The way "coal miners" are discussed would also likely be something that puzzles historians. There are approximately 45,000 coal miners in the US, that's roughly equivalent to the combined enrollment of Harvard and MIT. There are more university students in the relatively small city of Cambridge, Massachusetts than there are people mining coal in the US and yet we have to pretend the latter are a constituency worth considering.
But supporting industry of coal mining/coal power plants gets money to tilt or buy senators and their votes - college students are too sparsely distributed to have an equivalent effect in USA. It only took one senator to give us an completely unregulated supplements industry.