody Coal Company's Camp No. 2 mine in Union County, Kentucky." "Guillerman undertook this memoir because of the many misconceptions...

While searching for his younger brother who has been "sold" to be trained as a chimney sweep in eighteenth-century London, thirteen-year-old Ned meets the itinerant preacher John Wesley whose message changes the lives of his entire family.

"This collection brings together nearly three decades of research on the African American experience, class, and race relations in the Appalachian coal industry. It shows how, with deep roots in the antebellum era of chattel slavery, West Virginia's Black working class gradually picked up steam during the emancipation years following the Civil War and dramatically expanded during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From there, African...