Welcome to this week’s History Thread! My apologies for missing last week, I have no good excuse other than being otherwise occupied.

This week’s picture: on September 10, 1897 a miner’s strike at Lattimer, PA turned violent. After the usual cycle of firings and wage freezes, the mostly eastern European coal miners of the region, supported by the United Mine Workers, went on strike in August. Negotiations stalled, and the miner operator’s private police force was too small to deal effectively with the strikers, so the local Sheriff raised a posse of 150 men, mostly of Irish and British descent and thus of no sympathy to the Germans, Lithuanians, Poles and others facing them. After a group of strikers refused to disperse the posse opened fire, killing 19 and injuring dozens more. An all-too-common tragedy in that era of violent capital-labor relations.