In the early 20th century, as Pennsylvania’s anthracite industry collapsed under mechanization, corporate consolidation, and economic depression, thousands of coal miners were told – implicitly and explicitly – that they were no longer needed. What followed was not quiet resignation, but one of the most extraordinary episodes in American labor history: the bootleg coal rebellion.

In this new YouTube interview, I sat down with historian and author Mitch Troutman to talk about his book, The Bootleg Coal Rebellion: The Pennsylvania Miners Who Seized an Industry, 1925–1942, a deeply researched and long-overdue history of miners who refused to starve when the industry abandoned them.

Buy the book: The Bootleg Coal Rebellion: The Pennsylvania Miners Who Seized an Industry, 1925–1942

Across Northumberland County, the lower anthracite fields, and much of the wider Coal Region, unemployed miners began digging coal illegally – often on land they had worked for decades, using skills passed down through generations. What started as survival quickly became something bigger. Bootleg mining evolved into a mass movement that challenged coal companies, state authority, and long-standing ideas about who had the right to control natural resources.

Mitch and I talk about how bootleg mining grew out of earlier strike conditions, local customs, and bitter resentment toward decisions made in distant boardrooms. We dig into family stories, community memory, and the ways this history still lingers, sometimes quietly, sometimes defiantly, in the region today. For many families, bootleg coal wasn’t a crime. It was dignity, it put food on the table and it was resistance.

This conversation also places the bootleg coal rebellion in a larger context. The issues miners faced – automation, corporate power, economic dislocation, and the erosion of working-class security – are not relics of the Great Depression. They are painfully familiar in the 21st century. That’s what makes this story matter now.

Let me know what you think in the comments below! Hard to believe I made this more than a decade ago now.

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