The largest labor uprising in US history and the largest armed insurrection since the Civil War. Roughly 10,000 striking coal miners, many veterans of WWI, marched on Logan County to organize the southern West Virginia coalfields under the United Mine Workers. They were met by 3,000 lawmen and private mine-guard forces; private aircraft dropped bleach-and-shrapnel bombs on the miners. The federal government deployed Army troops and the uprising collapsed; UMWA membership in the region cratered for a decade. Blair Mountain was systematically excluded from West Virginia school textbooks for most of the 20th century.

Why it’s been targeted

West Virginia’s eighth-grade WV-studies course used a textbook that contained zero information on the Mine Wars for decades; researchers at BYU’s Scholar’s Archive and reporting in Lit Hub and the Smithsonian Magazine document the deliberate erasure pushed by the coal industry. Gun Thugs, Rednecks, and Radicals and The Devil Is Here in These Hills — recent histories — have not been adopted in WV social-studies materials despite advocacy from the UMWA.