Daughters of the Mountain

Daughters of the Mountain PDF Author: Suzanne E. Tallichet
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271030437
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Much has been written over the years about life in the coal mines of Appalachia. Not surprisingly, attention has focused mainly on the experiences of male miners. In Daughters of the Mountain, Suzanne Tallichet introduces us to a cohort of women miners at a large underground coal mine in southern West Virginia, where women entered the workforce in the late 1970s after mining jobs began opening up for women throughout the Appalachian coalfields. Tallichet's work goes beyond anecdotal evidence to provide complex and penetrating analyses of qualitative data. Based on in-depth interviews with female miners, Tallichet explores several key topics, including social relations among men and women, professional advancement, and union participation. She also explores the ways in which women adapt to mining culture, developing strategies for both resistance and accommodation to an overwhelmingly male-dominated world.

Daughters of the Mountain

Daughters of the Mountain PDF Author: Suzanne E. Tallichet
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271030437
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Get Book Here

Book Description
Much has been written over the years about life in the coal mines of Appalachia. Not surprisingly, attention has focused mainly on the experiences of male miners. In Daughters of the Mountain, Suzanne Tallichet introduces us to a cohort of women miners at a large underground coal mine in southern West Virginia, where women entered the workforce in the late 1970s after mining jobs began opening up for women throughout the Appalachian coalfields. Tallichet's work goes beyond anecdotal evidence to provide complex and penetrating analyses of qualitative data. Based on in-depth interviews with female miners, Tallichet explores several key topics, including social relations among men and women, professional advancement, and union participation. She also explores the ways in which women adapt to mining culture, developing strategies for both resistance and accommodation to an overwhelmingly male-dominated world.

Coal Towns

Coal Towns PDF Author: Crandall A. Shifflett
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9780870498855
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Using oral histories, company records, and census data, Crandall A. Shifflett paints a vivid portrait of miners and their families in southern Appalachian coal towns from the late nineteenth into the mid-twentieth century. He finds that, compared to their earlier lives on subsistence farms, coal-town life was not all bad. Shifflett examines how this view, quite common among the oral histories of these working families, has been obscured by the middle-class biases of government studies and the Edenic myth of preindustrial Appalachia propagated by some historians. From their own point of view, mining families left behind a life of hard labor and drafty weatherboard homes. With little time for such celebrated arts as tale-telling and quilting, preindustrial mountain people strung more beans than dulcimers. In addition, the rural population was growing, and farmland was becoming scarce. What the families recall about the coal towns contradicts the popular image of mining life. Most miners did not owe their souls to the company store, and most mining companies were not unusually harsh taskmasters. Former miners and their families remember such company benefits as indoor plumbing, regular income, and leisure activities. They also recall the United Mine Workers of America as bringing not only pay raises and health benefits but work stoppages and violent confrontations. Far from being mere victims of historical forces, miners and their families shaped their own destiny by forging a new working-class culture out of the adaptation of their rural values to the demands of industrial life. This new culture had many continuities with the older one. Out of the closely knit social ties they brought from farming communities, mining families created their own safety net for times of economic downturn. Shifflett recognizes the dangers and hardships of coal-town life but also shows the resilience of Appalachian people in adapting their culture to a new environment. Crandall A. Shifflett is an associate professor of history at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry

African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry PDF Author: Joe William Trotter
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781959000129
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Essays by the foremost labor historian of the Black experience in the Appalachian coalfields. This collection brings together nearly three decades of research on the African American experience, class, and race relations in the Appalachian coal industry. It shows how, with deep roots in the antebellum era of chattel slavery, West Virginia's Black working class gradually picked up steam during the emancipation years following the Civil War and dramatically expanded during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From there, African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry highlights the decline of the region's Black industrial proletariat under the impact of rapid technological, social, and political changes following World War II. It underscores how all miners suffered unemployment and outmigration from the region as global transformations took their toll on the coal industry, but emphasizes the disproportionately painful impact of declining bituminous coal production on African American workers, their families, and their communities. Joe Trotter not only reiterates the contributions of proletarianization to our knowledge of US labor and working-class history but also draws attention to the gender limits of studies of Black life that focus on class formation, while calling for new transnational perspectives on the subject. Equally important, this volume illuminates the intellectual journey of a noted labor historian with deep family roots in the southern Appalachian coalfields.

Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers

Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers PDF Author: Ronald D. Eller
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9780870493416
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
"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.

The Southern Appalachians

The Southern Appalachians PDF Author: Susan L. Yarnell
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
ISBN: 1428953736
Category : Agriculture
Languages : en
Pages : 52

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Book Description


Hill Women

Hill Women PDF Author: Cassie Chambers
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 1984818937
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
After rising from poverty to earn two Ivy League degrees, an Appalachian lawyer pays tribute to the strong “hill women” who raised and inspired her, and whose values have the potential to rejuvenate a struggling region. “Destined to be compared to Hillbilly Elegy and Educated.”—BookPage (starred review) “A gritty, warm love letter to Appalachian communities and the resourceful women who lead them.”—Slate Nestled in the Appalachian mountains, Owsley County, Kentucky, is one of the poorest places in the country. Buildings are crumbling as tobacco farming and coal mining decline. But strong women find creative ways to subsist in the hills. Through the women who raised her, Cassie Chambers traces her path out of and back into the Kentucky mountains. Chambers’s Granny was a child bride who rose before dawn every morning to raise seven children. Granny’s daughter, Ruth—the hardest-working tobacco farmer in the county—stayed on the family farm, while Wilma—the sixth child—became the first in the family to graduate from high school. Married at nineteen and pregnant with Cassie a few months later, Wilma beat the odds to finish college. She raised her daughter to think she could move mountains, like the ones that kept her safe but also isolated from the larger world. Cassie would spend much of her childhood with Granny and Ruth in the hills of Owsley County. With her “hill women” values guiding her, she went on to graduate from Harvard Law. But while the Ivy League gave her opportunities, its privileged world felt far from her reality, and she moved home to help rural Kentucky women by providing free legal services. Appalachian women face issues from domestic violence to the opioid crisis, but they are also keeping their towns together in the face of a system that continually fails them. With nuance and heart, Chambers breaks down the myth of the hillbilly and illuminates a region whose poor communities, especially women, can lead it into the future.

The Coal Trap

The Coal Trap PDF Author: James M. Van Nostrand
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108830587
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
A cautionary tale for the many other jurisdictions around the world that are resisting the transition to clean energy resources.

After Coal

After Coal PDF Author: Tom Hansell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
What happens when fossil fuels run out? How do communities and cultures survive? Central Appalachia and south Wales were built to extract coal, and faced with coal's decline, both regions have experienced economic depression, labor unrest, and out-migration. After Coal focuses on coalfield residents who chose not to leave, but instead remained in their communities and worked to build a diverse and sustainable economy. It tells the story of four decades of exchange between two mining communities on opposite sides of the Atlantic, and profiles individuals and organizations that are undertaking the critical work of regeneration. The stories in this book are told through interviews and photographs collected during the making of After Coal, a documentary film produced by the Center for Appalachian Studies at Appalachian State University and directed by Tom Hansell. Considering resonances between Appalachia and Wales in the realms of labor, environment, and movements for social justice, the book approaches the transition from coal as an opportunity for marginalized people around the world to work toward safer and more egalitarian futures.

Appalachian Fall

Appalachian Fall PDF Author: Jeff Young
Publisher: S&S/Simon Element
ISBN: 1982148861
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
A searing, on-the-ground examination of the collapsing coal industry—and the communities left behind—in the midst of economic and environmental crisis. Despite fueling a century of American progress, the people at the heart of coal country are being left behind, suffering from unemployment, the opioid epidemic, and environmental crises often at greater rates than anywhere else in the country. But what if Appalachia’s troubles are just a taste of what the future holds for all of us? Appalachian Fall tells the captivating true story of coal communities on the leading edge of change. A group of local reporters known as the Ohio Valley ReSource shares the real-world impact these changes have had on what was once the heart and soul of America. Including stories like: -The miners’ strike in Harlan County after their company suddenly went bankrupt, bouncing their paychecks -The farmers tilling former mining ground for new cash crops like hemp -The activists working to fight mountaintop removal and bring clean energy jobs to the region -And the mothers mourning the loss of their children to overdose and despair In the wake of the controversial bestseller Hillbilly Elegy, Appalachian Fall addresses what our country owes to a region that provided fuel for a century and what it risks if it stands by watching as the region, and its people, collapse.

The Last Train from Elkland

The Last Train from Elkland PDF Author: Doug McGuinn
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1427616671
Category : Ashe County (N.C.)
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Book Description
Not only is THE LAST TRAIN FROM ELKLAND a brief history of four northwestern North Carolina mountain communities, it is also about two railroads that operated in and around these communities: the Virginia¿Carolina, also known as the ¿Virginia Creeper¿ (in 1916, the Virginia¿Carolina Railway was bought by the Norfolk & Western Railway, and renamed the Abingdon Branch), and the Deep Gap Tie and Lumber Company¿s railroad, whose former Hassinger Lumber Company¿s Shay logging locomotive operated alongside Gap Creek, from Deep Gap, in Watauga County, North Carolina, to the South Fork of the New River, near Fleetwood, in Ashe County, North Carolina, a distance of only about five miles. Although these communities were located in North Carolina, they all had a common tie-in with the neighboring state of Virginia ¿ the trains of the two railroads hauled logs that had been felled in the area surrounding the four communities, timber destined to be cut at the Hassinger Lumber Company¿s sawmill in Konnarock, Virginia. By the time the blades went silent on Christmas Eve, 1928, almost 400 million board feet of the area¿s best hardwood had passed through the Hassinger Lumber Company¿s sawmill. How much did this unchecked logging contribute to the immense damage done to the area by the disastrous floods of 1916 and 1940? This question is also explored in this book.