VIDEO GALLERY
Coal Mining
From 1974 to1984 my colleagues and I were conducting a Visual Ethnography on the history of coal mining in the Rocky Mountain West. We interviewed old timers, first on audio tapes, then on broadcast quality video. We also collected some 12,000 historic photographs. At first the photos were imagined as “illustrations” for the stories the old-timers were telling us. After a time I began to see the images less as illustrations and more as data. Using the coding schemes of grounded theory, the images were sorted, coded, and recoded. In the dys long before computers, we used McBee cards s our sorting tool. The images and all our interviews have been archived at the University of Colorado Archive.
Many other researchers have mined this collection. The videos are on this site
Toil and Rage in the New Land
This is the first edited video ethnography. It presents the history of coal mining in the Rocky Mountain West in the words of those who lived it. Historical photographs and film were used to illustrate and explain what our participants told us. It begins with immigration stories and ends with accounts of coal town life. There is a section at the end called “Public Editing” in which we showed our works in progress to meetings in the coal towns and asked about the accuracy of our ethnographic videos, and solicited additional accounts. The coal project team included Co-director Ronald McMahan, videographers Oliver Henry, and Bill Loeffler, and editor/video technician Randall Vik. The project was made possible by generous contributions from The National Endowment for the Humanities.
Out of the Depths
This program carries the story further to the brutal 1913-14 strike that culminated with the Ludlow Massacre. We were fortunate that the advent of portable video recorders and the old timers we interviewed occurred at the same time. We interviewed a half dozen or more survivors of the Ludlow strike. Most of the interviewing was completed in 1977 so to have been conscious during the strike meant you were in your 80’s. The oldest person interviewed was Mike Livoda a union organizer in 1913.
Out of the Depths - The Miner's Story
Out of the Depths- the Miner’s story was produced by Bill Moyers for his PBS series “A Walk Through the 20th century. Moyers’ company used our material from the above 2 videos, and cut it down to the 58 minutes allocated by PBS. I have written about the differences between the video ethnography we produced and the documentary aired on PBS. We were very grateful to Moyers for buying our work and airing it.
At the time we were working it was nearly impossible for independent producers to have their work shown on PBS. This article throws more light
Hard Times Soft Coal
Hard Times Soft Coal is a work print made possible by Moyers’ cash contribution. Beginning after Ludlow, the video tells how the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) was kept out of the western mines. “Company Unions” were intended to weaken the desire for a real union, but backfired. In the 1920′ and 30’s radical unions like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and communist backed unions like the National Miner’s Union (NMU) were radical alternatives. The IWW Colorado strike in 1927 closed all the mines in the northern part of the state. The militia and company “gun thugs” used a machine gun to terrorize picketers and killed six people. This video is a rough cut because our funding ran out.
Raw Steel Mill
Hard Times Soft Coal is a work print made possible by Moyers’ cash contribution. Beginning after Ludlow, the video tells how the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) was kept out of the western mines. “Company Unions” were intended to weaken the desire for a real union, but backfired. In the 1920′ and 30’s radical unions like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and communist backed unions like the National Miner’s Union (NMU) were radical alternatives. The IWW Colorado strike in 1927 closed all the mines in the northern part of the state. The militia and company “gun thugs” used a machine gun to terrorize picketers and killed six people. This video is a rough cut because our funding ran out.