This masterful study charts the extensive common ground and telling differences between two widely separated coal-mining communities: Lanarkshire, in the Clyde Valley of southwest Scotland, and the northern Illinois coalfield that became a prime destination for skilled Scottish migrant miners in the mid-nineteenth century.
John H Laslett, a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles, is the author of Labor and the Left: A Study of Socialist and Radical Influences in the American Labor Movement, 1881-1924 and other books.