Coal, Industry, Labor, Railroads, Transportation

Center for Appalachian Studies at Appalachian State University.  After Coal.  DVD. (2016).  The roots of the After Coal project date to 1974, when political sociologist John Gaventa initiated a videotaped conversation between coal miners in Wales and Appalachia.  Appalachian scholar Helen Lewis expanded the exchange when she moved to Wales in 1975 to research coal mining culture. Working with filmmaker Richard Greatrex, Gaventa and Lewis made over 150 videotapes of daily life in South Wales.  Historian Hywel Francis helped provide support.  A short documentary about their work produced by Tom Hansell, Patricia Beaver, and Angela Wiley was published by the Southern Spaces online journal in 2015.

Chamberlain, Susan.  Cultural Identity, Vocational Development, and the Meaning of Work among Appalachian Coal Miners: A Qualitative Study.  Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2015.  In this study, the author explores coal mining and what it means to underground miners in Appalachia, how these meanings interact with participants' cultural and their vocational identities.  Using narrative data from eight underground coal miners, the study investigates the connections between cultural values, career, and personality. These connections are singularly intertwined in Appalachia, where economic and social landscapes have been heavily influenced by coal mining for over a century. This qualitative study is based on data from semi-structured interviews; participant language was analyzed using grounded theory to create a theory of cultural and vocational development while also exploring the meaning of work. 

Harris, Wess. 2017. Written in Blood: Courage and Corruption in the Appalachian War of Extraction. 252 pp. Written in Blood features the work of Appalachia’s leading scholars and activists making an uncensored understanding of our history. Sociologist Wess Harris (When Miners March) further documents the infamous Esau scrip system for women, suggesting an institutionalized practice of forced sexual servitude that was part of coal company policy. In a conversation with award-winning oral historian Michael Kline, federal mine inspector Larry Layne explains corporate complicity in the 1968 Farmington Mine disaster which killed seventy-eight men and became the catalyst for the passage of major changes in U.S. mine safety laws. Mine safety expert and whistleblower Jack Spadaro speaks candidly of years of attempts to silence his courageous voice and recalls government and university collaboration in covering up details of the 1972 Buffalo Creek flooding disaster, which killed over a hundred people and left four thousand homeless.

Keller, Nicholas, Central West Virginia Regional Airport Authority. 2017. Yeager Airport and Charleston Aviation. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing. 127 pp. This book covers the history of aviation in the Charleston area, from the first airplane flight in 1912 to the current Yeager Airport, which links the region to the world economy.

Lewis, Ronald L. 2017. The Industrialist and the Mountaineer: the Eastham-Thompson Feud and the Struggle for West Virginia’s Timber Frontier. Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press. 301 pp. This volume covers the incorporation of West Virginia, the modernization of the law, the early years of Robert W. Eastham and Eastham’s early years in WV, an introduction to the Thomspon family, and the feud between the families.

Olliff, Martin T. 2017. Getting Out of the Mud: The Alabama Good Roads Movement and Highway Administration, 1898-1928. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. 236 pp. Explores the history of the Good Roads Movement and investigates the nature of early twentieth-century progressivism in the state. Martin T. Olliff reveals how middle-class reformers secured political, economic, and social power not only by fighting against corporate domination and labor recalcitrance but also by proposing alternative projects like road improvement and identifying the interests of the rising middle class as being the most important to public interest.

Sander, Kathleen Waters. 2017. John W. Garrett and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 416 pp. Historian Kathleen Waters Sander tells the story of the B&O’s beginning and its unprecedented plan to build a rail line from Baltimore over the Allegheny Mountains to the Ohio River, considered to be the most ambitious engineering feat of its time. The B&O’s success ignited "railroad fever" and helped to catapult railroading to America’s most influential industry in the nineteenth century.

Zielinsky, Thomas W, and George B Hines. 2017. Rockyside : A Forgotten Mining Community. Weirton, WV: Zielinsky Publishing, LLC. 245 pp. No description available.