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Originally recorded at Marshall University in 1969, Memphis Tennessee Garrison's memoirs tell of her life, her career as a teacher, and her political activities in the early civil rights movement. Based on those recordings, this book describes her childhood in Gary, a West Virginian coal mining town populated largely by black and immigrant workers. It also describes her participation in the NAACP, bringing black performers to the area in the 1920s, starting a Girl Scout troop for black girls in the 1950s, and serving on the NAACP's board of directors in the 1960s. c. Book News Inc.
Thomas E. Wagner and Phillip J. Obermiller's African American Miners and Migrants documents the lives of Eastern Kentucky Social Club (EKSC) members, a group of black Appalachians who left the eastern Kentucky coalfields and their coal company hometowns in Harlan County. Bound together by segregation, the inherent dangers of mining, and coal company paternalism, it might seem that black miners and mountaineers would be eager to forget their past. Instead, members of the EKSC have chosen to celebrate their Harlan County roots. African American Miners and Migrants uses historical and archival research and extensive personal interviews to explore their reasons and the ties that still bind them to eastern Kentucky. The book also examines life in the model coal towns of Benham and Lynch in the context of Progressive Era policies, the practice of welfare capitalism, and the contemporary national trend of building corporate towns and planned communities.
In Reading Appalachia from Left to Right, Carol Mason examines the legacies of a pivotal 1974 curriculum dispute in West Virginia that heralded the rightward shift in American culture and politics. At a time when black nationalists and white conservatives were both maligned as extremists for opposing education reform, the wife of a fundamentalist preacher who objected to new language-arts textbooks featuring multiracial literature sparked the yearlong conflict. It was the most violent textbook battle in America, inspiring mass marches, rallies by white supremacists, boycotts by parents, and strikes by coal miners. Schools were closed several times due to arson and dynamite while national and...
In this study, Elizabeth Engelhardt finds in the work of four women writers from Appalachia, the origins of what is recognized today as ecological feminism - a wide-reaching philosophy that values the connections between humans and non-humans and works for social and environmental justice.
In this beautifully written meditation on identity and place, Talmage A. Stanley tells the story of his grandparents' middle-class aspirations from the 1920s to the 1940s in the once-booming Pocahontas coalfields of southern West Virginia. Part lyrical family memoir and part social study, The Poco Field: An American Story of Place addresses a long-standing gap in Appalachian and American studies, illustrating the lives and choices of the middle class in the mid-twentieth century and delving into questions of place-based identity. Exploring the natural and built environments of the towns of Keystone, West Virginia and Newbern, Virginia, Stanley delineates the history of conflict and control o...
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