The West Virginia University Mountaineer is not just a mascot: it is a symbol of West Virginia history and identity embraced throughout the state. In this deeply informed but accessible study, folklorist Rosemary Hathaway explores the figure's early history as a backwoods trickster, its deployment in emerging mass media, and finally its long and ......
Mother Jones and the Miner Rebellion at Paint and Cabin Creeks
In 1986 Lon Savage published Thunder in the Mountains: The West Virginia Mine War, 1920-21, a popular history now considered a classic. Among those the book influenced are Denise Giardina, author of Storming Heaven, and John Sayles, writer and director of Matewan. When Savage passed away, he left behind an incomplete book manuscript about a ......
The pepperoni roll, a soft bread roll with pepperoni baked in the middle, originated in the coal mining areas of north central West Virginia when Italian immigrants invented a food that could be eaten easily underground. This spicy snack soon found its way out of the mines and into bakeries, bread companies, restaurants, and event venues around ......
For nearly seventy years, John J. Young Jr. photographed railroads. With unparalleled scope and span, he documented the impact and beauty of railways in American life from1936 to 2004. As a child during the Great Depression, J. J. Young Jr. began to photograph railroads in Wheeling, West Virginia. This book collects over one hundred fifty of ......
For decades, hundreds of photographs chronicling some of the greatest moments in West Virginia University football history have been hidden away beneath piles of dusty media guides, tattered game programs, and yellowed newspaper clippings. Within the annals of the WVU athletic department, these archival treasures have been overlooked and forgotten ......
Virginia B. Evans (1894-1983) was an important figure in the field of art in the Upper Ohio Valley during the mid-twentieth century. A native of Moundsville, West Virginia, Evans was a talented impressionist and abstract expressionist painter, a skillful designer of art deco glass, and a teacher. Virginia B. Evans tells the story of this often ......
West Virginia Politics and Government offers the only recent study of politics in the Mountain State. Combining new empirical information about political behavior with a close examination of the capacity of the state's government, this second edition is a comprehensive and pointed study of the ability of the state's government to respond to the ......
101 Seasons of West Virginia University Basketball
Roll out the Carpet is the story of West Virginia University basketball. This comprehensive history chronicles over one hundred seasons of the game, from the early years of the Tri-State and Eastern Conferences, to the golden era of Hot Rod Hundley, Jerry West, and Rod Thorn, to the Mountaineer's most recent triumphs under coaches John Beilein and ......
Fresh out of college, David Stuart put off graduate school to take a job close to his West Virginia home as a counselor at the Youth Development Center at Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. Known locally as the Morganza, the facility was founded in the nineteenth century as a farm for orphaned boys. By the 1960s, the Morganza had long been burdened with a ......