How Mitchell Energy and Development Corp. Got Its Start and How It Grew Book

This is a solid piece of economic history from the lens of labor economics. You get wage theory, economics of discrimination, compensating differentials, employment bundles, etc. When discussing the effect of the coal industry on increasing education among black coal workers and their children, Fishback mostly focuses on West Virginia. I wish he had included more data from other coal regions. Much of the analysis in many chapters omit Alabama. Since he uses the state for comparisons in other chapters, I wish he explained the many omissions in the main text (I wasn't going to sift through the endnotes). I wish more of the data had been presented in graphs rather than tables. Overall the picture of the life of a coal miner is not much different than what you would expect, but when placed in historical context and in relation to relevant alternatives for employment, it's not much different than what many other working class lives work like in the early 1900s.