| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 130.4

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| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 130.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

The Face of Decline: The Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in the Twentieth Century. By Thomas Dublin and Walter Licht. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. viii, 275p. Appendices, notes, selected bibliography, index. Cloth, $65; paper, $24.95.)

This important book examines the history of the anthracite coal industry of northeastern Pennsylvania from its origins in the eighteenth century through the peak period of World War I to its ultimate decline in the late twentieth century. Employing an impressive array of manuscript and published sources, carefully supplemented by over one hundred oral interviews and surveys of current and former residents and their children, the authors describe in detail how the mineworkers, their families, and their communities struggled mightily with the decline and collapse of their primary industry. Dublin and Licht argue persuasively that the people of the anthracite industry were failed by their corporate employers, their union (the United Mine Workers of America), and their government. Without much help from the institutional support systems, the mineworkers and their families initiated a number of strategies to cope with economic decline and, in many instances, were able to survive and retool once the mines closed.

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