At the beginning of the 20th century, coal was the engine of American industrial progress. Nearly three quarters of a million men across the country spent ten or twelve hours a day underground in coal mines. In the spring of 1901, when miners in West Virginia began organizing to join a union, their efforts sparked a fight that woudl escalalate from an unremarkable skirmish between capital and labor to the largest armed insurrection since the Civil War. The Mine Wars brings to life the decades-long struggle that turned the coalfields of southern West Virginia into a blood-soaked war zone, where basic constitutional rights and freedoms were violently contested.