Download or read book Miners Millhands and Mountaineers written by Ronald D. Eller and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "As a benchmark book should, this one will stimulate the imagination and industry of future researchers as well as wrapping up the results of the last two decades of research... Eller's greatest achievement results from his successful fusion of scholarly virtues with literary ones. The book is comprehensive, but not overlong. It is readable but not superficial. The reader who reads only one book in a lifetime on Appalachia cannot do better than to choose this one... No one will be able to ignore it except those who refuse to confront the uncomfortable truths about American society and culture that Appalachia's history conveys." -- John A. Williams, Appalachian Journal.
Download or read book Miners and Millhands written by Janaki Nair and published by . This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mountaineers and Rangers written by Shelley Smith Mastran and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Selling Tradition written by Jane S. Becker and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first half of the twentieth century witnessed a growing interest in America's folk heritage, as Americans began to enthusiastically collect, present, market, and consume the nation's folk traditions. Examining one of this century's most prominent "folk revivals--the reemergence of Southern Appalachian handicraft traditions in the 1930s--Jane Becker unravels the cultural politics that bound together a complex network of producers, reformers, government officials, industries, museums, urban markets, and consumers, all of whom helped to redefine Appalachian craft production in the context of a national cultural identity. Becker uses this craft revival as a way of exploring the construction of the cultural categories "folk" and "tradition." She also addresses the consequences such labels have had on the people to whom they have been assigned. Though the revival of domestic arts in the Southern Appalachians reflected an attempt to aid the people of an impoverished region, she says, as well as a desire to recapture an important part of the nation's folk heritage, in reality the new craft production owed less to tradition than to middle-class tastes and consumer culture--forces that obscured the techniques used by mountain laborers and the conditions in which they worked.
Download or read book Black Coal Miners in America written by Ronald L. Lewis and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-03-17 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the early day of mining in colonial Virginia and Maryland up to the time of World War II, blacks were an important part of the labor force in the coal industry. Yet in this, as in other enterprises, their role has heretofore been largely ignored. Now Roland L. Lewis redresses the balance in this comprehensive history of black coal miners in America. The experience of blacks in the industry has varied widely over time and by region, and the approach of this study is therefore more comparative than chronological. Its aim is to define the patterns of race relations that prevailed among the miners. Using this approach, Lewis finds five distractive systems of race relations. There was in the South before and after the Civil War a system of slavery and convict labor—an enforced servitude without legal compensation. This was succeeded by an exploitative system whereby the southern coal operators, using race as an excuse, paid lower wages to blacks and thus succeeded in depressing the entire wage scale. By contrast, in northern and midwestern mines, the pattern was to exclude blacks from the industry so that whites could control their jobs and their communities. In the central Appalachians, although blacks enjoyed greater social equality, the mine operators manipulated racial tensions to keep the work force divided and therefore weak. Finally, with the advent of mechanization, black laborers were displaced from the mines to such an extent that their presence in the coal fields in now nearly a thing of the past. By analyzing the ways race, class, and community shaped social relations in the coal fields, Black Coal Miners in America makes a major contribution to the understanding of regional, labor, social, and African-American history.
Download or read book Making a Living written by Chad Montrie and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009-01-05 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an innovative fusion of labor and environmental history, Making a Living examines work as a central part of Americans' evolving relationship with nature, revealing the unexpected connections between the fight for workers' rights and the rise of the modern environmental movement. Chad Montrie offers six case studies: textile "mill girls" in antebellum New England, plantation slaves and newly freed sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta, homesteading women in the Kansas and Nebraska grasslands, native-born coal miners in southern Appalachia, autoworkers in Detroit, and Mexican and Mexican American farm workers in southern California. Montrie shows how increasingly organized and mechanized production drove a wedge between workers and nature--and how workers fought back. Workers' resistance not only addressed wages and conditions, he argues, but also planted the seeds of environmental reform and environmental justice activism. Workers played a critical role in raising popular consciousness, pioneering strategies for enacting environmental regulatory policy, and initiating militant local protest. Filled with poignant and illuminating vignettes, Making a Living provides new insights into the intersection of the labor movement and environmentalism in America.
Download or read book Coal Class and Color written by Joe William Trotter and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Worlds Apart written by Cynthia M. Duncan and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-13 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1999, Worlds Apart examined the nature of poverty through the stories of real people in three remote rural areas of the United States: New England, Appalachia, and the Mississippi Delta. In this new edition, Duncan returns to her original research, interviewing some of the same people as well as some new key informants. Duncan provides powerful new insights into the dynamics of poverty, politics, and community change. "Duncan, through in-depth investigation and interviews, concludes that only a strong civic culture, a sense among citizens of community and the need to serve that community, can truly address poverty. . . . Moving and troubling. Duncan has created a remarkable study of the persistent patterns of poverty and power."—Kirkus Reviews "The descriptions of rural poverty in Worlds Apart are interesting and read almost like a novel."—Choice
Download or read book The Company Town written by Hardy Green and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2011-04 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines how towns across the United States have grown thanks to the existence of one large business being run from the community, discusses how those single-business communities have influenced the American economy, and explores the benefits and consequences of these towns.
Download or read book To Save the Land and People written by Chad Montrie and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003-11-20 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surface coal mining has had a dramatic impact on the Appalachian economy and ecology since World War II, exacerbating the region's chronic unemployment and destroying much of its natural environment. Here, Chad Montrie examines the twentieth-century movement to outlaw surface mining in Appalachia, tracing popular opposition to the industry from its inception through the growth of a militant movement that engaged in acts of civil disobedience and industrial sabotage. Both comprehensive and comparative, To Save the Land and People chronicles the story of surface mining opposition in the whole region, from Pennsylvania to Alabama. Though many accounts of environmental activism focus on middle-class suburbanites and emphasize national events, the campaign to abolish strip mining was primarily a movement of farmers and working people, originating at the local and state levels. Its history underscores the significant role of common people and grassroots efforts in the American environmental movement. This book also contributes to a long-running debate about American values by revealing how veneration for small, private properties has shaped the political consciousness of strip mining opponents.
Download or read book Harlan Miners Speak written by Members of the National Committee for the Defense and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Dreiser Committee, including writers Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, and Sherwood Anderson, investigated the desperate situation of striking Kentucky miners in November 1931. When the Communist-led National Miners Union competed against the more conservative United Mine Workers of America for greater union membership, class resentment turned to warfare. Harlan Miners Speak, originally published in 1932, is an invaluable record that illustrates the living and working conditions of the miners during the 1930s. This edition of Harlan Miners Speak, with a new introduction by noted historian John C. Hennen, offers readers an in-depth look at a pivotal crisis in the complex history of this controversial form of energy production.
Download or read book High Mountains Rising written by Richard A. Straw and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection is the first comprehensive, cohesive volume to unite Appalachian history with its culture. Richard A. Straw and H. Tyler Blethen's High Mountains Rising provides a clear, systematic, and engaging overview of the Appalachian timeline, its people, and the most significant aspects of life in the region. The first half of the fourteen essays deal with historical issues including Native Americans, pioneer settlement, slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, industrialization, the Great Depression, migration, and finally, modernization. The remaining essays take a more cultural focus, addressing stereotypes, music, folklife, language, literature, and religion. Bringing together many of the most prestigious scholars in Appalachian studies, this volume has been designed for general and classroom use, and includes suggestions for further reading.
Download or read book They Say in Harlan County written by Alessandro Portelli and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-04 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Made famous in the 1976 documentary Harlan County USA, this pocket of Appalachian coal country has been home to generations of miners--and to some of the most bitter labor battles of the 20th century. It has also produced a rich tradition of protest songs and a wealth of fascinating culture and custom that has remained largely undiscovered by outsiders, until now. They Say in Harlan County is not a book about coal miners so much as a dialogue in which more than 150 Harlan County women and men tell the story of their region, from pioneer times through the dramatic strikes of the 1930s and '70s, up to the present. Alessandro Portelli draws on 25 years of original interviews to take readers into the mines and inside the lives of those who work, suffer, and often die in them--from black lung, falling rock, suffocation, or simply from work that can be literally backbreaking. The book is structured as a vivid montage of all these voices--stoic, outraged, grief-stricken, defiant--skillfully interwoven with documents from archives, newspapers, literary works, and the author's own participating and critical voice. Portelli uncovers the whole history and memory of the United States in this one symbolic place, through settlement, civil war, slavery, industrialization, immigration, labor conflict, technological change, migration, strip mining, environmental and social crises, and resistance. And as hot-button issues like mountain-top removal and the use of "clean coal" continue to hit the news, the history of Harlan County--especially as seen through the eyes of those who lived it--is becoming increasingly important. With rare emotional immediacy, gripping narratives, and unforgettable characters, They Say in Harlan County tells the real story of a culture, the resilience of its people, and the human costs of coal mining.
Download or read book The Hardrock Miners written by Richard E. Lingenfelter and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Stonemans written by Ivan M. Tribe and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Stonemans is an eye-opening slice of Americana---a trip through nearly twenty years of country music history following a single family from their native Blue Ridge Mountains to the slums of Washington, D.C., and the glitter of Nashville. As early as 1924 Ernest V. "Pop" Stoneman realized the potential of what is now known as country music, and he tried to carve a career from it. Successful as a recording artist from 1925 through 1929, Stoneman foundered during the Great Depression. He, his wife, and their nine children went to Washington in 1932, struggling through a decade of hardship and working to revive the musical career Pop still believed in. The Stoneman Family won the Country Music Association's Vocal Group of the Year Award in 1967. After Pop's death a year later, some of the children scattered to pursue their own careers. Ivan Tribe relies on extensive interviews with the Stonemans and their friends in this chronicle of a family whose members have clung to their musical heritage through good times and bad.
Download or read book Appalachia s Path to Dependency written by Paul Salstrom and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Appalachia's Path to Dependency, Paul Salstrom examines the evolution of economic life over time in southern Appalachia. Moving away from the colonial model to an analysis based on dependency, he exposes the complex web of factors—regulation of credit, industrialization, population growth, cultural values, federal intervention—that has worked against the region. Salstrom argues that economic adversity has resulted from three types of disadvantages: natural, market, and political. The overall context in which Appalachia's economic life unfolded was one of expanding United States markets and, after the Civil War, of expanding capitalist relations. Covering Appalachia's economic history from early white settlement to the end of the New Deal, this work is not simply an economic interpretation but draws as well on other areas of history. Whereas other interpretations of Appalachia's economy have tended to seek social or psychological explanations for its dependency, this important work compels us to look directly at the region's economic history. This regional perspective offers a clear-eyed view of Appalachia's path in the future.
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.
