In the definitive history of a twentieth-century public health disaster, Alan Derickson recounts how, for decades after methods of prevention were known, hundreds of thousands of American miners suffered and died from black lung, a respiratory illness caused by the inhalation of coal mine dust. The combined failure of government, medicine, and industry to halt the spread of this disease and even to acknowledge its existence resulted in a national tragedy, the effects of which are still being felt.

The book begins in the late nineteenth century, when the disorders brought on by...

Workers in the United States are losing sleep. In the global economy a growing number of employees hold jobs often more than one at once with unpredictable hours. Even before the rise of the twenty-four-hour workplace, the relationship between sleep and industry was problematic: sleep is frequently cast as an enemy or a weakness, while constant productivity and flexibility are glorified at the expense of health and safety.

"Dangerously Sleepy" is the first book to track the longtime association of overwork and sleep deprivation from the nineteenth century to the present. Health and labor...