An overview of the midsummer miners’ vacation

Abstract This paper calls attention to an underexamined aspect of the US coal industry in the mid to late twentieth century. The paper examines the case of an American coal mining tradition, the midsummer miners’ vacation, and situates the vacation tradition within the US coal industry’s shift from underground Appalachian mines to western surface mines. The authors collated weekly US coal production data produced over a 70 year period, then analyzed the results through the lens of change dynamics within the coal industry. To determine whether the midsummer vacation period seen in Appalachia had a significant impact on coal production, a generalized linear model on the Z -transformed production data was conducted. The analysis demonstrates that the effect of the miners’ vacation on coal production was statistically significant in Appalachia during the summer vacation period. The authors argue that the rise and fall of the midsummer miners’ vacation—and the marked spatial differences in the holiday’s observance—highlight the shifts in labor, technology, geography and economics that redefined coal work in the late twentieth century.