The World in 1902 the year the coal stopped coming

Coal ran almost everything. Trains, factories, kitchen stoves and house furnaces all burned it, so when about 147,000 American miners stopped digging in May, the whole country felt it by the first frost.

Life back then

Coal did the heavy work in every house. It warmed the rooms, cooked the dinner and left grit on the windowsills, and a family judged its winter by how full the cellar bin was. So when the anthracite miners walked out in May and stayed out until October, the coal strike became everyone's problem, and some schools closed in the autumn to save fuel. A share of the workers in those mines were children. Breaker boys as young as ten sat bent over the chutes for ten hours, picking slate out of the moving coal, and went home with cut fingers.

The year in 8 events

• 🏈Jan 1 Michigan beats Stanford 49 to 0 in the first Rose Bowl game.
• 🤝Jan 30 Britain and Japan sign an alliance in London, aimed at Russian power in the Far East.
• 🕯️May 8 Mount Pelee erupts on Martinique. The town of Saint-Pierre is destroyed and almost nobody there survives.
• 🌍May 20 Cuba becomes an independent republic.
• 🕊️May 31 The Treaty of Vereeniging is signed and the Boer War in South Africa ends.
• 👑Aug 9 Edward VII is crowned at Westminster Abbey, six weeks late after an operation.
• 🧸Nov 16 A newspaper cartoon shows Roosevelt refusing to shoot a bear cub. A Brooklyn shopkeeper starts selling stuffed teddy bears.
• 🏗️Dec 10 The first dam across the Nile at Aswan opens in Egypt.

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