West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies最新文献

{"title":"“Balancing the Budget on the Back of Education”: Neoliberalism and the 1990 West Virginia Teachers’ Strike","authors":"William Hal Gorby","doi":"10.1353/wvh.2023.a906878","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wvh.2023.a906878","url":null,"abstract":"“Balancing the Budget on the Back of Education”: Neoliberalism and the 1990 West Virginia Teachers’ Strike William Hal Gorby As a crowd of West Virginia public school teachers rallied at the state capitol during the cold legislative session, teacher Anna Cuppett of Romney, writing in the Charleston Gazette, noted the terrible irony that “West Virginia requires the highest scholastic standard of their teachers but the salary is more than 21 percent below the average salary of the five states that surround West Virginia. In January the teachers were paid out of the school supply fund. . . . Instead of a raise, the state is asking the teachers to take over payments on their insurance.”1 With all the national attention recently paid to the 2018 teachers’ strike in West Virginia, readers may think Cuppett was complaining about the proposed premium increases to the state employees’ insurance provider, the Public Employees Insurance Agency (PEIA). However, her criticism came nearly three decades earlier in February of 1988, after a decade of frustration by teachers and other public employees at the austerity measures enacted by state and county governments.2 “55 Strong,” the 2018 political slogan and movement embraced by the striking state teachers, was built off the Mountain State’s long-standing labor history but was also a response to the state’s continued policy decisions addressing the economic precarity of the past forty years. During the 1980s, West Virginia experienced losses in manufacturing jobs, a decline in coal, and rising deficits. A major drop in tax revenues and federal funding through the 1980s added to the challenges for the state to fund public priorities. By 1989, the Wall Street Journal described West Virginia as a “state of despair.” 3 Seeking new solutions to the state’s economic woes, in 1988, voters elected a wealthy political outsider, Gaston Caperton, to revitalize the state’s economy. Giving him a year to turn the finances around, teachers grew impatient in 1990 when the governor and legislature stressed scarcity. Thus, the more recent 2018 teachers’ strike was not an aberration; it fits into a longer historical continuum [End Page 31] of the state’s educators feeling marginalized while facing austerity budgets and the privatization of public services.4 The 1990 teachers’ strike was a response to neoliberalism, the economic ideology that underlay budget cuts and privatization. Beginning in the late 1970s, politicians began to support policies that favored the free market, cuts to social programs, deregulation of industries, supply-side tax cuts, and efforts to undermine labor unions. Supporters of neoliberal economic reform argued that these changes would stimulate new economic activity while being a more efficient use of capital. Building on the policies enacted by Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States, neoliberalism encouraged deregulation of government agencies, supported the financial s","PeriodicalId":350051,"journal":{"name":"West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies","volume":"201 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533235","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Appalachia in the Neoliberal Era","authors":"Lou Martin","doi":"10.1353/wvh.2023.a906877","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wvh.2023.a906877","url":null,"abstract":"Appalachia in the Neoliberal Era Lou Martin In May 2017, four months into Donald Trump’s presidency, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote about the president’s budget proposal.1 Krugman, a Nobel Prize–winning economist, noted that the cuts in social spending and the elimination of Obamacare could have devastating effects, especially on the president’s supporters. To make his observation more “concrete,” he used West Virginia as an example because it “went Trump by more than 40 percentage points.” After listing the many ways West Virginians depended on the very programs that Trump would cut, Krugman wondered why so many had voted for him. “Partly, presumably, they supported Trump because he promised—falsely, of course—that he could bring back the well-paying coal-mining jobs of yore,” he wrote. “Maybe he would take benefits away from Those People, but he would protect the programs white working-class voters, in West Virginia and elsewhere, depend on.” In other words, maybe their racism had made them victims of “an epic scam.” Krugman hoped that if they ever realized the truth about Trump, they would “punish him the only way they can—by voting for Democrats.”2 Krugman was one of the many who, trying to understand the surprising results of the 2016 election, looked to Appalachia for answers. Their observations followed a pattern. They noted the high percentage of votes for Trump, and then made assumptions about voters such as being racist and gullible and clinging to the “jobs of yore.” Finally, they would quote a few locals to support their assumptions. The narrative that emerged was that Trump won the election because of the wrongheadedness of uneducated Appalachians and others around the country like them.3 This kind of scapegoating of the region’s supposedly backward thinking echoed commentary about Appalachians for more than a century and a half. Superficial observations about Appalachian culture have been a substitute for knowledge of more complex subjects such as the region’s history and its place in the nation’s political economy. Additionally, blaming an “other” has helped reassure urban, upper-middle-class audiences in times of uncertainty.4 [End Page 1] Krugman’s conjecture about West Virginians’ voting patterns is not only an example of national observers continuing to draw on hillbilly stereotypes but is also evidence of the public’s ignorance about the region’s recent history. Historians have an important role to play in illuminating the region’s historical development over the past four decades. In this article, I do not attempt to explain the 2016 presidential election results but instead argue for the importance of conceptualizing recent decades as a distinctive historical era. In particular, I argue that understanding voting patterns, as well as other subjects, requires a better understanding of the rise of neoliberalism since the 1970s and its various effects on the nation and Appalachia.5 Policymakers and scholars have vie","PeriodicalId":350051,"journal":{"name":"West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533237","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Recent Publications","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/wvh.2023.a906879","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wvh.2023.a906879","url":null,"abstract":"Recent Publications Stewart Plein The history of West Virginia is rich and complex. Over 150 years have passed since West Virginia was admitted to the Union, and the desire to understand and relate to our past continues to the present day. The books, theses and dissertations, magazines and journal articles listed here are testament to the continued interest in the state, its people, traditions, and culture. Each of the works cited in this bibliography is available for reading and research at the West Virginia and Regional History Center, the largest historical archives collection and library relating to West Virginia. This list includes works published in 2020, 2021, and 2022, with the addition of a title from 2019 that was not included in previous lists. West Virginia–related titles not found in this bibliography can be located in other resources for publishers, periodicals, magazines, historical societies, and state publications. Special thanks go to Laureen Wilson for her proofreading and editorial assistance, periodicals research, and her work on compiling the bibliography. As always, if you are aware of significant books or articles concerning West Virginia, its people and places, please bring them to my attention. ________ Akren-Dickson, Melanie. Coal Country Connections: How Finding an 1800s Autograph Album Led to a Quest to Find Its Signers in Coal Towns of Northeastern Pennsylvania. Self-published. 2022. 415 pgs. Updated edition with additional information and new color images, previously published as This, Their Friendship’s Monument. Mary Boyd, who lived in the anthracite coal-fields of northeastern Pennsylvania in the late nineteenth century, kept a friendship and autograph album which she filled over the course of 14 years. When the album was rediscovered, author Melanie Akren-Dickson set out to research Boyd and the people who signed her album. Various sources, including online and hard copy records, newspaper articles, interviews, cemetery walks, and family records, revealed a fascinating group of people connected to each other through the album. The signers, who included coal miners, midwestern school teachers, Civil War veterans, and the daughters of a Philadelphia industrial magnate, offer a fascinating glimpse into the world in which they lived. The many of the signers lived in the historic Pennsylvania towns of Mauch Chunk (now Jim Thorpe), Eckley (now the outdoor museum Eckley Miners’ Village), and Old Buck Mountain (no longer extant), while others lived in Freeland, Hazleton, and Philadelphia. Alderson, Emma Botham. Writing Home: A Quaker Immigrant on the Ohio Frontier: The Letters of Emma Botham Alderson. Edited by Donald Ingram Ulin. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. 2021. 548 pgs. A firsthand account of the life of Emma Alderson, an English immigrant to the Ohio frontier in mid-nineteenth-century America. Alderson documented the five years preceding her death with detail and insight. Her convictions as a Quaker of","PeriodicalId":350051,"journal":{"name":"West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533231","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fishing for Chickens: A Smokies Food Memoir by Jim Casada (review)","authors":"Laura Michelle Diener","doi":"10.1353/wvh.2023.a906881","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wvh.2023.a906881","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Fishing for Chickens: A Smokies Food Memoir by Jim Casada Laura Michelle Diener Fishing for Chickens: A Smokies Food Memoir. By Jim Casada. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2022. Pp. ix, 336.) Jim Casada, a former historian at Winthrop University, has devoted the second half of his career to promoting the unique regional flavor of the Smoky Mountains, a distinct area too often lumped into the umbrella of southern Appalachia. Using the geographic description posited by nineteenth-century explorer Arnold Guyot, Casada argues that the Smokies of western North Carolina and east Tennessee along with some neighboring mountain chains such as the Blacks and the Snowbirds, possess a unique subculture, one dying out as the conveniences of modernity replace traditional folkways. In an effort to preserve and celebrate those traditions, Casada has authored and coauthored multiple books relating to hunting, [End Page 118] fishing, and storytelling. In his latest, Fishing for Chickens, Casada has produced a hybrid work that blends several genres—childhood memoir, regional history, folk study, and cookbook—into a toothsome concoction of mass appeal. One could easily do a quick taste to sample the recipes, but the rich flavor derives from the memories behind them. Forgive the puns, but Casada’s easy folksy language promotes an informal intimacy with the subject, one of the book’s many charms. Fishing for Chickens serves as an homage to his mountain boyhood as well as a love letter to his mother and grandmother, whose “recipes” feature throughout the book—recipes being in quotes because he never recalls those women measuring or writing anything down. Their cooking thus can’t truly be replicated, and in all honesty, much of it probably shouldn’t be, at least for regular consumption; most of the foodstuffs aren’t suitable for today’s population—office workers, tech employees, people who drive cars and watch TV. These dishes are high calorie, high fat, high carb—anathema to twenty-first-century American health standards, but perfectly reasonable and even essential for people who worked their fingers to the bone sunup to sundown. Traditional cooking is rooted in traditional living, so while most of the recipes included here are friendly enough for replication in a modern kitchen, Casada points out that simply buying your meat in a grocery store reduces the whole experience to immediate gratification. Eating, however satisfying, is merely one stage in a long relationship with the earth, one strengthened by raising and slaughtering your own animals. The recipes thus serve as a recording of history far more than practical instructions. That being said, living historians, reenactment groups, and museums would truly benefit from the authentic directions. Each chapter focuses on a food staple—pork, domestic fruits, corn, chickens, etc.—and begins with a brief prose memoir about how his family raised, hunted, gathered, cultivated, slaughtered, prepared and ","PeriodicalId":350051,"journal":{"name":"West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533233","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Living Queer History: Remembrance and Belonging in a Southern City by Gregory Samantha Rosenthal (review)","authors":"Greta Rensenbrink","doi":"10.1353/wvh.2023.a906884","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wvh.2023.a906884","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Living Queer History: Remembrance and Belonging in a Southern City by Gregory Samantha Rosenthal Greta Rensenbrink Living Queer History: Remembrance and Belonging in a Southern City. By Gregory Samantha Rosenthal. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 229.) As G. Samantha Rosenthal notes, “This is not so much a history book as a book about history” (10). While the reader can piece together a narrative of the layered queer pasts of Roanoke, Virginia, the book’s focus is on the project of collecting and honoring queer pasts, and the significance and meaningfulness of that history in creating space for queer futures. The book examines the work of the Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project, an organization Rosenthal helped to lead. The text can be read as a manifesto for the importance of queer public history and public space in a rapidly digitizing world, as a primer for how to do (and not do) queer public history, and as a personal memoir. The latter is a strength and a potential weakness of the book. The author’s rigorous interrogation of their experience as a white trans woman transplanted to Appalachia, viewed through their understanding of intersubjectivity, is strikingly revealing, but the personal narrative can sometimes be distracting. The book is well grounded in LGBTQ+ historiography and in theoretical approaches to space, place and identity, and its archival and oral history research, the heart of the project, is impressive. The book opens with a history of Roanoke as a “Sin City” (19) that created spaces for queer people, most visibly white gay men, queens, and trans women. The early history especially is more suggestive than evidenced, but the author does an excellent job situating the story within larger historical frames. The second chapter explores the creation and development of the project, focusing on the problems it faced and how it sought to overcome them. This is followed by three thematic chapters, which contain some of the narrative missing from that first historical overview. The first explores the history of lesbianism, and the second transgender history. Both raise a critical question for queer public history: how do public history projects contend with [End Page 123] generational differences in language, experience, and identity? In the first, the author examines the problem of creating a history of an identity that most of the young women who worked with the project did not themselves claim. It raises more questions than it has answers, but the trans chapter is more satisfying. Rosenthal does a fabulously nuanced job of thinking through the many meanings of trans across generations and within communities, showing how sensitivity to those differences can lead to a richer history and more meaningful community connections in the present. The next chapter addresses the ways race and racism have shaped Roanoke’s queer history, the (mostly white) project itself, and the possibilities and r","PeriodicalId":350051,"journal":{"name":"West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533234","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Loyalty in Pocahontas County, West Virginia","authors":"Jacob J. Klinger","doi":"10.1353/wvh.2022.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wvh.2022.0007","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":350051,"journal":{"name":"West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127319417","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"RxAppalachia: Stories of Treatment and Survival in Rural Kentucky by Lesly-Marie Buer (review)","authors":"C. M. White","doi":"10.1353/wvh.2022.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wvh.2022.0013","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":350051,"journal":{"name":"West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131675904","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gone Dollywood: Dolly Parton's Mountain Dream by Graham Hoppe (review)","authors":"R. Straw","doi":"10.1353/wvh.2022.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wvh.2022.0012","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":350051,"journal":{"name":"West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114867716","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Never Justice, Never Peace: Mother Jones and the Miner Rebellion at Paint and Cabin Creeks by Lon Kelly Savage and Ginny Savage Ayers (review)","authors":"M. Myers","doi":"10.1353/wvh.2022.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wvh.2022.0010","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":350051,"journal":{"name":"West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126344053","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Food We Eat, the Stories We Tell: Contemporary Appalachian Tables ed. by Elizabeth S. Engelhardt with Lora E. Smith (review)","authors":"Mark F. Sohn","doi":"10.1353/wvh.2022.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wvh.2022.0011","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":350051,"journal":{"name":"West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132472610","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}