They show what it was like for eight-year-old breaker boys sorting coal surrounded by deafening noise and black clouds of dust, steam, and smoke what it was like to be a mule driver underground what it meant to be a spragger, a butty, a nipper. Lewis Hines' famous pictures will grab readers, and Bartoletti has also gathered dozens of archival photos and heartbreaking oral histories. The story of these boys' lives are a part of Russell Freedman's general overview Kids at Work (1994) and of Betsy Harvey Kraft's biography Mother Jones (1995) but there's a wealth of personal detail and family story here that focuses on what it was like in the mines and in the homes and communities of these working children. With compelling black-and-white photographs of children at work in the coal mines of northeastern Pennsylvania about 100 years ago, this handsome, spacious photo-essay will draw browsers as well as students doing research on labor and immigrant history. Quotes from personal interviews with miners, as well as taped interviews and transcripts, provide a refreshing first person frame of reference. An accessible writing style, as well as the abundance of stimulating information, makes for an engrossing historical account. Bartoletti has written a concise, thoroughly researched account of the often grim working and living conditions in Pennsylvania coal towns.
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