The Impact of Mountaintop Removal Surface Coal Mining on Southern West Virginia
Coal is West Virginia's bread and butter. For more than a century, West Virginia has answered the energy call of the nation and the world by mining and exporting its coal. In 2004, West Virginia's coal industry provided almost forty thousand jobs directly related to coal, and it contributed $3.5 billion to the state's gross annual product. And in ......
Linked stories trace the vocational and emotional bargains made by workers at a Colorado sausage factory. It's almost a decade after the Great Recession, and in Colorado, St. Anthony Sausage has not recovered. Neither have its employees: a laid-off railway engineer, an exiled computer whiz, a young woman estranged from her infant daughter, an ......
The McLain Family Band in Appalachia and the World
Bluegrass Ambassadors is the first book-length study of the McLain Family Band, which has spread the gospel of bluegrass for more than fifty years. Rooted in bluegrass but also collaborating with classical composers and performing folk, jazz, gospel, and even marches, the band traveled to sixty-two foreign countries in the 1970s under the auspices ......
Blue Basin Island is the final resting spot of formerly enslaved Africans whose souls have flown from Earth-not to heaven or purgatory but toward freedom and a new life. Lucille, the island's seamstress, takes two forms. She lives among the inhabitants in human form and, along with the evil-repelling blue of the houses, her divine form protects ......
Blanche Lazzell went from Maidsville, West Virginia, to the leading edge of twentieth-century American art. A member of the prominent art communities of Paris and Provincetown, MA during the '20s and '30s, Lazzell was always on the fringe of important developments in the modern art world. Her studies in Paris led her to adopt the techniques of ......
West Virginia University English Professor Timothy Sweet edited the second volume in our West Virginia and Appalachia series. The Blackwater Chronicle by Philip Pendleton Kennedy was originally published in 1853, but this wilderness travelogue about the exploration of Canaan Valley has appeal far beyond that time and region. In fact, it was ......
How well do we really know Pearl S. Buck? Many think of Buck solely as the Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Good Earth, the novel that explained China to Americans in the 1930s. But Buck was more than a novelist and interpreter of China. As the essays in Beyond The Good Earth show, she possessed other passions and projects, ......
How well do we really know Pearl S. Buck? Many think of Buck solely as the Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Good Earth, the novel that explained China to Americans in the 1930s. But Buck was more than a novelist and interpreter of China. As the essays in Beyond The Good Earth show, she possessed other passions and projects, ......
Across the world, politics is lurching to the right, ethnic nationalism is on the rise, and people are furious. Beyond Populism critically examines the new destructive projects of resentment that have surfaced in the political spaces opened by neoliberalism's failures, particularly since the financial collapse of 2008. It contextualizes the recent ......
