Give history a voice, give memory a history. In 2010, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, Kessler traveled to Matewan, West Virginia, to trace a much older American history of labor uprising: the 1920s union battles that ended in the Matewan Massacre and, further down the road, the Battle of Blair Mountain — the largest armed labor uprising in US history since the Civil War. In Matewan and the mountaintop-removal sites around it, he found activists and miners on opposite sides of the same crisis — economic survival for the few still employed by the mines, against towns emptied to make way for strip mines, water contamination, coal dust, and flash floods.
Matewan (Mining Investigations)
