On Labor Day 1902, UMWA president John Mitchell stood before 50,000 people in Philadelphia and made the case for the striking miners of Pennsylvania's Coal Region. This photograph captures that moment. His words still resonate. Read the story.
"I'm willin' for the sake of the poor creatures who never have enough to eat that my man shall strike." A Philadelphia Inquirer reporter named Esther Nixon traveled to Shenandoah, PA during the 1900 Coal Strike to interview working class mining families about the intense labor battle between the United Mine Workers and the coal operators. Read the full story.
Through the coal country with a camera... This photograph was taken in a school classroom somewhere near Shenandoah, PA and appeared in an 1892 magazine article by journalist and photograph Frances Benjamin Johnston. Read more of the story.
"An atomic bomb of joy" | Shenandoah's Victory Parade draws 20,000 | August 1945 On the eve of Japan's formal surrender, 20,000 people filled the streets of Shenandoah for a Victory Parade that the Evening Herald called "an atomic bomb of joy." Confetti rained from the buildings, Spanish-American War veterans drew cheers, and a sign in the crowd read: "To Our Buddies Who Won't Come Back." Read the full story.
A soldier kneels at his young wife's grave - then marches back to war. Luther Dodson's wife Sarah died of tuberculosis at 25, less than a year after their wedding. He came home on leave that August, visited her grave at dusk, and wrote about it in a letter that stands as some of the most moving passages in this entire series. Then he went back to the front. Read the letter.
A constant rumble of baggage wagons, night and day" | Washington at war, August 1861 A Pittston correspondent spent a week in Washington in late August 1861 and sent back a portrait of a city transformed — cavalry clattering through the streets, tent villages visible from the Capitol, and two armies drawing closer by the day. He also had some sharp words for the "Peace Party" back home. Read the letter.
Shot in the foot at Bull Run — and too stubborn to stop moving When a Confederate bullet hit Josiah Wildermuth in the foot during the Second Battle of Bull Run, he got up, fell down, got up again, and kept going. What followed was a days-long ordeal on improvised fence-rail crutches that took him from a field hospital to Centreville, Virginia to Washington. He told the story 38 years later at a veterans' reunion in Pottsville, PA. Read the story.
Bayonets in the streets | The National Guard occupies Shenandoah during the 1900 Coal Strike After a fatal shooting during the 1900 Coal Strike, the Governor sent hundreds of National Guard troops into Shenandoah. This Philadelphia Inquirer illustration shows them massed in the streets — and the striking miners said it amounted to being threatened back to work at bayonet point. Read more.
Five hundred Japanese laborers coaled the US Navy transport in Nagasaki harbor, working for twenty-five cents a day. Watching from the deck was Philip Messner, a Marine from Loyalton, PA, bound for China. Forty-five years later, an atomic bomb erased the city he described. Read the Full Story.
From his post guarding the Chain Bridge above Washington, Lieutenant Martin Byrne watched General McClellan and President Lincoln ride through a grand review of the division on August 21, 1861. Lincoln, he noted, had "that lofty, though care worn appearance." Read the full letter.