I realize that this post is a week late. I guess that the lack of assigned reading kept me from looking over the syllabus last week. Still, I figure that a research update could be helpful and maybe\u2014I really hope it does\u2014count as a blog post.<\/p>\n

I’m currently half an hour north of Monongah. Initially, I had hoped to visit the town and see the historic mines, cemeteries, and memorials, but \u00a06″ of snow and sub-freezing temperatures have kept me from venturing too far outside. Instead, to escape the cold, I’ve spent the last day in the warmth of the West Virginia Regional History Center. Though I’ve been able to gather some primary sources digitally, the best\u2014that is, the personal letters, company records, and investigative reports from the disaster\u2014are all housed in the Center’s archives. I’ve been lucky to peruse and photocopy the many of these.\u00a0In addition to these primary sources, I have slowly been working my way through stack of secondary sources. I have found these to be the most helpful in narrowing my thesis.<\/p>\n

Though my initial plan was to research the disaster’s death toll and the way it was falsified and reported, I’ve found in my research that not only is this question less feasible than other options. It’s also much less interesting. Plus, a number of scholars have written on the very topic in the last several \u00a0years, leaving the question practically null and void. So, I have since changed my focus. By the end of last week, I had three “lenses” through which I planned to examine the disaster and find my thesis: gender, ethnicity, and class. Since nearly half of the victims of the disaster were either Italian-speaking immigrants or illiterate natives, uncovering the various \u00a0views of the disaster from ethnically diverse perspectives would be unfeasible. Likewise, interpreting the disaster from the standpoint of gender would be difficult, considering the paucity of surviving letters and records of the women directly involved with the disaster, the 250 widows. So, by process of elimination, I have chosen class.<\/p>\n

My research now focuses on the class tensions that arose during the hearings following the disaster and during the subsequent movement to reform West Virginia’s mining laws. Today, I read through the correspondence of West Virginia mining officials and Fairmont Coal Company owners to find primary sources from an “elite” perspective. Tomorrow, I will examine the letters and records of the miners themselves.<\/p>\n

So, though I may be close to Monongah, I think that I am even closer to a thesis. Hopefully by the end of tomorrow, as I begin my drive back to Davidson, I will have stumbled upon it. Then, the process of writing really begins.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I realize that this post is a week late. I guess that the lack of assigned reading kept me from looking over the syllabus last week. Still, I figure that a research update could be helpful and maybe\u2014I really hope it does\u2014count as a blog post. I’m currently half an hour north of Monongah. Initially, … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Close to Monongah, Even Closer to a Thesis: Research Update (3\/5\/14)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":73,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[7,27,329,350],"class_list":["post-419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-1907-monongah-coal-mining-disaster","tag-archives","tag-primary-sources","tag-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/73"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=419"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":909,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419\/revisions\/909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}