Monongah: The Tragic Story of the Worst Industrial Accident in US History: The Tragic Story of the 1907 Monograph Mine Disaster (West Virginia and Appalachia, Band 6) - Hardcover

Davitt McAteer is internationally recognized as an expert on mine and workplace health and safety. He has worked with consumer advocate Ralph Nader to enact the 1969 Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act. He was also involved in the recovery efforts at Ground Zero shortly after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. He has also conducted an independent investigation on the cause of the Sago Mine Disaster. Today, McAteer is vice president of Wheeling Jesuit University and maintains a law office in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, where he lives with his wife Kathryn.

To commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the Monongah, West Virginia mine disaster, the West Virginia University Press is honored to carry Davitt McAteer’s definitive history of the worst industrial accident in U.S. history. Monongah documents the events that led to the explosion, which claimed hundreds of lives on the morning of December 6, 1907.

Nearly thirty years of exhaustive research have led McAteer to the conclusion that close to 500 men and boys—many of them immigrants—lost their lives that day, leaving hundreds of women widowed and more than one thousand children orphaned. McAteer delves deeply into the personalities, economic forces, and social landscape of the mining communities of north central West Virginia at the beginning of the twentieth century. The tragedy at Monongah led to a greater awareness of industrial working conditions, and ultimately to the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969, which Davitt McAteer helped to enact.