Download or read book Removing Mountains written by Rebecca R. Scott and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ethnography of coal country in southern West Virginia.
Download or read book Extracting Appalachia written by Geoffrey L. Buckley and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a function of its corporate duties, the Consolidation Coal Company had photographers take hundreds of pictures of nearly every facet of its operations. Here, geographer Geoffrey L. Buckley examines the company's photograph collection housed at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.
Download or read book What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia written by Elizabeth Catte and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2016, headlines declared Appalachia ground zero for America's "forgotten tribe" of white working class voters. Journalists flocked to the region to extract sympathetic profiles of families devastated by poverty, abandoned by establishment politics, and eager to consume cheap campaign promises. What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia is a frank assessment of America's recent fascination with the people and problems of the region. The book analyzes trends in contemporary writing on Appalachia, presents a brief history of Appalachia with an eye toward unpacking Appalachian stereotypes, and provides examples of writing, art, and policy created by Appalachians as opposed to for Appalachians. The book offers a must-needed insider's perspective on the region.
Download or read book A History of Appalachia written by Richard B. Drake and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2003-09-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Drake has skillfully woven together the various strands of the Appalachian experience into a sweeping whole. Touching upon folk traditions, health care, the environment, higher education, the role of blacks and women, and much more, Drake offers a compelling social history of a unique American region. The Appalachian region, extending from Alabama in the South up to the Allegheny highlands of Pennsylvania, has historically been characterized by its largely rural populations, rich natural resources that have fueled industry in other parts of the country, and the strong and wild, undeveloped land. The rugged geography of the region allowed Native American societies, especially the Cherokee, to flourish. Early white settlers tended to favor a self-sufficient approach to farming, contrary to the land grabbing and plantation building going on elsewhere in the South. The growth of a market economy and competition from other agricultural areas of the country sparked an economic decline of the region's rural population at least as early as 1830. The Civil War and the sometimes hostile legislation of Reconstruction made life even more difficult for rural Appalachians. Recent history of the region is marked by the corporate exploitation of resources. Regional oil, gas, and coal had attracted some industry even before the Civil War, but the postwar years saw an immense expansion of American industry, nearly all of which relied heavily on Appalachian fossil fuels, particularly coal. What was initially a boon to the region eventually brought financial disaster to many mountain people as unsafe working conditions and strip mining ravaged the land and its inhabitants. A History of Appalachia also examines pockets of urbanization in Appalachia. Chemical, textile, and other industries have encouraged the development of urban areas. At the same time, radio, television, and the internet provide residents direct links to cultures from all over the world. The author looks at the process of urbanization as it belies commonly held notions about the region's rural character.
Download or read book Written in Blood written by Wess Harris and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2017-10-01 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in Blood features the work of Appalachia’s leading scholars and activists making available an accurate, ungilded, and uncensored understanding of our history. Combining new revelations from the past with sketches of a sane path forward, this is a deliberate collection looking at our past, present, and future. Sociologist Wess Harris (When Miners March) further documents the infamous Esau scrip system for women, suggesting an institutionalized practice of forced sexual servitude that was part of coal company policy. In a conversation with award-winning oral historian Michael Kline, federal mine inspector Larry Layne explains corporate complicity in the 1968 Farmington Mine disaster which killed seventy-eight men and became the catalyst for the passage of major changes in U.S. mine safety laws. Mine safety expert and whistleblower Jack Spadaro speaks candidly of years of attempts to silence his courageous voice and recalls government and university collaboration in covering up details of the 1972 Buffalo Creek flooding disaster, which killed over a hundred people and left four thousand homeless. Moving to the next generation of thinkers and activists, attorney Nathan Fetty examines current events in Appalachia and musician Carrie Kline suggests paths forward for people wishing to set their own course rather than depend on the kindness of corporations.
Download or read book Appalachian Aspirations written by John E. Benhart and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the fall of 1865, two Union officers stationed in East Tennessee during the Civil War - Hiram Chamberlain and John Wilder -- decided to stay in the South to pursue business careers. They recognized potential in the "untapped" resources they had seen during military operations in this part of the state. Within the space of four years, Chamberlain and Wilder had recruited business partners, built an operating iron furnace in the Upper Tennessee River Valley (the Roane Iron Company), and established a company town at Rockwood, Tennessee. Twenty years later, in some parts of Appalachia, new planned towns were being established by land companies that wanted to develop model industrial real estate ventures. In the Upper Tennessee River Valley, these new towns - Cardiff, Harriman, and Lenoir City, Tennessee - were planned to be the quintessential places for industrial production and urban living as they were characterized by urban/sanitary reform ideals, temperance tenets, and distinctive urban landscapes. In Appalachian Aspirations, John Benhart presents the story of the evolution of capitalism and regional development in the Upper Tennessee River Valley in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Download or read book Appalachia written by and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ramp Hollow written by Steven Stoll and published by Hill and Wang. This book was released on 2017-11-21 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the United States underdeveloped Appalachia Appalachia—among the most storied and yet least understood regions in America—has long been associated with poverty and backwardness. But how did this image arise and what exactly does it mean? In Ramp Hollow, Steven Stoll launches an original investigation into the history of Appalachia and its place in U.S. history, with a special emphasis on how generations of its inhabitants lived, worked, survived, and depended on natural resources held in common. Ramp Hollow traces the rise of the Appalachian homestead and how its self-sufficiency resisted dependence on money and the industrial society arising elsewhere in the United States—until, beginning in the nineteenth century, extractive industries kicked off a “scramble for Appalachia” that left struggling homesteaders dispossessed of their land. As the men disappeared into coal mines and timber camps, and their families moved into shantytowns or deeper into the mountains, the commons of Appalachia were, in effect, enclosed, and the fate of the region was sealed. Ramp Hollow takes a provocative look at Appalachia, and the workings of dispossession around the world, by upending our notions about progress and development. Stoll ranges widely from literature to history to economics in order to expose a devastating process whose repercussions we still feel today.
Download or read book Appalachia written by John Alexander Williams and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003-04-03 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interweaving social, political, environmental, economic, and popular history, John Alexander Williams chronicles four and a half centuries of the Appalachian past. Along the way, he explores Appalachia's long-contested boundaries and the numerous, often contradictory images that have shaped perceptions of the region as both the essence of America and a place apart. Williams begins his story in the colonial era and describes the half-century of bloody warfare as migrants from Europe and their American-born offspring fought and eventually displaced Appalachia's Native American inhabitants. He depicts the evolution of a backwoods farm-and-forest society, its divided and unhappy fate during the Civil War, and the emergence of a new industrial order as railroads, towns, and extractive industries penetrated deeper and deeper into the mountains. Finally, he considers Appalachia's fate in the twentieth century, when it became the first American region to suffer widespread deindustrialization, and examines the partial renewal created by federal intervention and a small but significant wave of in-migration. Throughout the book, a wide range of Appalachian voices enlivens the analysis and reminds us of the importance of storytelling in the ways the people of Appalachia define themselves and their region.
Download or read book Appalachia s Coal Mined Landscapes written by Carl E. Zipper and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-11-25 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book collects and summarizes current scientific knowledge concerning coal-mined landscapes of the Appalachian region in eastern United States. Containing contributions from authors across disciplines, the book addresses topics relevant to the region’s coal-mining history and its future; its human communities; and the soils, waters, plants, wildlife, and human-use potentials of Appalachia’s coal-mined landscapes. The book provides a comprehensive overview of coal mining’s legacy in Appalachia, USA. It book describes the resources of the Appalachian coalfield, its lands and waters, and its human communities – as they have been left in the aftermath of intensive mining, drawing upon peer-reviewed science and other regional data to provide clear and objective descriptions. By understanding the Appalachian experience, officials and planners in other resource extraction- affected world regions can gain knowledge and perspectives that will aid their own efforts to plan and manage for environmental quality and for human welfare. Appalachia's Coal-Mined Landscapes: Resources and Communities in a New Energy Era will be of use to natural resource managers and scientists within Appalachia and in other world regions experiencing widespread mining, researchers with interest in the region’s disturbance legacy, and economic and community planners concerned with Appalachia’s future.
Download or read book Kentucky by Design written by Andrew Kelly and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2015-07-31 with total page 611 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Index of American Design was one of the most significant undertakings of the Federal Art Project—the visual arts arm of the Works Progress Administration. Part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, this ambitious initiative set out to discover and document an authentic American style in everyday objects. The curators of the Index combed the country for art of the machine age—from carved carousel horses to engraved powder horns to woven coverlets—created by artisans for practical use. In their search for a true American artistic identity, they also sought furniture designed by regional craftsmen laboring in isolation from European traditions. Kentucky by Design offers the first comprehensive examination of the objects from the Bluegrass State featured in this historic venture. It showcases a wide array of offerings, including architecture, furniture, ceramics, musical instruments, textiles, clothing, and glass- and metalworks. The Federal Art Project played an important role in documenting and preserving the work of Shaker artists from the Pleasant Hill and South Union communities, and their creations are exhibited in this illuminating catalog. Beautifully illustrated with both the original watercolor depictions and contemporary, art-quality photographs of the works, this book is a lavish exploration of the Commonwealth's distinctive contribution to American culture and modern design. Features contributions from Jean M. Burks, Erika Doss, Jerrold Hirsch, Lauren Churilla, Larrie Currie, Michelle Ganz, Tommy Hines, Lee Kogan, Ron Pen, Janet Rae, Shelly Zegart, Mel Hankla, Philippe Chavance, Kate Hesseldenz, Madeleine Burnside, and Allan Weiss.
Download or read book A Companion to American Environmental History written by Douglas Cazaux Sackman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2010-02-12 with total page 696 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to American Environmental History gatherstogether a comprehensive collection of over 30 essays that examinethe evolving and diverse field of American environmental history. Provides a complete historiography of American environmentalhistory Brings the field up-to-date to reflect the latest trends andencourages new directions for the field Includes the work of path-breaking environmental historians,from the founders of the field, to contributions frominnovative young scholars Takes stock of the discipline through five topically themedparts, with essays ranging from American Indian EnvironmentalRelations to Cities and Suburbs
Download or read book Coal Cages Crisis written by Judah Schept and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2022-04-12 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How prisons became economic development strategies for rural Appalachian communities As the United States began the project of mass incarceration, rural communities turned to building prisons as a strategy for economic development. More than 350 prisons have been built in the U.S. since 1980, with certain regions of the country accounting for large shares of this dramatic growth. Central Appalachia is one such region; there are eight prisons alone in Eastern Kentucky. If Kentucky were its own country, it would have the seventh highest incarceration rate in the world. In Coal, Cages, Crisis, Judah Schept takes a closer look at this stunning phenomenon, providing insight into prison growth, jail expansion and rising incarceration rates in America’s hinterlands. Drawing on interviews, site visits, and archival research, Schept traces recent prison growth in the region to the rapid decline of its coal industry. He takes us inside this startling transformation occurring in the coalfields, where prisons are often built on top of old coalmines, including mountaintop removal sites, and built into community planning approaches to crises of unemployment, population loss, and declining revenues. By linking prison growth to other sites in this landscape—coal mines, coal waste, landfills, and incinerators—Schept shows that the prison boom has less to do with crime and punishment and much more with the overall extraction, depletion, and waste disposal processes that characterize dominant development strategies for the region. Schept argues that the future of this area now hangs in the balance, detailing recent efforts to oppose its carceral growth. Coal, Cages, Crisis offers invaluable insight into the complex dynamics of mass incarceration that continue to shape Appalachia and the broader United States.
Download or read book Global Mountain Regions written by Ann Kingsolver and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-01 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Works exploring the responses of global mountain communities to the shared challenges and opportunities their unique locations afford them. No matter where they are located in the world, communities living in mountain regions have shared experiences defined in large part by contradictions. These communities often face social and economic marginalization despite providing the lumber, coal, minerals, tea, and tobacco that have fueled the growth of nations for centuries. They are perceived as remote and socially inferior backwaters on one hand while simultaneously seen as culturally rich and spiritually sacred spaces on the other. These contradictions become even more fraught as environmental changes and political strains place added pressure on these mountain communities. Shifting national borders and changes to watersheds, forests, and natural resources play an increasingly important role as nations respond to the needs of a global economy. The works in this volume consider multiple nations, languages, generations, and religions in their exploration of upland communities’ responses to the unique challenges and opportunities they share. From paintings to digital mapping, environmental studies to poetry, land reclamation efforts to song lyrics, the collection provides a truly interdisciplinary and global study. The editors and authors offer a cross-cultural exploration of the many strategies that mountain communities are employing to face the concerns of the future. “Global Mountain Regions is an outstanding addition to the inventory of the interdisciplinary field of montology, the study of mountains. For any scholar or student interested in the human dimensions of mountain regions, many if not all of the essays will be valuable references.” —American Ethnologist
Download or read book Appalachia North written by Matthew J. Ferrence and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Appalachia North is the first book-length treatment of the cultural position of northern Appalachia--roughly the portion of the official Appalachian Regional Commission zone that lies above the Mason-Dixon line. For Matthew Ferrence this region fits into a tight space of not-quite: not quite "regular" America and yet not quite Appalachia. Ferrence's sense of geographic ambiguity is compounded when he learns that his birthplace in western Pennsylvania is technically not a mountain but, instead, a dissected plateau shaped by the slow, deep cuts of erosion. That discovery is followed by the diagnosis of a brain tumor, setting Ferrence on a journey that is part memoir, part exploration of geology and place. Appalachia North is an investigation of how the labels of Appalachia have been drawn and written, and also a reckoning with how a body always in recovery can, like a region viewed always as a site of extraction, find new territories of growth.
Download or read book Company Towns in the Americas written by Oliver J. Dinius and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Company towns were the spatial manifestation of a social ideology and an economic rationale. The contributors to this volume show how national politics, social protest, and local culture transformed those founding ideologies by examining the histories of company towns in six countries: Argentina (Firmat), Brazil (Volta Redonda, Santos, Fordlândia), Canada (Sudbury), Chile (El Salvador), Mexico (Santa Rosa, Río Blanco), and the United States (Anaconda, Kellogg, and Sunflower City). Company towns across the Americas played similar economic and social roles. They advanced the frontiers of industrial capitalism and became powerful symbols of modernity. They expanded national economies by supporting extractive industries on thinly settled frontiers and, as a result, brought more land, natural resources, and people under the control of corporations. U.S. multinational companies exported ideas about work discipline, race, and gender to Latin America as they established company towns there to extend their economic reach. Employers indeed shaped social relations in these company towns through education, welfare, and leisure programs, but these essays also show how working-class communities reshaped these programs to serve their needs. The editors’ introduction and a theoretical essay by labor geographer Andrew Herod provide the context for the case studies and illuminate how the company town serves as a window into both the comparative and transnational histories of labor under industrial capitalism.
Download or read book Folk Medicine in Southern Appalachia written by Anthony Cavender and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-07-25 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first comprehensive exploration of the history and practice of folk medicine in the Appalachian region, Anthony Cavender melds folklore, medical anthropology, and Appalachian history and draws extensively on oral histories and archival sources from the nineteenth century to the present. He provides a complete tour of ailments and folk treatments organized by body systems, as well as information on medicinal plants, patent medicines, and magico-religious beliefs and practices. He investigates folk healers and their methods, profiling three living practitioners: an herbalist, a faith healer, and a Native American healer. The book also includes an appendix of botanicals and a glossary of folk medical terms. Demonstrating the ongoing interplay between mainstream scientific medicine and folk medicine, Cavender challenges the conventional view of southern Appalachia as an exceptional region isolated from outside contact. His thorough and accessible study reveals how Appalachian folk medicine encompasses such diverse and important influences as European and Native American culture and America's changing medical and health-care environment. In doing so, he offers a compelling representation of the cultural history of the region as seen through its health practices.
