Las Animas - Bent County Library District

A diary account of thirteen-year-old Anetka's life in Poland in 1896, immigration to America, marriage to a coal miner, widowhood, and happiness in finally finding her true love.

Sixty year-old Huw Morgan looks back on his childhood in a small Welsh mining town. His reminiscences reveal the disintegration of the close knit Morgans, and his devoted parents, while capturing the sentiments and issues of their time.

"Orphans Gig and Rye Dolan don't have a penny to their names. The brothers work grueling, odd jobs each day just to secure a meal, and spend nights sleeping wherever they can with other day laborers. Twenty-three-year-old Gig is a passionate union man, fighting for fair pay and calling out the corrupt employers who exploit the working class. Eager to emulate his older brother, Rye follows suit, though he can't quite muster Gig's passion for the cause....

The year is 1872. The place is Wigan, England, a coal town where rich mine owners live lavishly alongside miners no better than slaves. Into this dark, complicated world comes Jonathan Blair, who has accepted a commission to find a missing man. When he begins his search every road leads back to one woman, a haughty, vixenish pit girl named Rose. With her fiery hair and skirts pinned up over trousers, she cares nothing for a society that calls her...

After his mother is killed, four-year old Clay Sizemore finds himself alone in a small Appalachian mining town. At first, unsure of Free Creek, he slowly learns to lean its residents as a family.

Publisher's description: The fascinating history of a simple black rock that has shaped our world--and now threatens it. In this remarkable book, Barbara Freese takes us on a rich historical journey that begins hundreds of millions of years ago and spans the globe. Prized as "the best stone in Britain" by Roman invaders who carved jewelry out of it, coal has transformed societies, expanded frontiers, and sparked social movements, and still powers...

"By early April 1914, Colorado Governor Elias Ammons thought the violence in his state's strike-bound southern coal district had eased enough that he could begin withdrawing the Colorado National Guard, deployed six months earlier as military occupiers. But Ammons misread the signals, and on April 20, 1914, a full-scale battle erupted between the remaining militiamen and armed strikers living in a tent colony at the small railroad town of Ludlow....

"David Mason's Ludlow is a magnificent novel in verse, meaning it has the speed, concision and accuracy of the best poetry along with the expansiveness and character development of a novel. It tells the searing story of a handful of immigrants - Greek, Mexican, Scottish, Italian - in southern Colorado, climaxing in the Ludlow Massacre of April 1914. Here we find the orphaned Luisa Mole, who must choose between life among the miners and the middle-class...