Bill Johnstone spent most of his working years as a coal miner, first in England, then in Alberta, and finally on Vancouver Island. Born in 1908 in Northumberland, England, he began working in the pits as a hand miner at the age of thirteen. After immigrating to the Canadian Prairies, where he alternated between working as a farmhand and a miner in the Alberta coal mines. In 1936, he moved to Vancouver Island where he mastered nearly every phase of coal mining from working on the picking tables to shooting explosive charges. He also studied mining engineering and mine rescue and was injured in a cave-in. Not long before his retirement, after 52 years in the mining industry, Bill Johnston became district superintendent of the Canadian Collieries mines near Cumberland.

The town of Ladysmith was one of the most important coal-mining communities on Vancouver Island during the early twentieth century. The Ladysmith miners had a reputation for radicalism and militancy and engaged in bitter struggles for union recognition and economic justice, most notably the Great Strike of 1912-14. This strike, one of the longest and most violent labour disputes in Canadian history, marked a watershed in the history of the town and the coal industry.

Lizzie's mother is dead, and left in the care of her prim older sister, the 15-year-old fears her carefree ways are over. But when tragedy strikes again, Lizzie discovers a sinister web of lies and deception, of murders past and present. Fierce resentments and racial tensions boil beneath the illusion of civilization. Soon, Lizzie finds herself ensnared in a secret that stretches from the opium dens of British Columbia and the alleys of San Francisco to the jungles of Panama and beyond -- and it's a secret that the murderer will do anything to protect.

In 2010, a mine explosion killed twenty-nine coal miners in Raleigh County, West Virginia. Obama's Deadliest Cover-Up goes beyond the official narrative of the 2010 Upper Big Branch (UBB) Mine disaster to disclose the dark truth. In this daring exposé, Don Blankenship reveals how far the government will go to keep its dirty secrets, even if it means disparaging deceased miners and sending innocent Americans to prison. Using government documents, witness testimony, and science, Blankenship pieces together the Obama-Biden administration's responsibility for the explosion. Blankenship explains how the government used prevarication, lies, and document destruction to bury the truth. Blankenship calls the American media "Pinocchio" and backs it up. Blankenship demonstrates that America's elite, America's media, and America's DOJ hid the UBB truth and says, "They all have blood on their hands." An unflinching look at corruption in America, Obama's Deadliest Cover-up issues a dire warning: Our government will do anything to "get what it wants."

Beginning early in the nineteenth century, thousands of Canadian boys, some as young as eight, laboured underground - driving pit ponies along narrow passageways, manipulating ventilation doors, and helping miners cut and load coal at the coalface to produce the energy that fuelled Canada's industrial revolution. Boys died in the mines in explosions and accidents but they also organised strikes for better working conditions but were instead expelled from the mines and lost their jobs.Boys in the Pits shows the rapid maturity of the boys and their role in resisting exploitation. In what will certainly be a controversial interpretation of child labour, Robert McIntosh recasts wage-earning children as more than victims, showing that they were individuals who responded intelligently and resourcefully to their circumstances.Boys in the Pits is particularly timely as, despite the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, accepted by the General assembly in 1989, child labour still occurs throughout the world and continues to generate controversy. McIntosh provides an important new perspective from which to consider these debates, reorienting our approach to child labour, explaining rather than condemning the practice. Within the broader social context of the period, where the place of children was being redefined as - and limited to - the home, school, and playground, he examines the role of changing technologies, alternative sources of unskilled labour, new divisions of labour, changes in the family economy, and legislation to explore the changing extent of child labour in the mines.Robert McIntosh is employed at the National Archives of Canada.