One can go days on FR with only mundane news stories and analysis. Then you get a comment like yours. Not really a comment, really, more like a mini-essay. In any event, you obviously have done your homework, and I am sure you had to boil the snot out of a lot you learned or was taught to hit the true note like you did. I am so glad you posted this.
LOL I write too much. I was born in 1957. As a kid I remember trips dad and mom would take back up in the Cumberland mountains. I remember seeing Coal Towns. They were dying out then due to roads and changes in mining technology from deep mining to surface. Now you can't tell they were even there unless you know what to look for to tell where houses once stood. Spring time is easiest. Domestic flowers blooming give it away.
Coal Town's became liabilities as did deep mining vs surface. A lot of stuff I've read like The Coal Creek war. That one wasn't in my state history classes in high school LOL. Some of it I learned doing genealogy.
Some of the farces like The New Deal and the development of the TVA was evidence left by old building foundations of flooded communities where factories, stores, school, gas stations, and homes once existed. Reading FDR propaganda you'd think folks were dirt farmers starving to death. Far from it.
I had a few hobbies like collecting old Pre-1900's bottles where you could learn a lot just by looking for them. I've helped dig out old filled in cisterns in the city also. You could tell the Prohibition Era when digging one out that had been filled in LOL. The bottles were Tonics in that ear usually containing a good percentage of alcohol. Cisterns in the city were filled in when utility water was available. It was my uncle, a cousin, my dad and myself mainly looking for them. A lot of history is out there most of it never published.