Spring Canyon Coal Camps – The Prototype

Colter Wilson is a Helper native now living in Denver. He is also a podcaster, and this week released an episode reflecting on the coal camps of Spring Canyon. Within six miles six company towns once existed, with over a thousand people estimated to have been living in the canyon during the town’s peak years

Museum of Moab Zoom Book Event

In September I did a speaking event, via Zoom, with the Museum of Moab about Carbon County USA as part of their Tuesdays with the Museum lecture series. A video/audio recording of it is has been posted and is available here. It is about an hour long. Other speakers in the series have presented on

Feminism and Canoes

There is a sticker that has been popping up in my facebook feed a lot lately. I can’t tell if it’s a monument to genius, or hubris. Sometimes, the line is so fine, a thing can actually exist in both worlds, simultaneously. At first glance you may understand the sticker is designed to imply depth

Author Interview with New Books Network

In May I sat down with Ryan Driskell Tate to do an interview about Carbon County USA. It is online and you can listen to it here: https://newbooksnetwork.com/christian-wright-carbon-county-usa-miners-for-democracy-in-utah-and-the-west-u-utah-press-2020/?fbclid=IwAR3xIHUbuUPLYTkxehwNHbTwuAyemZAUHiu7KMZJ6z-97dC0Y-azkGSdqoQ “During the early 1970s, a movement of rank-and-file coal miners rose up in Appalachia to challenge mine bosses and stodgy union officials. They sought greater control over

What Will Happen to Gillette?

“What will happen to Gillette — and other fossil fuel towns — as the coal industry recedes and clean-energy goals are realized? And what difference could the Biden administration or Congress make for a dying town built on coal?” A thoughtful recent piece from CNN grapples with these questions directly. It also notes, as I

Carbon County USA is now an audio book!

Woah the book is now an audio book! For you podcast-lovers and commuters, you can now HEAR, read to you, the whole heroic rise, troubled fall, and inconclusive redemption of industrial unionism in America! Here it is from audible.com

Sun News Feature

I was asked by the Moab Sun-News to share a few thoughts on the relevance of labor history to our own local past. Here is the piece they published, which I am mirroring the text of. One thing can re-balance and save America. That thing is a labor movement. But what does that mean? It’s

Carbon County, USA

I wrote a book about mining coal and the United Mine Workers in Utah and the West. It came out this year with U of U Press, and studies changes in the industry and the union from 1933 to 1985. Carbon County, USA studies unions in western coal and asks the question, “What the hell