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.

community life, coal mining, education, Southern Appalachian Mountains

In The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey, published by the University Press of Kentucky in 1962, Rupert Vance suggested a decennial review of the region's progress. No systematic study comparable to that made at the beginning of the decade is available to answer the question of how far Appalachia has come since then, but David S. Walls and John B. Stephenson have assembled a broad range of firsthand reports which together convey the story of Appalachia in the sixties. These observations of journalists, field workers, local residents, and social scientists have been gathered from a variety of sources ranging from national magazines to county weeklies. Focusing mainly on the coalfields of West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia, and north-central Tennessee, the editors first present selections that reflect the "rediscovery" of the region as a problem area in the early sixties and describe the federal programs designed to rehabilitate it and their results. Other sections focus on the politics of the coal industry, the extent and impact of the continued migration from the region, and the persistence of human suffering and environmental devastation. A final section moves into the 1970s with proposals for the future. Although they conclude that there is little ground for claiming success in solving the region's problems, the editors find signs of hope in the scattered movements toward grass-roots organization described by some of the contributors, and in the new tendency to define solutions in terms of reconstruction rather than amelioration.

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.

Monacans and Miners sheds new light on the indigenous and immigrant communities of southern Appalachia by comparing the political, economic, and social experiences of the Monacans, a historically significant Native American group in Amherst County, Virginia, with those of Scottish and Irish settlers who made their home in Wyoming County, West Virginia, in the late eighteenth century. The Monacans are the descendants of a powerful people who both fought and traded with the Powhatan Indians. As a tide of English settlers swept through Virginia and continued west, some Monacans took refuge in the Blue Ridge Mountains. For the next few centuries the Monacans, like some other Native American groups in the Southeast, were legally classified as black and not permitted to vote or hold office. Many were also forced into indentured servitude, laboring in apple orchards for large landowners. Recent decades have witnessed a dramatic resurgence of Monacan ethnic and political identity and independence. They have won legal recognition as a tribe, collaborated with local universities to document their history, and worked to create a tribal museum. Samuel R. Cook tells the story of the Monacans in a uniquely comparative way. Their changing fortunes and relationships with outsiders are juxtaposed with the experiences of Scottish and Irish settlers in rural Wyoming County, West Virginia, a region now dominated by the coal industry.