Crowley County Combined Library

King Coal is a 1917 novel by Upton Sinclair that describes the poor working conditions in the coal mining industry in the western United States during the 1910s, from the perspective of a single protagonist, Hal Warner. As in his earlier work, The Jungle, Sinclair uses the novel to express his socialist viewpoint. The book is based on the 1914-1915 Colorado coal strikes. The sequel to King Coal was posthumously published under the title, The Coal...

Biography of Cesar Chavez, Hispanic American farm labor activist, told in graphic novel format.

"David Mason's Ludlow is a magnificent novel in verse, meaning it has the speed, concision and accuracy of the best poetry along with the expansiveness and character development of a novel. It tells the searing story of a handful of immigrants - Greek, Mexican, Scottish, Italian - in southern Colorado, climaxing in the Ludlow Massacre of April 1914. Here we find the orphaned Luisa Mole, who must choose between life among the miners and the middle-class...

"By early April 1914, Colorado Governor Elias Ammons thought the violence in his state's strike-bound southern coal district had eased enough that he could begin withdrawing the Colorado National Guard, deployed six months earlier as military occupiers. But Ammons misread the signals, and on April 20, 1914, a full-scale battle erupted between the remaining militiamen and armed strikers living in a tent colony at the small railroad town of Ludlow....

"A dynamic, gripping collection of short stories from "America's best novelist" (Denver Post), the New York Times-bestselling James Lee Burke. Harbor Lights is a story collection from one of the most popular and widely acclaimed icons of American fiction, featuring a never-before-published novella. These eight stories move from the marshlands on the Gulf of Mexico to the sweeping plains of Colorado to prisons, saloons, and trailer parks across the...

When the bloodiest labor dispute in U.S. history burst forth in 1913-14 in the coal fields of Southern Colorado, the miners knew whom to praise, and the owners knew whom to blame. Mary Harris Jones, known from New York to Colorado as Mother Jones, could incite a riot or calm a crowd with her amazing oratory gifts. She dedicated her life to helping miners organize to negotiate, even demand, better wages and working conditions.

In a book based on newly released documents, the author sheds a new light on the historic battle between U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa during the Senate Rackets Committee hearings and beyond during 1957 to 1964.

Longshoremen's union leader Charlie Vitteli is a cold-blooded villain who clawed his way to the top of the heap and no one's going to take him down. Like Vince Carlotta. The union boss's fiercest rival has accused Vitteli of embezzlement, election rigging, and other abuses. Now Carlotta is just another corpse on the waterfront. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Vitteli is somehow involved. But proving it is a whole other story. Enter...