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Appalachia

SOURCE: New York Times
8/4/2022

How Decades of Coal Mining Left West Virginia Vulnerable to Flooding

For a century, coal mining companies have taken billions of dollars of wealth out of eastern Kentucky, stripped the land of vegetation that can contain flood waters, and contributed to the climate change making severe storms more frequent, while leaving little for the people who live there.

SOURCE: Black Perspectives
12/10/2021

(Re)locating Sites of Memory in Appalachia Through Black Spaces and Stories

by Kristan McCullum

"I grew up in Jenkins not knowing its full history. I never knew the church I was raised in was once the movie theater that required Black patrons to sit in the balcony."

SOURCE: Bitter Southerner
9/7/2021

Life After the Mines

A long read examines the social disruption that ensues when coal companies close shop and abandon the communities that have grown around mining work for decades and generations.

SOURCE: New York Times
9/6/2021

Too Few Today Remember the Bloody Uprising of Miners at Blair Mountain

In a region still marked by rampant inequality, the public forgetting of the Battle of Blair Mountain seems like a concerted effort to suppress working people's history.

SOURCE: Economic Policy Institute
8/25/2021

A Century After Blair Mountain, the Right to Organize is as Vital as Ever

by Dave Kamper

"In many mining regions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mine companies for all practical purposes were the government."

SOURCE: WVNews
4/28/2021

West Virginia Univ. Researcher Wins Carnegie Award for Study of Appalachian Feminism

Jessica Wilkerson's research examines how the women's movement unfolded in places outside the nation's urban centers and how women decided what constituted "women's issues" in their own communities in Appalachia.

SOURCE: Hedgehog Review
4/10/2020

Left Behind: The Trouble with Euphemism

by Nancy Isenberg

A historian of white rural poverty says that the cultural phenomenon of JD Vance's book "Hillbilly Elegy" is just the latest deployment of the "left behind" euphemism to obscure the nature of poverty in the United States. The rural poor are and have been part and parcel of the American economic order.

SOURCE: Folklife
3/1/2021

“Making a Living by the Sweat of Her Brow”: Hazel Dickens and a Life of Work

by Emily Hilliard

"Hazel’s song catalog is often divided into separate categories of personal songs, women’s songs, and labor songs. But in her view and experience, these issues all bled together; her songs address struggle against any form of domination and oppression, whether of women, workers, or herself."

SOURCE: New York Times
2/8/2021

West Virginia Has Everyone’s Attention. What Does It Really Need?

by Emily Badger

The influence of Senator Joe Manchin in Washington has fueled speculation about federal aid to depressed communities in the Mountaineer State. But historians like William Hal Gorby and in-state activists say that there will be no quick fixes.

SOURCE: New York Times
1/30/2021

The Real Meaning of Hillbilly

The work of historian Chuck Keeney is critical to recovering the radicalism of Appalachian miners and a "redneck" identity that is based in struggles for equality and shared dignity instead of reactionary individualism, says writer Abby Lee Hood.

SOURCE: Vox
11/10/2020

Everything About Netflix’s Hillbilly Elegy Movie Is Awful (Review)

"It strips out Vance’s sociopolitical commentary entirely, which, however you feel about the commentary, leaves the story without an all-important ingredient: a political and sociological point."

SOURCE: Black Perspectives
8/12/2020

Unearthing New Histories of Black Appalachia (Review)

by Jillean McCommons

Tension between Black and white memory of the founding of Liberia, South Carolina drives John M. Coggeshall’s study, which adds significant insight to the history of Black Appalachia.

SOURCE: Black Perspectives
6/16/2020

Appalachian Hillsides as Black Ecologies: Housing, Memory, and The Sanctified Hill Disaster of 1972

by Jillean McCommons

The Sanctified Hill disaster exposed the vulnerability of Black people to climate events due to a combination of placement and neglect.

SOURCE: The Guardian
5/18/2020

You Don't Have to Choose Between Jobs and Safety. Just Ask West Virginia

We can guarantee economic security and keep every working family safe, paid for by an end to grotesque wealth inequality. Here’s how.

SOURCE: Associated Press
5/18/2020

‘Matewan Massacre’ A Century Ago Embodied Miners’ Struggles

Historian Lou Martin, a board member of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, recounts the oppressive atmosphere in mining towns that led to a violently repressed unionization drive.

5/10/2020

60 Years Ago, West Virginia Helped Make JFK President

by Robert Rupp

JFK's diligent campaigning in West Virginian in 1960 overcame the state's suspicion of his Catholic faith and later put Appalachia on the nation's policy agenda.

SOURCE: Pacific Standard
1/16/19

Jessica Wilkerson: If We Forget Appalachia's Radical History, We Will Misunderstand Its Future

In her new book, Jessica Wilkerson tells the stories of the radical mountain women who fought against bosses and laid the groundwork for ensuing generations of Appalachian resistance.

SOURCE: The Activist History Review
4-25-18

This is what happened when a historian with a rural background wrote favorably about gun control in the Washington Post

by Nathan Wuertenberg

He was subjected to anti-Semitic diatribes from people who denied he represented rural America.

SOURCE: WSP
2-12-18

RFK's visit to Appalachia, 50 years later: How Kennedy country became Trump country

Children of Kennedy Democrats are Trump Republicans. And for those inspired by RFK in 1968, what should be a happy anniversary is instead an occasion to puzzle a drastic reversal of political fortune.

SOURCE: New Republic
2-6-18

The Truth About Appalachia

A conversation with historian Elizabeth Catte, author of a new book that upends narratives about a region that has been dubbed Trump Country