Growing Up Hard in Harlan County

Growing Up Hard in Harlan County PDF Author: G. C. Jones
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813143500
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
This classic memoir is “an absorbing tale” of life in Appalachian Kentucky during the Great Depression (The Washington Post). G.C. “Red” Jones’s classic memoir of growing up in rural eastern Kentucky during the Depression is a story of courage, persistence, and eventual triumph. His priceless and detailed recollections of hardscrabble farming, of the impact of Prohibition on an individualistic people, of the community-destroying mine wars of “Bloody Harlan,” and of the drastic dislocations brought by World War II are essential to understanding this seminal era in Appalachian history. “An absorbing tale told in the vernacular language of the teamsters, farmers and miners in rural, mountainous Kentucky in the early decades of this century. The narrative flows with the symmetry that comes naturally to the accomplished storyteller.” —TheWashington Post “Draws the reader into a sometimes frightening world of survival.” —Lexington Herald-Leader “He bears witness to Harlan County—first as a community of self-sufficient farmers, then as a mining area and finally in the 1930s as ‘bloody Harlan’ . . . Mr. Jones celebrates horses and mules, the bounty of the hillside farms and woods and the rough ingenuity, honor and sweetness of the mountain people.” —The New York Times “Jones shows all of us that fierce determination, lived day by day, can lead to a satisfying life, even though it might be hard.” —Kentucky Monthly

Growing Up Hard in Harlan County

Growing Up Hard in Harlan County PDF Author: G. C. Jones
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813143500
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Get Book Here

Book Description
This classic memoir is “an absorbing tale” of life in Appalachian Kentucky during the Great Depression (The Washington Post). G.C. “Red” Jones’s classic memoir of growing up in rural eastern Kentucky during the Depression is a story of courage, persistence, and eventual triumph. His priceless and detailed recollections of hardscrabble farming, of the impact of Prohibition on an individualistic people, of the community-destroying mine wars of “Bloody Harlan,” and of the drastic dislocations brought by World War II are essential to understanding this seminal era in Appalachian history. “An absorbing tale told in the vernacular language of the teamsters, farmers and miners in rural, mountainous Kentucky in the early decades of this century. The narrative flows with the symmetry that comes naturally to the accomplished storyteller.” —TheWashington Post “Draws the reader into a sometimes frightening world of survival.” —Lexington Herald-Leader “He bears witness to Harlan County—first as a community of self-sufficient farmers, then as a mining area and finally in the 1930s as ‘bloody Harlan’ . . . Mr. Jones celebrates horses and mules, the bounty of the hillside farms and woods and the rough ingenuity, honor and sweetness of the mountain people.” —The New York Times “Jones shows all of us that fierce determination, lived day by day, can lead to a satisfying life, even though it might be hard.” —Kentucky Monthly

They Say in Harlan County

They Say in Harlan County PDF Author: Alessandro Portelli
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199934851
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
This book is a historical and cultural interpretation of a symbolic place in the United States, Harlan County, Kentucky, from pioneer times to the beginning of the third millennium, based on a painstaking and creative montage of more than 150 oral narratives and a wide array of secondary and archival matter.

The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture

The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture PDF Author: Amy Louise Wood
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807869287
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Much of the violence that has been associated with the United States has had particular salience for the South, from its high homicide rates, or its bloody history of racial conflict, to southerners' popular attachment to guns and traditional support for capital punishment. With over 95 entries, this volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture explores the most significant forms and many of the most harrowing incidences of violence that have plagued southern society over the past 300 years. Following a detailed overview by editor Amy Wood, the volume explores a wide range of topics, such as violence against and among American Indians, labor violence, arson, violence and memory, suicide, and anti-abortion violence. Taken together, these entries broaden our understanding of what has driven southerners of various classes and various ethnicities to commit acts of violence, while addressing the ways in which southerners have conceptualized that violence, responded to it, or resisted it. This volume enriches our understanding of the culture of violence and its impact on ideas about law and crime, about historical tradition and social change, and about race and gender--not only in the South but in the nation as a whole.

Strike Songs of the Depression

Strike Songs of the Depression PDF Author: Timothy P. Lynch
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1604736720
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
The Depression brought unprecedented changes for American workers and organized labor. As the economy plummeted, employers cut wages and laid off workers, while simultaneously attempting to wrest more work from those who remained employed. In mills, mines, and factories workers organized and resisted, striking for higher wages, improved working conditions, and the right to bargain collectively. As workers walked the picket line or sat down on the shop floor, they could be heard singing. This book examines the songs they sang at three different strikes- the Gastonia, North Carolina, textile mill strike (1929), Harlan County, Kentucky, coal mining strike (1931-32), and Flint, Michigan, automobile sit-down strike (1936-37). Whether in the Carolina Piedmont, the Kentucky hills, or the streets of Michigan, the workers' songs were decidedly class-conscious. All show the workers' understanding of the necessity of solidarity and collective action. In Flint the strikers sang: The trouble in our homestead Was brought about this way When a dashing corporation Had the audacity to say You must all renounce your union And forswear your liberties, And we'll offer you a chance To live and die in slavery. As a shared experience, the singing of songs not only sent the message of collective action but also provided the very means by which the message was communicated and promoted. Singing was a communal experience, whether on picket lines, at union rallies, or on shop floors. By providing the psychological space for striking workers to speak their minds, singing nurtured a sense of community and class consciousness. When strikers retold the events of their strike, as they did in songs, they spread and preserved their common history and further strengthened the bonds among themselves. In the strike songs the roles of gender were pronounced and vivid. Wives and mothers sang out of their concerns for home, family, and children. Men sang in the name of worker loyalty and brotherhood, championing male solidarity and comaraderie. Informed by the new social history, this critical examination of strike songs from three different industries in three different regions gives voice to a group too often deemed as inarticulate. This study, the only book-length examination of this subject, tells history "from the bottom up" and furthers an understanding of worker culture during the tumultuous Depression years.

Lost Mountain

Lost Mountain PDF Author: Erik Reece
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9781594482366
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
A new form of strip mining has caused a state of emergency for the Appalachian wilderness and the communities that depend on it-a crisis compounded by issues of government neglect, corporate hubris, and class conflict. In this powerful call to arms, Erik Reece chronicles the year he spent witnessing the systematic decimation of a single mountain and offers a landmark defense of a national treasure threatened with extinction.

Harlan County Haunts

Harlan County Haunts PDF Author: Darla Jackson
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 0615199143
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
Harlan County Haunts explores the unknown with over 60 tales of spooky encounters and weird occurrences. Although the focus is on Harlan County, there are stories from around the southeastern Kentucky region as well as other states. Featured in Harlan County Haunts is the novella, "Caroline", which highlights one of Harlan County's most compelling unsolved crimes.Jackson, a lifelong Native of Harlan County, takes you on a ghostly journey through the mountains of Appalachia and beyond. Harlan County Haunts contains ghosts, monsters, angels, and many personal accounts of encounters with the unexplained.Harlan County Haunts was over two years in the making, with Jackson compiling well over 100 true accounts of experiences with the paranormal. After many interviews and research, the stories in the book are what she considered the best and most credible.

A Guide to Historic Coal Towns of the Big Sandy River Valley

A Guide to Historic Coal Towns of the Big Sandy River Valley PDF Author: George D. Torok
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9781572332829
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
A guide to the historical coal towns of the Big Sandy River Valley that provides brief histories of each town, descriptions of the buildings and structures that remain, and insight into the town's residents.

The American Experiment

The American Experiment PDF Author: James MacGregor Burns
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 148043020X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 2468

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Book Description
The Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s stunning trilogy of American history, spanning the birth of the Constitution to the final days of the Cold War. In these three volumes, Pulitzer Prize–­ and National Book Award–winner James MacGregor Burns chronicles with depth and narrative panache the most significant cultural, economic, and political events of American history. In The Vineyard of Liberty, he combines the color and texture of early American life with meticulous scholarship. Focusing on the tensions leading up to the Civil War, Burns brilliantly shows how Americans became divided over the meaning of Liberty. In The Workshop of Democracy, Burns explores more than a half-century of dramatic growth and transformation of the American landscape, through the addition of dozens of new states, the shattering tragedy of the First World War, the explosion of industry, and, in the end, the emergence of the United States as a new global power. And in The Crosswinds of Freedom, Burns offers an articulate and incisive examination of the US during its rise to become the world’s sole superpower—through the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Cold War, and the rapid pace of technological change that gave rise to the “American Century.”

African American Miners and Migrants

African American Miners and Migrants PDF Author: Thomas E. Wagner
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252092732
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
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.

Black Coal Miners in America

Black Coal Miners in America PDF Author: Ronald L. Lewis
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 9780813116105
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
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 m.