In the definitive history of a twentieth-century public health disaster, Alan Derickson recounts how, for decades, the combined failure of government, medicine, and industry to halt the spread of black lung disease—and even to acknowledge its existence—resulted in a national tragedy, the effects of which are still being felt.

Alan Derickson is Professor of Labor and Employment Relations and History at Pennsylvania State University. His book Workers’ Health, Workers’ Democracy: The Western Miners’ Struggle, 1891–1925 was the recipient of the Philip Taft Labor History Award. He is the author most recently of Dangerously Sleepy: Overworked Americans and the Cult of Manly Wakefulness.

This volume is a significant contribution to American labor history and to the history of occupational health, but it is also an important cautionary tale whose implications for today's 'science wars' should not go unnoticed.... Derickson has written an important book, worthy of the attention of all medical historians.

In a richly researched and brilliantly argued work, Derickson shows how health professionals' obsession with silicosis prevented the recognition of coal workers pneumoconiosis (CWP) as a distinct disease entity, and how it took substantial effort by the workers themselves to force it onto the public agenda.... This is an impressive book and one that should be read by a wide audience.

Historians from many fields will want to read this book.... Labor historians will want to weigh Derickson's sophisticated take on the unions' on-again, off-again advocacy of health issues. Medical historians will find a quite literal example of the 'social constructedness' of disease. And most readers will find renewed appreciation for the men who spent half their lives gasping for breath, that a nation might light its cities and heat its homes.

Derickson's dissection of this public health disaster leaves the reader cringing.... It is a solid professional history. Derickson's story is well documented with an impressive range of published sources, archival documents, and oral interviews.... This book is an impressive contribution to occupational health history, to labor history, and to United States history in general.

Derickson provides a detailed chronicle of the consequences of the social, political, medical, and economic forces that supported and delayed recognition of black lung as a preventable disease.... His book offers a concise and comprehensive account of a national tragedy with heavy financial and human cost.

An important contribution to the history of the coal industry and its economic and social impact.... Derickson focuses on the health consequences of mining coal, tracing the scientific, medical, labor, and political histories of black-lung disease, the respiratory illness caused by breathing coal dust. Perhaps most disturbing is Derickson's assertion that the effects of exposure to coal dust were known at the turn of the century and that preventative measures could have been implemented; instead, millions either died or suffered the debilitating effects of the disease.

Kathryn Kish Sklar, Binghamton University:

The definitive account of this American tragedy, Black Lung is a very important book for the history of American public policy and also adds substantially to our understanding of the industrial revolution.

Ralph Nader:

Alan Derickson's Black Lung chronicles a century of betrayal of the coal miners—decades of duplicity, cover-up, and cowardliness by the coal barons, government officials, and the miners' own union leaders.

Charles Rosenberg, Harvard University:

A passionately argued study of a 'disease' that has in the past century and a half been constructed, dismissed, and reconstructed, Black Lung is an important addition to a growing literature on the history of occupational health.

David Rosner, Columbia University:

Black Lung is a masterful piece of work that finally brings together all the elements of labor, medical, political, and social history.