Mark Aldrich, “Preventing ‘the Needless Peril of the Coal Mine’: The Bureau of Mines and the Campaign against Coal Mine Explosions, 1910–1940,” Technology and Culture 36 (1995): 483–518.

Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). Chapters 1 and 2 examine coal’s significance to economic growth, social stratification, and economic change in the American West. Chapter 3 follows immigrants from homelands across the world to the southern Colorado coalfields. Chapters 4 and 5 explore underground environments and the culture of militant opposition the ever-present possibility of death in the mines generated. The remainder of the book focuses on labor conflict from the 1880s through the great coalfield war of 1913–1914.

Mine Safety and Health Administration, United States Department of Labor, “Historical Data on Mine Disasters in the United States,” accessed March 8, 2014, www.msha.gov/mshainfo/factsheets/mshafct8.htm.