The "afterlife" of the "coal boom" in NE Pennsylvania has been too long left out of contemporary academia and heritage considerations. This is a book about this "coal boom" ruination, as a form of recovering anthracite memories. It becomes an "excavation" that exposes various layers of ruin in the form of collapsed walls and dreams, immobile machinery and economic stagnation, exposed floors and history. These remains all reveal previous entanglements of a now defunct coal mining industry. The "coal rush" is over and buried, but the infrastructure and the families of those who sustained that "rush," remain. Let's honor that which remains as "anthracite coal mining heritage." "Some landscapes....refuse history; some efface it so completely it is never found; in others, the thronging of memories of the past subdue the living" (Loren Eiseley). This is the anthracite coal region.