The Hagley Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society has selected Jonathon Free, a PhD candidate at Duke University, as the first Miller Center/Hagley Library Dissertation Fellow in Business and Politics. The Miller Center of Public Affairs, founded at the University of Virginia in 1975, focuses the lessons of history on the the nation’s most pressing contemporary governmental challenges.
Jonathon Free’s dissertation, “Redistributing Risk: The Political Ecology of Coal in Late-Twentieth Century Appalachia,” traces complicated unintended consequences of increasing health and safety regulations on the U.S. coal industry in the last half of the twentieth century. During the late 1960s and 1970s, Congress passed new mine safety regulations that significantly lowered the number of deaths from explosions, roof-falls, and other underground disasters. Coal companies responded to safety legislation by expanding surface mining operations, which were less accident-prone but more environmentally destructive than underground mines.
This redistribution of the risks of mining had profound consequences that were not anticipated by safety advocates and policy makers. In Appalachian states like Kentucky and West Virginia, where coal companies traditionally played a major role in the local economy, the mining jobs that remained became more precious, as did the few mountains left untouched by surface mining operations. Meanwhile, the risks of surface mining became more acceptable to many coalfield residents as the industry depicted it as a way to provide the energy that the nation needed while also improving both the aesthetic quality and economic attractiveness of the land. As a result, the debate over surface mining became a point of fracture in increasingly divided communities.
The Miller Center/Hagley Library fellowship is the fruit of a three-year collaborative agreement between the institutions for a jointly-funded dissertation residential fellowship. It is an addition to the dozen other Miller Center fellowships that encourage excellence among graduate students in the final stages of writing their dissertations.
Roger Horowitz is the Director of the Center for the History of Business, Technology and Society.