Download or read book Power and Powerlessness written by John Gaventa and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains to outsiders the conflicts between the financial interests of the coal and land companies and the moral rights of the vulnerable mountaineers.
Download or read book Power From the Appalachians written by Frank J. Calzonetti and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1989-07-10 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book grew out of a study that was commissioned by the West Virginia University Energy and Water Research Center. It was designed to assess the impact of electricity imports on West Virginia's economy and to determine what efforts, if any, should be made to increase electricity exports. Because organizations involved in the electricity industry operate on the multi-state level, the outcome is a work that considers the electricity trade from the Appalachians to the Northeast and the physical, political, geographic, and economic factors influencing this trade now and in the future. Early chapters provide an introduction to and overview of the American electricity industry. Twenty years ago energy forecasters predicted that electricity demand would grow at a healthy rate and that the only way to satisfy future demand was to build new, and usually larger, power plants. Little, if any, thought was given to electricity conservation, alternatives to centralized power plants, or changing demand patterns. This mentality brought disaster to many utility companies that ordered unnecessarily expensive power plants. Recent thinking dictates that the nation has sufficient generating supply, conservation can reduce the need for power plants, and those plants that are needed can be smaller, locally-sited facilities. This perception is quickly changing, the authors contend, as certain regions are now in a dangerous position because energy demand is increasing and existing capacity is aging. The balance of the book discusses the steps that must be taken to insure cost-effective use of electricity and the addition of new supplies. Among the issues considered are the power trade alternative; the economic impacts of the electricity industry, (using West Virginia as a test case); acid rain; Canadian power imports; siting energy facilities; and the cost-effectiveness of the various strategies. Given the diverse backgrounds of the coauthors, this book will have widespread appeal in the fields of economics, electrical engineering, geography, mineral resource economics, and political science. Members of the electrical industry itself should also consider this book as they grapple with guaranteeing the nation's energy supply into the next century.
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 Appalachian Reckoning written by Anthony Harkins and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Hillbilly elegy, J.D. Vance described how his family moved from poverty to an upwardly mobile clan while navigating the collective demons of the past. The book has come to define Appalachia for much of the nation. This collection of essays is a retort, at turns rigorous, critical, angry, and hopeful, to the long shadow cast over the region and its imagining. But it also moves beyond Vance's book to allow Appalachians to tell their own diverse and complex stories of a place that is at once culturally rich and economically distressed, unique and typically American. -- adapted from back cover
Download or read book Talking Appalachian written by Amy D. Clark and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-08-29 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tradition, community, and pride are fundamental aspects of the history of Appalachia, and the language of the region is a living testament to its rich heritage. Despite the persistence of unflattering stereotypes and cultural discrimination associated with their style of speech, Appalachians have organized to preserve regional dialects -- complex forms of English peppered with words, phrases, and pronunciations unique to the area and its people. Talking Appalachian examines these distinctive speech varieties and emphasizes their role in expressing local history and promoting a shared identity. Beginning with a historical and geographical overview of the region that analyzes the origins of its dialects, this volume features detailed research and local case studies investigating their use. The contributors explore a variety of subjects, including the success of African American Appalachian English and southern Appalachian English speakers in professional and corporate positions. In addition, editors Amy D. Clark and Nancy M. Hayward provide excerpts from essays, poetry, short fiction, and novels to illustrate usage. With contributions from well-known authors such as George Ella Lyon and Silas House, this balanced collection is the most comprehensive, accessible study of Appalachian language available today.
Download or read book Transforming Places written by Stephen L. Fisher and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this era of globalization's ruthless deracination, place attachments have become increasingly salient in collective mobilizations across the spectrum of politics. Like place-based activists in other resource-rich yet impoverished regions across the globe, Appalachians are contesting economic injustice, environmental degradation, and the anti-democratic power of elites. This collection of seventeen original essays by scholars and activists from a variety of backgrounds explores this wide range of oppositional politics, querying its successes, limitations, and impacts. The editors' critical introduction and conclusion integrate theories of place and space with analyses of organizations and events discussed by contributors. Transforming Places illuminates widely relevant lessons about building coalitions and movements with sufficient strength to challenge corporate-driven globalization. Contributors are Fran Ansley, Yaira Andrea Arias Soto, Dwight B. Billings, M. Kathryn Brown, Jeannette Butterworth, Paul Castelloe, Aviva Chomsky, Dave Cooper, Walter Davis, Meredith Dean, Elizabeth C. Fine, Jenrose Fitzgerald, Doug Gamble, Nina Gregg, Edna Gulley, Molly Hemstreet, Mary Hufford, Ralph Hutchison, Donna Jones, Ann Kingsolver, Sue Ella Kobak, Jill Kriesky, Michael E. Maloney, Lisa Markowitz, Linda McKinney, Ladelle McWhorter, Marta Maria Miranda, Chad Montrie, Maureen Mullinax, Phillip J. Obermiller, Rebecca O'Doherty, Cassie Robinson Pfleger, Randal Pfleger, Anita Puckett, Katie Richards-Schuster, June Rostan, Rees Shearer, Daniel Swan, Joe Szakos, Betsy Taylor, Thomas E. Wagner, Craig White, and Ryan Wishart.
Download or read book What You are Getting Wrong about Appalachia written by Elizabeth Catte and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 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 Ramp Hollow written by Steven Stoll and published by Hill and Wang. This book was released on 2017-11-21 with total page 433 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 Daughters of the Appalachians written by Linda Goodman and published by The Overmountain Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author introduces six unique women, each of whom offers a rare glimpse of a culture that is fast fading away. As you share their joys and sorrows, these women will touch your soul and live in your heart.
Download or read book Blood in the Hills written by Bruce Stewart and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To many antebellum Americans, Appalachia was a frightening wilderness of lawlessness, peril, robbers, and hidden dangers. The extensive media coverage of horse stealing and scalping raids profiled the regionÕs residents as intrinsically violent. After the Civil War, this characterization continued to permeate perceptions of the area and news of the conflict between the Hatfields and the McCoys, as well as the bloodshed associated with the coal labor strikes, cemented AppalachiaÕs violent reputation. Blood in the Hills: A History of Violence in Appalachia provides an in-depth historical analysis of hostility in the region from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Editor Bruce E. Stewart discusses aspects of the Appalachian violence culture, examining skirmishes with the native population, conflicts resulting from the regionÕs rapid modernization, and violence as a function of social control. The contributors also address geographical isolation and ethnicity, kinship, gender, class, and race with the purpose of shedding light on an often-stereotyped regional past. Blood in the Hills does not attempt to apologize for the region but uses detailed research and analysis to explain it, delving into the social and political factors that have defined Appalachia throughout its violent history.
Download or read book Unwhite written by Meredith McCarroll and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2018-10-15 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Appalachia resides in the American imagination at the intersections of race and class in a very particular way, in the tension between deep historic investments in seeing the region as “pure white stock” and as deeply impoverished and backward. Meredith McCarroll’s Unwhite analyzes the fraught location of Appalachians within the southern and American imaginaries, building on studies of race in literary and cinematic characterizations of the American South. Not only do we know what “rednecks” and “white trash” are, McCarroll argues, we rely on the continued use of such categories in fashioning our broader sense of self and other. Further, we continue to depend upon the existence of the region of Appalachia as a cultural construct. As a consequence, Appalachia has long been represented in the collective cultural history as the lowest, the poorest, the most ignorant, and the most laughable community. McCarroll complicates this understanding by asserting that white privilege remains intact while Appalachia is othered through reliance on recognizable nonwhite cinematic stereotypes. Unwhite demonstrates how typical characterizations of Appalachian people serve as foils to set off and define the “whiteness” of the non-Appalachian southerners. In this dynamic, Appalachian characters become the racial other. Analyzing the representation of the people of Appalachia in films such as Deliverance, Cold Mountain, Medium Cool, Norma Rae, Cape Fear, The Killing Season, and Winter’s Bone through the critical lens of race and specifically whiteness, McCarroll offers a reshaping of the understanding of the relationship between racial and regional identities.
Download or read book Beyond the Mountains written by Drew A. Swanson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond the Mountains explores the ways in which Appalachia often served as a laboratory for the exploration and practice of American conceptions of nature. The region operated alternately as frontier, wilderness, rural hinterland, region of subsistence agriculture, bastion of yeoman farmers, and place to experiment with modernization. In these various takes on the southern mountains, scattered across time and space, both mountain residents and outsiders consistently believed that the region's environment made Appalachia distinctive, for better or worse. With chapters dedicated to microhistories focused on particular commodities, Drew A. Swanson builds upon recent Appalachian studies scholarship, emphasizing the diversity of a region so long considered a homogenous backwater. While Appalachia has a recognizable and real coherence rooted in folkways, agriculture, and politics (among other things), it is also a region of varied environments, people, and histories. These discrete stories are, however, linked through the power of conceptualizing nature and work together to reveal the ways in which ideas and uses of nature often created a sense of identity in Appalachia. Delving into the environmental history of the region reveals that Appalachian environments, rather than separating the mountains from the broader world, often served to connect the region to outside places.
Download or read book The Power and Magic of the Appalachian Trail written by Donald E. Williams Jr. "Jug" and published by Dorrance Publishing. This book was released on 2018-03-22 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Power and Magic of the Appalachian Trail By: Donald E. Williams Jr. “Jug” The Power and Magic of the Appalachian Trail is a real life epic tale about a series of hiking trips from Georgia to Maine that Jug and a supporting cast of counselors went on with several groups of multi-ethnic youth. Jug’s sole purpose in conducting these trips was to simply have the youth live in the mountains, catch some panoramic views, feel the pulse of the wild, hoping that the experience would trigger an awakening of the spirit and open up a brand new world that they all could express with love and pride. The trips were not easy. The Appalachian Trail hikes were mentally challenging, physically demanding, and requiring deep soul searching daily. Yet in the end, the explorations were immensely positive and also were enriching experience for the youth. The Appalachian Trail provided a setting that allowed for the openness and freedom where there is no limit to self growth, the greatest trail of all.
Download or read book Yesterday s People written by Jack E. Weller and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-04-23 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The distinctive way of life of the Southern Appalachian people has often been criticized, romanticized or derided, but rarely has it been understood. Yesterday's People, the fruit of many years' labor in the mountains, reveals the fears, anxieties, and hopes that underlie the mountaineers' way of thinking and acting, and thereby shape their relationships in family and community. First published in 1965, this book has been an indispensable guide for all who seek to study, work or live within the Appalachian culture.
Download or read book Our Roots Run Deep as Ironweed written by Shannon Elizabeth Bell and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2013-10-30 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Motivated by a deeply rooted sense of place and community, Appalachian women have long fought against the damaging effects of industrialization. In this collection of interviews, sociologist Shannon Elizabeth Bell presents the voices of twelve Central Appalachian women, environmental justice activists fighting against mountaintop removal mining and its devastating effects on public health, regional ecology, and community well-being. Each woman narrates her own personal story of injustice and tells how that experience led her to activism. The interviews--many of them illustrated by the women's "photostories"--describe obstacles, losses, and tragedies. But they also tell of new communities and personal transformations catalyzed through activism. Bell supplements each narrative with careful notes that aid the reader while amplifying the power and flow of the activists' stories. Bell's analysis outlines the relationship between Appalachian women's activism and the gendered responsibilities they feel within their families and communities. Ultimately, Bell argues that these women draw upon a broader "protector identity" that both encompasses and extends the identity of motherhood that has often been associated with grassroots women's activism. As protectors, the women challenge dominant Appalachian gender expectations and guard not only their families but also their homeplaces, their communities, their heritage, and the endangered mountains that surround them. 30% of the proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to organizations fighting for environmental justice in Central Appalachia.
Download or read book Ecotourism in Appalachia written by Al Fritsch and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-10-17 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tourism is the world's largest industry, and ecotourism is rapidly emerging as its fastest growing segment. As interest in nature travel increases, so does concern for conservation of the environment and the well-being of local peoples and cultures. Appalachia seems an ideal destination for ecotourists, with its rugged mountains, uniquely diverse forests, wild rivers, and lively arts culture. And ecotourism promises much for the region: protecting the environment while bringing income to disadvantaged communities. But can these promises be kept? Ecotourism in Appalachia examines both the potential and the threats that tourism holds for Central Appalachia. The authors draw lessons from destinations that have suffered from the "tourist trap syndrome," including Nepal and Hawaii. They conclude that only carefully regulated and locally controlled tourism can play a positive role in Appalachia's economic development.
Download or read book Modernizing the Mountaineer written by David E. Whisnant and published by Univ Tennessee Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Whisnant focuses upon public and private social and economic development efforts in Appalachia from the close of the nineteenth century through the early 1970s. He explores their diverse origins, their many ways of assessing and relating to the problems and people of the region, and above all the cultural politics that shaped them
