Coal's central role in America's history and its ongoing threats in the climate crisis.
For decades coal has been crucial to America's culture, society, and environment, an essential ingredient in driving out winter's cold, cooking meals, and lighting the dark. In the coalfields and beyond, Bob Wyss describes how this magical elixir sparked the Industrial Revolution, powered railroads, and built urban skylines, while providing home comforts for families.
Coal's history and heritage are fundamental to understanding its legacy of threats to America's well-being. As industry developed so did clashes between powerful tycoons, coal miners, and innocent families. Exploitation and avarice led to victimization, deadly violence, and ultimately the American labor movement. More recently coal has endangered American lives and safety, brought on by two centuries of carbon combustion, and here the threat remains unresolved. This is coal's most enduring legacy, and Black Gold is pivotal in helping us understand how we got to this point.
Bob Wyss was a reporter and editor at the Providence Journal for thirty years, a journalism professor at the University of Connecticut for fifteen years, and is currently Professor Emeritus.
"Black Gold provides an on-the-ground view of the extraordinary human toll of our country's determination to mine and burn coal as our primary source of energy and the avarice and greed of coal barons who profited on the backs of workers who were treated as expendable indentured slaves." Gina McCarthy, US Environmental Protection Agency Administrator, 2013–2017
"Bob Wyss's Black Gold is a clear-eyed history of the American coal industry and wisely spotlights the immense political power long wielded by corrupt coal barons. Decades of carbon emissions, faux science, and dangerous lies have wreaked havoc on our planet and workers' health—all to keep polluters profiting handsomely."—US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (RI), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works
"Black Gold is simply the best environmental history ever written about the coal industry and the fascinating people who ignited America's industrial revolution. From a wild, naked barge ride down the Lehigh River in the early 1800s to the westward race between railroads and canals, the book traces the coal industry's struggle for great power and the miners' attempts to cope with the cost. Wyss achieves this with a solid historical narrative and unflinching details of outrageous labor conditions and life-threatening air pollution disasters. These include the company store 'Esau scrip' system, which involved secret sexual servitude, and the choking city smog episodes so intense that lanterns were needed in broad daylight. Written with all the insight, sympathy, horror, and humor that environmental history can evoke, Black Gold is a monumental contribution."—William (Bill) Kovarik, author and compiler of the Environmental History Timeline
"A terrific environmental historian who writes well too, Wyss has a lifetime of expertise in environmental issues and the journalists who cover them. If he wrote it, it's worth your time."—Dan Fagin, author of Pulitzer Prize–winning Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation
312 pp.6 x 9Illus: 25 b/w illustrations
9780520391789$28.95|£25.00Hardcover
Sep 2025