In Popular Culture
- The film The Molly Maguires, starring Sean Connery and Richard Harris, was released in 1970.
- Arthur Conan Doyle's The Valley of Fear is partly based on the Mollies.
- A 1965 episode of The Big Valley titled "Heritage" portrayed the Mollies as active at a fictitious mine in the Sierras in the 1870s, in which the Irish miners protest the use of Chinese laborers during a mine strike.
- George Korson, a folklorist and journalist, wrote several songs on the topic including his composition Minstrels of the Mine Patch, which has a section on the Molly Maguires: "Coal Dust on the Fiddle".
- Irish folk band The Dubliners have a song called "Molly Maguires".
- The original name of Molly, a Swedish band, whose specialties are Irish music and ska, was 'Molly Maguire'.
- The Irish Rovers' song, "Lament for the Molly Maguires", is on their album Upon a Shamrock Shore.
- In the historical novel Mine Seed, Lucia Dailey, using primary sources, oral history and other historical records, seeks to cast serious doubt on the narrative of the "violent Mollies". The book exposes tactics used by industrialists against workers and trade unionists in the anthracite coal region, including the use of inflammatory terms and epithets such as "communist" and "Molly Maguire" used to depict union leaders and strikers as violent and dangerous. Dailey also detailed purportedly biased courtrooms and procedures leading up to the 1877 executions in Schuylkill County.
Read more about this topic: Molly Maguires
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Like other secret lovers, many speak mockingly about popular culture to conceal their passion for it.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“If our entertainment culture seems debased and unsatisfying, the hope is that our children will create something of greater worth. But it is as if we expect them to create out of nothing, like God, for the encouragement of creativity is in the popular mind, opposed to instruction. There is little sense that creativity must grow out of tradition, even when it is critical of that tradition, and children are scarcely being given the materials on which their creativity could work”
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“To assault the total culture totally is to be free to use all the fruits of mankind’s wisdom and experience without the rotten structure in which these glories are encased and encrusted.”
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